Chapter Two
S ons of bitches!” Pritkin yelled and jumped up, only to have me tackle him before he ran through my time spell. “What the—”
“I’m aging out their weapons. Don’t touch it!”
He stared at an arrow a few feet away that some bright spark had shot into the midst of all the magic being flung around. Maybe it was reflexive, or maybe the fey archer had thought it might get through the spell as their curses had not. But he was learning otherwise.
Pritkin stared at it as the wooden shaft cracked and splintered and dusted away, as the white fletching curled up, turned brown, and then was gone, too, and as the metal tip corroded, rusted, and flaked off. The last little nub of what had been an arrowhead fell to the ground, and a fey voice could be heard yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Pythia!”
Caught that one, I thought wryly, even before my translation spell crackled in my ear.
And then the fey were gone as well, melting into the forest like leaves on autumn’s wind, which was good because a moment later—
“Are you alright?” Pritkin said, clutching my arm as my spell faltered and fell apart, dissipating like smoke.
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “Harder here.”
He nodded curtly. And then unleashed his magic, which I assumed was of the demon variety since the blob perked up. Talons of fire went screeching after the fey, with fiery bodies glimpsed briefly in the air like demented birds.
I couldn’t see them well; they were only flickers in the vague shape of winged creatures and were quickly lost among the trees. But the fey didn’t seem to like them much. I heard screams, warning cries, and then more screams, and the vicious little half-smile on Pritkin’s face told me that at least some of his bolts had hit home.
“Okay, that went well—” I began right before he grabbed me again.
“Go home.”
“My ass.”
“Your arse is very nice,” he said, grabbing it and giving a squeeze. “And I like it in one piece. So, get it out of here!”
“I came to help you!”
“I don’t need any help.”
“Yeah, it looks like it!”
But then he was gone because he was an asshole , and between the dark and the trees and the no-doubt cloaking spell he was using, I had no clue what—
I suddenly had an idea.
“Hey! Hey, you!” The blob looked around and then slowly up at me, the stalk-eye appearing somewhat startled. “Follow him!”
The blob did not have hands, but a tentacle stopped messing with a leaf and touched what could, very charitably, have been termed its chest. “Yes, you! Hurry! He’s getting away!”
And, okay, part of what followed was my fault. I knew that the blob, AKA one of Adra’s top operatives, was having a bit of a moment. It was in a world not its own, in a form that was its own but probably didn’t feel like it, and likely only understood English in a rudimentary way.
I should have been more specific. But I was fast losing Pritkin in a forest full of murderous fey, I had not been having fun trying to find him before this, and I didn’t know how much longer it would take to do so again—or what I’d see if I did. So, I wasn’t thinking about the blob.
Until it ate me, opening up and stuffing me inside and leaving me looking out at the world through a mass of translucent flesh, just like the unfortunate fey.
“Auggh—urp.” I opened my mouth to scream because that is what you do when a demon has just eaten you, but that was not a good move. The hollow I found myself in was large enough to accommodate me and had at least a little air. But it also had a lot of phlegm or whatever the goopy clear stuff was, and it was everywhere, including in my mouth!
I spat it out and tried not to hurl, but it smelled. Oh, God, it did! And I didn’t know how to—
We were moving.
No, we were moving .
I stopped worrying about losing my lunch because of the stench and started worrying about losing my life because of the speed . Which was absurd! We were in a forest ; big trees were everywhere, and some were sapient!
Experience had proven what would happen if we hit one—
Annnnnnd we did, we hit a lot of them, but the blob didn’t seem to mind ping-ponging off the rough old bark at sixty miles an hour. Or getting lashed at by angry roots and overhanging limbs and then stung by a bunch of wasp-like insects that had had a nest in one of the branches until it smashed into us. I did mind, but not physically, since whatever receptacle encased me did not appear connected to the demon’s outer body.
It was like racing around like a gyroscope made from very stinky flesh as we tore through the trees after Pritkin. Or, at least, I guessed we did, although despite remaining relatively upright and stable, I couldn’t see much. Everything was thrashing leaves, stabbing roots, and buzzing wasps, and anything I could see past all of that was distorted by the rippling wall of flesh.
Then we hit water—a lake, a river, hell, maybe an ocean for all I knew—but it was deep, and we were diving fast.
I tried to tell the translucent submarine I was in that it wasn’t going the right way. I wanted to find Pritkin, not a watery grave, and it needed to turn around! It needed to turn around right now!
But I couldn’t scream without ingesting more terrible goo, and beating on the sides of the thing didn’t work, and trying to communicate mentally didn’t work, not that it usually did with me, but I thought that maybe a demon might be able to pick something up. But if it could, it was ignoring me. And diving ever deeper, with my frantic stares upward now showing me only a vague glimmer of sunlight on the water . . .
Before it was gone, too.
Leaving me in an eerie, dark world where everything was quiet except for my harsh breathing, and everything was disorienting as the whole world was suddenly one shade of murky blue-black.
Screw this , I was shifting, I decided. And I tried. But my power was acting up again as it did everywhere in Faerie, where I had to draw it through whatever portal I could find to Earth.
The Pythian power had been tethered there by the gods millennia ago when Apollo first gifted it to his seers at Delphi, and it couldn’t leave. Only I had discovered that that wasn’t entirely true. As long as I was near enough to a portal, I could pull some power to my location.
But it was never as strong as on Earth, and the further I got into this crazy world, the more unreliable it became, to the point of just putzing out entirely. It was like trying to find cell phone service in the mountains and never knowing when or if you’d come across a good spot. Or when you’d get cut off since some of Faerie’s portals were omnidirectional.
Running a portal was expensive, magically speaking, so having one that cycled from place to place on a set schedule was efficient. It allowed one portal to serve many destinations and saved power. But it also meant that my power could get cut off randomly as the portal I was tapping into cycled away from Earth.
Like that, I thought, as the strands I had been trying to grasp suddenly disappeared, fading into nothingness in my hands. And leaving me at the mercy of the crazed little taxi I was now stuck inside, without knowing how much air I had left or where I was going. Or what the heck that was, I thought, peering through the rippling surface at something in the distance.
It didn’t stay distant for long. That was concerning not only because it was huge, a dark, oblong shape that I couldn’t see very well in the gloom but also because it appeared to be able to give a whale a decent run for his money. Only whales didn’t have teeth that big, did they?
I didn’t think they had teeth at all, just a screen for filtering krill and why was I thinking about that when we were about to get eaten ? Because we were, we very definitely were, and the blob finally appeared to wake up to that fact. And started churning up the water with its tentacles.
But they were short and stubby, and the Not Whale was still coming, and the little burst of speed we’d put on was only doing us the dubious favor of allowing me to see our pursuer better.
That didn’t help because I still didn’t know what it was. I didn’t want to know what it was. It looked like a cross between a whale and a shark, with a tremendous body and a gaping maw, and why did every freaking thing in Faerie have a gaping maw?
With teeth larger than me, by the look of them.
I had a second to stare at the biggest set of chompers I’d ever seen when suddenly, I was no longer trapped. Because my little friend had decided that it was every demon for himself and shat me out before hauling ass, zipping off into the darkness like a fleeing jellyfish. And leaving me as the sole hors d’oeuvre on the tray.
How did I get here, I thought, staring at looming death. And wondering if the set of armor that my dress was quickly transforming into would save me from those teeth. It was dragon scale, but I supposed that even that had limits and—
And shut up, shut up, shut up , you’re about to die !
That was undoubtedly true, as the giant creature was now on top of me, the maw was gaping even wider, and I was about to find out how Jonah had felt—
When what looked like a human fist, if it was fifty times the size and made of golden light, popped out of nowhere. And crashed into the creature’s jawline, hard enough to send several of those teeth flying. One of them shot past me, disturbing the water, but not half as much as when the whole great body flipped around, tail thrashing, and sent me tumbling head over heels, lost in a wash of bubbles and a current that left me feeling like I was being torn apart.
But the armor held me together, although it did nothing for my burning lungs because I had no air. And what little I’d had that encounter had forced out of me. Leaving my vision darkening, my body flailing, and my brain telling me that I should have listened to Pritkin and gone home.
Because Faerie was just one big way to die.
And it would have been, but the portal took that moment to cycle back to Earth, and my power immediately reached out to me. It found me just before I lost consciousness, enveloping me in warmth and shooting magic down to my fingertips. And a second later, I had a new enclosure, which smelled much better than the old one.
This one smelled like loamy earth and wildflowers and the rich greenness that permeated this part of Faerie, but not because I’d shifted up there. But because I’d reached out and shifted it down to me. Or a portion of it, anyway, with crumbly soil under my feet, a bunch of little river rocks that threatened to trip me up, and a branch full of leaves that promptly fell into my face.
Not that I cared because air .
I gulped it down, my lungs greedy and seemingly impossible to satisfy for a moment, maybe because the damned branch kept getting in the way! I spat out a mouthful of leaves, heaved in a deep, satisfying breath, and coughed much of it back out because I already had a lung full of water. Then, I breathed in more clear, sparkling breaths that a few seconds ago had seemed like a mirage in the desert and something I would never experience again.
Before looking around and realizing the fight wasn’t over.
The fight was just gearing up, in fact, and the Not-Whale was pissed .
The fist had just made it mad, so I decided to make it madder before my power cut out again, and it succeeded in eating Pritkin. Because that had been his fist, a massive extension of his tiny-looking body, which was still going to town on whatever part of the bastard it could find. But it didn’t seem to be making much of a difference.
There was too much blubber in the way, which cushioned the blows, and when Pritkin decided to go for the mouth again, his impressive fist got introduced to the chompers from hell.
And they didn’t give a damn about his magic.
Try mine, bitch , I thought, and sent a spell speeding through the ward encasing my air pocket and out into the open water.
It didn’t change the water as water doesn’t age. But the same could not be said for the Not Whale. I once thought that Faerie’s creations were eternal, but apparently not.
Because a large section of its scarred old hide suddenly burst outward, as if from decaying gasses, blowing a hole big enough for me to see what was happening inside. It wasn’t pretty. Entrails were churning and dissolving into soup, ribs were cracking and blackening and falling to pieces, and the great spine was liquifying as the spell, shot at an angle, boiled through to the other side and punched a hole there as well, bisecting the creature that was no longer looking quite so angry anymore.
In fact, it wasn’t looking so much like a creature anymore and more like something called lunch. Because out of nowhere, the formerly empty water was churning with life, as a myriad of weird aquatic . . . things . . . came zooming in, determined to get a piece of the pie. Or of the whale. Or of something I didn’t care about because my power had just cut out again.
Son of a bitch!
The ward I’d been sustaining popped, letting the water rush in and slap me in the face. The tree branch decided it had had enough and floated off, but not up because things were too churned up thanks to the feeding frenzy to obey gravity. And while I had a lungful of air this time, as there was no longer anything to force it out of me, it wouldn’t last.
How many minutes had it been between cycles of that portal? I thought frantically. And didn’t know, having been busy almost dying that whole time. And was about to do it again, and that wasn’t fair.
We’d won, damn it!
But then a hand, normal-sized and not glowing, caught mine. I jerked in surprise and looked up to see Pritkin, visible in the spectral light that some of the water creatures were giving off. He had a bubble over his head and was yelling something at me, which I thought was a bit much right now.
But suddenly, I had one, too. A bubble, that is, filled with air that I gasped in gratefully. So much so that the fact that I could now hear him bitching at me almost didn’t matter.
We took off, with me latching onto his back and him plowing through the water faster than he could run on land, and he could run pretty fast. But he could swim even faster, which was lucky as I was so disoriented that I had no idea where we freaking were. Or even which direction we were headed, although it appeared to be mostly down.
Down, down, down, to the point that I didn’t know how he could see anymore. The bioluminescent creatures had been left behind, and the murky water had swallowed up what little light they’d shed. My eyes met only blackness, and only the sensation of my fingers digging into the muscles of Pritkin’s back and shoulders kept me somewhat grounded.
Then we abruptly hit bottom, on a sandy bed that I could feel against my skin as it was stirred up by Pritkin scrabbling around as if searching for something.
Something that I guessed he didn’t find since he started cursing. And while Pritkin had many different styles of profanity, which he cheerfully used for everything from his coffee not being strong enough to sending his enemies into oblivion, this one was serious. This one meant business.
But then it stopped, he grunted with surprise, and manically started digging again. The next moment, we were on the move, plowing through the clouds of sand he’d stirred up into utter darkness. Before entering a vast cave, with torchlight glimmering on black rocks as we sloshed and then crawled out of the depths and onto a shoreline with people all around, none of whom I cared about because I was too busy collapsing into a soggy pile.
The bubble around my face burst, but there was air in the cave, so it didn’t matter. Someone was talking in a sonorous voice that echoed, but which I could barely hear over my heavy gasps. My lungs were not convinced that this air would stick around and were drawing in as much as possible while they could. But my ears finally popped, and a bunch of water ran out, allowing me to hear what was being said.
“—the statue is genuine. The winner of the first Challenge is, therefore, Prince Emrys of the Earthly Realm—”
“I protest!”
“ Prince! He’s no prince of mine!
“Earthly Realm! Say rather the hell regions. He’s a demon!”
“He cheated! That damned woman is with him!”
There were a lot of similar comments, shouted at us from all sides, but ‘that damned woman’ was too tired to pay them much attention. I rolled my head over to look at Pritkin, who was also lying on his back, breathing hard and looking back at me. And picking up my sandy hand and pressing a kiss to the back of it, because he was clearly over them all, too.
“You’ve landed in it this time,” he murmured.