CHAPTER NINETEEN
Zandren
I knew Omaera had developed a fondness of sorts for Hell—or at least for a few demons she met while here—but I was itching to get the fuck out of the place. This was the longest I’d ever gone without shifting, and the bear inside of me itched and growled to get out. But I knew that shifting in such a hot place would not be wise. I was already uncomfortable, but in my bear form, with all the fur and insulation, I would be the most miserable beast alive. My mate didn’t need that stress added to her plate.
Would I stay in Hell longer if I had to? Of course I would. I would do anything for Omaera, but I was also allowed to be relieved that we were finally leaving this godforsaken place in our rearview mirror. I planned to smash the shit out of that mirror when we got through the portal. If I could scrub the memory of our time in Hell from my mind, I would. Maybe Omaera could go in with her demon powers and just gently scoop that part out? It was worth a try.
I was in the back of our four-person convoy. Maxar led the way through the mountain passageway, with the dumbass vampire behind him, Omaera in the middle, then me taking up the back. I had everyone’s six. But honestly, if push came to shove, they all knew that the only person that mattered was Omaera. I’d let the other two become bisibra food while whisking my mate off to safety.
She seemed pretty capable of taking care of herself though. She did manage to save the weak little vampire from the bisibra, after all.
Even though it’d been a little over a week since we made this trek through the mountain in the opposite direction, it felt a hell of a lot longer going in reverse. If I was an annoying dick like the mage, I would ask if we were there yet. But I wasn’t. So I kept my mouth shut and just maintained pace with the rest of them, keeping my ears and nose tuned into what was behind me. I also glanced over my shoulder every thirty seconds or so.
It was light enough that unlike last time, we didn’t need any of the little torches that the mage conjured for us. And now, Omaera could make her own fire. The mage certainly had his uses, but he could also be annoying as fuck. I was still having a hard time reconciling the fact that he was going to be part of my life for eternity. He just never shut up.
Maybe I was overthinking things, but after he saved me out in the desert after the bisibra got me, not to mention our time together with Omaera in the training room, I did feel a very small—and I mean microscopic—amount of fondness for Maxar. He was proving to be useful, and seriously committed to Omaera. It just drove me crazy that he never took anything seriously.
Tickling my nuts? Fuck right off.
Omaera glanced at me over her shoulder. “How are you doing, Pooh Bear?” Her smile dissolved all the remaining bits of annoyance from my body, replacing it with nothing but an overwhelming love for this gorgeous creature. She was all mine—sort of—and I’d never cease to be amazed by that.
“Hanging in there,” I said with a smile before pulling on the top handle of her backpack, so she was forced to stop. Then I planted a big, smacking kiss on her mouth.
She was breathless when I released her, her eyes full of stars. “Well then,” she said with a light giggle.
“Nearly there,” Maxar said from the front.
Thank fuck.
It was starting to feel like a goddamned maze, and we were just going in fucking circles.
I kept pace with them, and within a few minutes we were stepping out of the passageway and back into the endless red desert of despair with the sun rising big, orange, and obnoxious in the east just above the horizon.
“How do we even begin to look for the portal?” I asked. “At least on Earth it was between two rocks. There aren’t any rocks out there big enough. It’s a fucking wasteland of nothing.” I waved my hand at the empty scene before us. “Nothing can survive out there.”
“The portal will present itself when we’re close enough, Pooh Bear ,” Maxar said, flashing me a cocky smile.
“Nobody calls me that but Omaera,” I warned with a deep, throaty growl.
Maxar merely smirked, hiked his backpack onto his shoulders, then set off in a straight line out into the vast nothingness.
I’d never felt so freaking hopeless as we wandered like idiots around that sterile land, searching for … what? What exactly were we supposed to see? Were two stones going to just magically appear? It was so flat, I could see for miles in every direction, and there were definitely no stones, boulders, trees, or mounds in which a portal could hide behind. We were sitting ducks for whatever predator flew over and had a rumbling belly.
Every whistle of the wind had me pausing and my asshole clenching up tight. The breeze sounded oddly similar to a bisibra screech. Or was my mind just playing tricks on me?
I honestly didn’t know how long we wandered for. But the sun was directly overhead now, and we had all sweat through our clothing and were down to just underwear, leaving drips and drops of sweat on the cracked muddy ground that sizzled when they landed, only to evaporate in seconds. We stopped for several water breaks and were already running low. At this rate, we’d be dead by morning from dehydration if a bisibra didn’t get us first.
Fear and hopelessness made pounding steps through me. Or maybe that was just the headache forming in my forehead. I was growing delirious from the heat and every time I looked up, spots would cloud my vision and things would get blurry .
“Whoa, big guy,” Maxar said when I swayed and wobbled, my legs becoming Jell-O. He looped an arm under me to support my weight.
“Get off me,” I grunted, trying to shove him away. But I was too weak.
Omaera was beside me. She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead. “He’s burning up. He’s got heat stroke.” She glanced toward the mountains. But we’d wandered so far that they were hours away now. “We can’t even run back to the passageway for shade.”
“What’s that?” Drak asked, breaking through the buzzing in my ears. He pointed, but my head pounded too much, and my vision was too fuzzy for me to see.
“That’s it,” Maxar said, relief coloring his tone. “It has to be.”
“I don’t see it.” Omaera squinted.
“See the hazy air there,” Maxar said, pointing with his free hand, since he was still holding me up with the other arm.
“It’s all hazy,” she said. “Heat is rising off the ground like steam.”
He got right beside her, extended her arm out and directed her fingers with his to point. “Yes, but if you look right there, you’ll see it’s extra blurry and there’s a bit of a rainbow texture to it. Do you see it?”
She glanced at him with skepticism in her eyes. “Barely.”
“Let’s go,” the mage said, still carrying my weight but leading the charge. I was too weak to argue. I hated all of this.
The heat. The fact that we were prey. And most of all, that I was relying on the mage to help me. The only saving grace in all of this was that it was the mage and not the vampire. If the vampire was the one helping me, I’d just tell them to leave me here as bisibra food. I’d rather die than be indebted to a vampire.
I hedged a glance upward to see if I could spot the blurry rainbow air the mage was talking about. But as soon as I lifted my gaze from the ground, that pounding in my skull intensified and all I saw were black spots.
“Easy, Paddington. We see it. No need to look up. We’ve got you.” Maxar hoisted me higher up onto his shoulder.
“Okay, now I see it,” Omaera said with triumph. “That’s it? You’re sure?”
“Ninety-nine percent,” Maxar said .
“That’s not what the portal looked like on Earth,” she argued.
“Not all doors are the same,” the mage replied.
She growled, which made me smile despite the agony in my head. “Of course not. Fucking Hell.”
Maxar chuckled. “All the better to fuck with you, my dear.”
We walked for another ten minutes or so before we stopped. Maxar was practically dragging me at this point. I was essentially dead weight. But he managed, and to my surprise, he never complained.
I still didn’t like it when he tickled my balls, but maybe in a century or two I would call him … “friend.”
“Gonna put you down here for a sec, fluffy,” Maxar said slowly, gently lowering me to the ground. I was able to sit up, but slumped over. My entire body was one enormous ball of fire at this point. I could swear my organs were threatening to shut down as they boiled inside of me like lobsters in a pot.
A bottle of water was brought to my lips. “Drink, Pooh Bear,” Omaera said with concern. “Please.”
I sipped as best I could, but a lot of it ran down my chest.
The familiar humming sound like the portal on the Earth side filled my ears. It was not a pleasant sound. It scratched the inside of my brain like a cheese grater and made me nauseous. The air around us sparked and crackled, and you could feel the magic pulsing.
“Remember, just like last time,” Maxar said, stepping closest to the portal, “linear thoughts. Just think about keeping it together. About getting home. Back to Earth.” He gripped my shoulder and gave it a friendly squeeze. “And keeping your cock.”
All I did was grunt.
Unlike last time, I wasn’t able to watch as Maxar stepped forward. I barely had enough energy to lift my head. I could only imagine the vampire was suffering nearly as much. He was cold-blooded after all and suffered from the intense heat like I did.
“See you on the other side,” Maxar said. I heard him kiss Omaera, then he was gone .
“Drak, you’re next,” Omaera said, crouching down beside me. “I’m going to stay with Pooh Bear.” Her hand landed on my shoulder and from the corner of my eye, I could see the vampire’s feet step forward, then disappear.
“All right, big guy,” Omaera said, “you’ve got to rally enough strength to get up and get through. I’m not leaving you here to be bisibra food. I love you too much to see you go out like that.”
I barely managed a chuckle.
Lifting my head, which felt more like a ball of liquid fire, I squinted as the sun’s angry rays glared at me. “Anything for you, Little One.” Then, with the last few pitiful bits of energy I had left inside of me, I slowly stood up. “You go first.”
“No chance. I need to make sure you get through.”
I shook my head, unable to lift it to look at her. “You go first,” I said again.
“Zandren, don’t make me pull rank with you, please. Just do as I ask without me having to get all queeny on you. I’ll be fine. But I’m not walking through that portal, leaving you in this terrifying state. Go. Please.”
It was that last word that did it. The near begging way she said, “Please.” There was a sob to her tone, a desperation I could feel in every poached cell of my body. I didn’t have enough energy to argue. So with another barely there nod, I took one step forward, then another, and another. The hum of the portal grew more intense, the crackling and sparkling in the air was electric, and a few times those sparks landed on my skin, leaving a benign burning sensation for a second or two.
I took a fourth step, but was falling to the ground face first before I could take a fifth. My upper body collided with the dry, cracked mud with a harsh, painful thud .
Omaera was at my side as I put my hands on the hot dirt to push up so I was on all fours. “Oh my god, are you okay?” she asked, her hand on my shoulder.
Grunting, I nodded. “Gonna crawl the rest of the way.”
“Whatever works, Pooh Bear. You just need to get there.”
She walked as far as she could with me to the portal, which in reality was only another five or six steps. The buzz was deafening now. I glanced up at her as best I could. With a smile, she took my face in her hands and kissed me. Then she pressed her forehead to mine. “See you on the other side.”
I grunted. “See you on the other side.” With more than a hint of hesitation, but a lot more desperation to get the fuck out of Hell, I crawled through the portal where my body was instantly sucked forward like a vacuum.
And just like last time, the pain from being exploded into a billion little pieces was more than I was prepared for. I was nothing more than pink mist, getting siphoned from one dimension to another in a giant, noisy vacuum. The one good thing about the portal? The lack of deadly heat. Or maybe it was still there. I just couldn’t feel it because my body was no more than water droplets racing through a wormhole.
Either way, I was relieved as clarity came rushing back. I did my very best to keep my thoughts linear, focusing on getting back to Earth, back to Omaera, and keeping my dick.
Just like last time, I had no idea how long I flew through space and time as no more than wet dust. A minute? An hour? A week? No fucking clue. All I knew was that I started out in Hell, wanting to die from the heat. Then I wasn’t hot, I was blown to a billion and five chunks—but no longer hot—and before I knew it, I was reassembling and landing face first down in the dirt on the other side.
Or at least, I hoped it was the other side.
Before I did anything else, I slid my hand beneath me to make sure my favorite body part was still there.
Thank fuck.
I sniffed the air. It didn’t smell like Hell. It smelled like Earth.
I nearly kissed the fucking ground as tears of joy stung the backs of my eyes.
“There you are,” said the mage with amusement.
I blinked a few times, taking in the darkness of our surroundings. It was nighttime on Earth. The sky was almost blinding with how many stars filled it. It reminded me of back home, where my cave was. I would go out nearly every clear night, lay in a field, and just stare up at the vastness, at the trillions of diamonds so far away, yet still so beautiful.
With my chest heaving like I’d just sprinted up the side of a mountain after a juicy rabbit, I rolled over to my back and closed my eyes, running through my body to make sure everything was accounted for. Just because I made it through the portal with my cock intact, didn’t mean a toe or a much-needed joint didn’t get lost on the journey.
But for what I could tell, I left with 206 bones and returned with 206 bones.
“Where’s Omaera?” the mage asked. “She should have come out by now.”
Terror swamped my veins.
Little One.
I left her behind. She made me go ahead of her. She insisted as much when I didn’t want to leave her there alone. Why the fuck didn’t I listen to my instincts?
And now, we may have lost her.