Page 20

We took a swim. Ray leapt upwards, into the suspended river, giving me the strange view of his body floating over nothing at all. For a moment, it looked like I was sitting under a swimming pool with a glass bottom, looking up at the sun’s rays filtering through onto my face. It was amazing.

And that was before an arm reached down, grasped my hand, and pulled me up alongside him.

The water was cold enough to be a shock, although less of one than the view. I looked down through shifting waters at the massive cavern below us, and something between excitement and fear coursed through me. Cascading sunlight picked out glints in the rocks, gleamed off a forest of limestone formations, and highlighted bats, thousands upon thousands of them, flocking like birds far below.

It was a mind-bending sight that I knew I’d never forget. But it was almost equaled when we burst out of the other side of the stream, and for a moment, I didn’t know which way was up. A wave of disorientation hit, giving me the strangest feeling that the world had flipped, and I was about to fall into the huge, blue bowl of the sky.

Then I blinked and everything righted itself, leaving me looking at a truly beautiful spot. The river murmured over clutches of rocks, the wind sighed through the treetops of an enormous forest, the sun streamed down out of a cloudless sky, and a bird sang a brief trill. Even better, the entire stretch of riverbank was deserted, without a threat in sight.

We were out!

Ray and I looked at each other, and despite everything, we laughed. And kept on doing so when he tossed his head, spraying me with water, and I splashed him back. We floated there, having a water flight like a couple of children for a moment, just grateful to be alive.

We eventually started moving, but not toward dry land as I’d expected. The shoreline wasn’t far, a brief rocky and then grassy expanse before the tree line, but Ray avoided it. I tried to ask why, but he just shook his head.

“In a minute.”

In a minute we ended up by a flat shelf of rock that extended outward from the embankment. Ray scooped me up and deposited me in a dry area out of the waterline. The rock looked like shale and had been washed by the river for so long that it was as smooth as silk under my fingertips. The sun had warmed it, in between sections of a rocky overhang, making it a comfortable enough spot.

Yet I didn’t understand why we had stopped here.

Ray squatted down beside me, his face earnest. “Look. You gotta remember three things about Faerie, okay?”

I nodded.

“One, assume that everything is trying to kill you, all the time, because it probably is. Two, never—and I mean never—go into a forest unless you got a fey guide. Seriously. The damned thing will eat you, and that is not a metaphor.”

I nodded again.

“And three, try to get out as fast as you can. If you remember those three things, you got maybe a fifty-fifty chance.”

I did not like those odds. “But how do we get out? I didn’t find a map—”

He waved it away. “Portals won’t be on a map, unless they’re the official ones we’d never get near anyway. But I got contacts. Soon as we figure out where we are, I’ll get us outta here, okay?”

I nodded. I was grateful for Ray’s former occupation, which had involved a fair amount of smuggling into the fey lands. If I had to be stuck here with anyone, I was glad it was him.

He smiled as if he’d heard that, which perhaps he had. “Look, I’m gonna go get a fish and some firewood. You want anything else?”

I frowned. “Shouldn’t we move on before making camp? Put some distance between us and the fey?”

Ray shook his head. “It’s gonna be dark before long. That’s rule number four: never travel in Faerie at night. It’s dangerous enough in the daytime.”

I absorbed that, and my stomach growled, as if placing an order. “Another fish, then?”

“Another fish it is.” He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t wander off.”

I gazed after him, wondering if that had been a joke.

Ray sloshed back into the stream, but the area nearby was rocky and the water turbulent. He eventually ventured further away, where a bend in the river and some trees mostly hid him from sight. I would have been more concerned about that, but he was a master vampire. He could take care of himself as well as hear me if I called out.

And I could hear him cursing in between dives, which made me smile.

After a while, I started looking through the waterlogged blanket of items that I had taken out of the capsule. I opened up the soggy knots and spread the fabric out to dry. I put the contents on the other side of me and took stock.

There were the four blood bags, which had surprisingly remained intact. There was the mirror, which had not, but I had the flint and striker so that did not matter. There was a small bundle of kindling, which seemed odd with how heavily forested this area was—until I remembered Ray’s comment about the trees.

I gazed at the ones across the river, but they were so thick that I could not tell if anyone, or anything, gazed back. They had huge, old, wizened trunks, like the last stretch of woodland I’d seen, most of them topped by massive canopies of dark green leaves. There was a scattering of yellow tops among the group as well, one that was violently red, and another that was vividly purple.

The more colorful ones explained the varicolored leaves that floated gently downstream, and had collected near the waterline. They were all different sizes and shapes, some spotted and speckled with age, others still bright and vibrant. I couldn’t name all of the species, but some were oak and a few looked like maple.

If there was anything odd about the trees, other than their size, I couldn’t tell. Although occasionally one would shiver slightly as if in a breeze, while the surrounding forest stayed still. I slowly laid the sticks out to dry, still watching them, and wondered if it would be taken as an offense if we actually built a fire.

And then wondered at finding myself in a place where that was a reasonable question to have.

I went back to exploring our cache.

There was the small bag of emergency food, which was nuts and some odd, orange colored, dried fruit. There was the canteen-like container of something that was definitely not water, as I had first assumed. I sniffed it, and then tried a minute drop on the end of my tongue.

Fey wine.

And it was fresh. Like everything else in the cache, it had been put there relatively recently. As if someone else had discovered the capsule and did their best to hide it, but also used it on occasion, for what I did not know.

But I did not think that it had been the Svarestri, who had seemed as surprised by it as we were.

I put the canteen aside.

There was also the knife that I had managed to hang onto somehow, although Ray had taken it “fishing.” And a few strips of the first blanket, which he had ripped up for bandages. And that was all. That was everything we had to help us survive in the hostile environment of an alien world.

Fifty-fifty, I thought.

I put the blanket aside and started massaging my legs, trying to get them working again, but had to stop when the pressure opened one of the wounds. I frowned at myself—I should have expected that—and rebandaged it with some more blanket strips. The wounds were deep, as if the fey had been attempting to hamstring me, but not dangerous, and they did not impede my movement as my legs were nonfunctioning anyway. But it felt strange, not being able to feel my fingers moving over my flesh.

There was no pain, even when I washed the seeping wound in fey wine to disinfect it. Dhampirs do not suffer from infections, but that was on Earth. Who knew how it worked here?

I thought about that, then unwrapped the other wound and disinfected it, too, just to be safe. Again, there was no discomfort. It was almost as if my legs were not there at all, which was . . . disturbing.

I tried telling myself that it would be fine, that I would return to Earth, reunite with Dory, and that our body would be whole again. Only, what if this was our body? I had assumed that the original had stayed with her, simply because I was used to thinking about it as hers more than mine. But what if she had the duplicate?

What if I returned to her, and paralyzed us both?

I pushed that thought away—hard—because it made the cold water beading my skin feel like it reached all the way to my heart. I shivered anyway, probably because my tunic was wet. I pulled it off and laid it in the sun, and even found a small patch of warmth for myself while it dried.

The rocks overhead looked a bit like an open hand, I decided, with four fingers of stone sticking out, and the thumb being the stony protrusion behind me. It showed me the sky in pieces, but provided a little shelter in case it rained. Assuming that it did that here.

I didn’t know because I didn’t know the rules of this place. Not any of them. It made me uneasy, like the thought that I might not be able to fight off an attack if it came.

But there was nothing obviously threatening at the moment, and I had started to relax by the time Ray returned, with four large fish, a crab-like creature, and a sliced-up nose. And a slightly horrified expression when he caught sight of me. “Oh, hey! Hey, yeah. Um—”

“Is something wrong?” I asked, because he’d looked away. And then almost turned his back on me.

“No, no, hell no. Not a thing. It’s just . . . it gets cold here, at night. You, uh, should probably put that tunic back on.”

I reached over and felt of it. And to my surprise, it was dry. The strange material had wicked away the water and the sun had warmed it. I pulled it over my head and Ray was right. I did feel better.

“What is it you have there?” I asked.

He glanced over his shoulder, and looked faintly relieved for some reason. Then he looked down at his catch. “Oh. Crab,” he explained, shaking the obviously dead creature. “I’m gonna enjoy cooking this bitch up. It almost took my nose off.”

“Can we cook?” I asked, as he squatted down by the river to clean his catch. The sun, or what passed for it here, was getting lower. It would be dark soon, and a fire would show our location all too well.

And that was assuming that the trees didn’t get us first.

Ray shrugged. “May as well. We have to have a fire anyway.” He thought about it. “That’s rule number five. Never sleep without a fire, especially not at water’s edge.”

“But if we light one, somebody might see us.”

“And if we don’t, something might eat us.”

“There seems to be a lot of that going on,” I pointed out.

He started to say something, but then looked up and saw my face. Or perhaps he read my mind, and picked up on some of the strange feeling I was having. Not fear exactly, but something approaching it. Anxiety? Was that the word?

“That’s the word,” Ray said. “And if you didn’t have any around here, you’d be either stupid or crazy.”

“All right,” I said.

“In Faerie, you gotta pick your battles,” he added, working on the fish. “Look, I’m not gonna lie to you and promise that we’re going to make it out of here, okay? I’m not gonna do that. But I will promise that tonight, we’ll do the eating.”

I felt my face crack, and then smile. Ray had a way with words. It wasn’t a conventional way, but it was a way.

“I’ll make the fire,” I said.

* * *

The meal was simple but good. Hunger is the best sauce, as someone once said, and I was very hungry. I ate all four of the fish, some of the dried fruit, and most of Ray’s crab. It had almost taken his nose off in an epic battle, so he had eaten some as a point of honor.

He had also drunk another pint of blood, reducing our stash to three, which told me how much healing he’d had to do earlier. A master shouldn’t have needed another feed so soon. Especially not with a family back on Earth to draw from.

“Can your family not supply you?” I asked, as I handed it over.

He rolled his eyes, which I was beginning to see as a favorite gesture, and poked our fire with a stick. He’d found some driftwood along the banks, so we had a good blaze. It was chilly now with the sun down, but the fire warmed not only us but the rock behind us. I thought we’d sleep comfortably enough.

“You seen my family, right?” he said, after a moment.

“Yes.”

“So, what do you think?”

I ate a fish eye. “I think they are too weak to help you, and that it is my fault.”

He looked up, the firelight splashing his face. “Why would it be your fault?”

“I am not a proper master. Neither is Dory. Your old master could give you power through the blood bond, but we cannot. As a result, your people draw from you, but you have no one to draw from in return. It weakens you.”

Ray picked at the mostly empty crab shell. “That’s one way of looking at it.”

“Is that not how you look at it?”

He shot me a look. “No.”

For a while, nothing else was said. The wood popped, the wind rustled through the treetops, and the water murmured over the stones. I looked up, and the rocky fingers seemed as if they were reaching out, to clutch the sky. There were stars visible, but no moon. I wondered if Faerie even had one, and felt a strange quiver at the thought that I didn’t know.

“I look back,” Ray finally said, “at four hundred years of slavery. You know when Dory cut off my head that time?”

I nodded.

“We were nothing to each other then; never even met. I was just some loser she’d been sent after, just a paycheck. Yet she was more polite to my decapitated corpse than my old master ever was to the whole man. That fucking prick.”

I blinked.

“So you gotta weigh it out. On the one hand, sure, I don’t get any power boosts, but that miserly bastard never gave up much anyway. And on average, I’d rather have some goddamned respect than all the power in the world. You know?”

“No,” I said honestly. “I have never met a vampire who did not crave power.”

“Didn’t say I didn’t crave it,” Ray corrected. “Right now, I crave the heck out of it. I just crave something else more. You spend four hundred years being treated like nothing, just nothing at all, and maybe you’d understand.”

This time, I was the one who was silent.

“I did,” I finally said, and saw him blush.

Or maybe that was the fire. It was sending a cheerful glow over the flat stone beneath us, the rocks behind us, and the fingers above. It had also given Ray back his youthful appearance. There was no gray in the shock of black hair, and the blue eyes, so startling against the tanned skin, were unlined. At a guess, I would have said that he was Changed young, no more than early twenties.

“Nineteen,” he said roughly, and looked away. But a moment later, those blue eyes were back and staring at me challengingly. “What about you?”

“I am not a vampire,” I pointed out. “I was not Changed.”

The eyeroll was back. “No, I meant what do you want? You asked me, so it’s only fair.”

I agreed that it was fair. It was also difficult to answer. I decided to take my time, as he had, and lay back against the warm stone to look at the stars.

Like everything else here, they were both familiar and not. The small, pinpricks of light were the same, but there were no familiar constellations. Orion, the Big Dipper, the Pleiades . . . they simply were not there.

Of course, they wouldn’t be, would they? I had heard that Faerie was in a completely different universe, connected to our own solely by a small breach in space-time. It was on the “heavenly” side, whereas Earth was part of the “hells”, although those terms did not have the same connotations that I had been taught as a child. They simply denoted the rules under which the two universes operated, acknowledging that their magic, and possibly even their physics, worked differently.

“They got constellations,” Ray suddenly said. “They’re just different from ours. See that line of four stars in a row, with three more curving up from it?”

I followed the line of his pointing finger, and nodded.

“That’s Gangleri, the Wanderer. Said to be the ship the gods came here in. The story is that they were like space Vikings, poor adventurer types searching for wealth, lands, people they could conquer—basically anything. They traveled all over their galaxy, plundering the shit outta everybody who didn’t beat them up first—”

“Beat them up? When they were so strong?”

He settled onto his back and put his hands behind his head. “Well, that’s the point. They weren’t that strong then. They were only overpowered when they came here, where the rules are different. They discovered that in our universe they were like, well, like gods. They could beat up anybody.”

“But they weren’t in our universe,” I pointed out. “Faerie is in theirs.”

“Yeah, but it’s the closest world to the rift on their side, like Earth is on ours. Both worlds are a little weird, ‘cause things bleed over. That’s how the gods found us; we’re not that far away, you know?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know. I had never heard this before.

“How did you come to know so much?” I asked.

He shrugged. “The fey. If you wanna do business, you gotta have a meal, drink some wine, smoke some herb. And while you’re doing that, you talk, so they can decide what kind of person you are. They been ripped off before, but it don’t happen often ‘cause they’ve been trading a long time. They’re pretty good at sizing a guy up. But anyway, eventually they talk back, usually telling stories.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Any kind. Every kind.” Ray grinned. “Bullshit, mostly: heroes and villains, epic journeys and daring deeds, damsels needing rescuing from ugly ogres . . . unless it’s the ogres telling the story. In which case it’s usually about light fey trespassers getting what’s coming to ‘em. And about roasting pretty fey princes over a spit until the juices run clear.”

I blinked. “You traded with the dark fey, too?”

“Sure, why not? They have portals. They also got stories, but they’re not so nice. The light fey were the ones the gods interbred with. The dark fey were the ones they experimented on. Guess who was treated better?”

I did not have to guess. Dory had dark fey friends who had fled to Earth, where they were thought of as monsters. Yet they had better lives there.

I looked up at the glimmering constellation, sailing across the heavens. It resembled a Viking ship, with a long body and a raised prow. But judging by what I’d seen today, I doubted it had looked like that at all. Probably a case of the fey interpreting the idea of a ship in a way that made sense to them.

Was that all the gods were? I wondered. Just space vagabonds looking for an opportunity, and finding it because of a happenstance of physics? Like a human walking on the moon could suddenly jump higher because of the difference in gravity.

“What if God was one of us,” Ray suddenly sang. “Just a slob like one of us?”

I laughed; I couldn’t help it. He always seemed to know what to say.

“And then Great Artemis’ spell banished the gods and blocked the breech behind them, preventing their return,” I said. “But it had to encompass Faerie as well, since the ley lines connected it to Earth. Thus, cutting Faerie off from the rest of the heavens.”

“Pretty much,” Ray agreed.

I watched the stars wheel above us. There were so many here, and so close. Maybe it was just the lack of light pollution, but it looked as if someone had pitched a great, glittery tent in the heavens.

One the fey could no longer reach.

I wondered what they thought, looking up at a sky cut off from them forever. At worlds they’d never visit, at a universe they would never explore. I couldn’t imagine what that must have felt like, to be suddenly so alone.

Or perhaps I could.

“I don’t know what I want,” I said to Ray.