Page 87 of WitchCurse
“Nick?” I tapped his shoulder. Where was Kiran? And where the hell were we?
He rolled backward, blinking hard for a moment, gaze filled with sleep and confusion. He jolted the second he saw me. “What…how? Toby… Fuck, where is Kiran?”
“Where are we?” I asked him, waving at the woven walls of branches. It was a bit like a cage, only it didn’t feel confining.
Den,my wolf said, as he was calm and rested, nestled deeply inside. I reached for him and he was there in everything, not separated by a divide, or even a scar.Memories still hurt, the wolf told me,stronger together.The space where we had once been divided was now a field of flowers, and giant trees, like it had all been blooming a while.
Memories unfolded in my head, a mix of mine and Nick’s, getting caught by the nightmare queen and plummeted into agony, a battle, my wolf tearing into Kiran, pulled like a puppet and out of my control, and the enormous god-like thing Nick had become, sweeping us away.
“Holy fuck, you took all of Kiran’s darkness?”
Nick blinked at me, a stuttering gaze that told me he was processing as well. “It was all that was left. The fae drained us dry, and killed you and Kiran. I only remember some? Standing before the barrier, not dead, but willing to end it all because you were both already gone.” He looked down at the bed and our clothes, which seemed to be an older style, like something from movies, leather pants? Nick tugged at his shirt. “Is this glamour? It feels real? Looks like Kiran’s work.”
“Can you feel him?” I sought the link to him, and it had changed. Present, but hard to reach through, as if he was shielding from us like he always claimed he tried to but never succeeded. Until now, apparently.
“It’s a barrier,” Nick agreed. He got up from the bed, sliding out of the mess of fabrics, gaze searching the room for an opening. It was like we were in a cocoon or something. “How do you feel? No battle with your wolf?” He stared at me. “No divide?”
“No. I feel good. Well rested and the wolf is settled. Not tugging for control.” Which was sort of a funny thought because the wolf was me and I was him. Without the divide there was no demand for control because we were always both in control. Was this what it felt like to be a normal werewolf? “How about you?” I slid into our connecting bond, feeling him well-rested, unconflicted. “The anger?”
“Not gone, but…sated?” Nick shrugged. “Hard to explain. You with your wolf again is amazing.” He touched the wall. It rippled for a second before forming a door. He looked back my way. “Um. That was way too easy.”
“Where does it go?” I asked, getting up to follow.
He shrugged. “I thought of home? The camper Sebastian gave us.”
“When Sebastian thought of home, he ended up in Underhill. What if we are dead and this is Kiran’s way of protecting us from hell? What if that leads to regular hell?” I wondered thinking back to a thousand stories, and my few young years when my mother dragged me to church.
“Does hell apply to demi-gods?” Nick wondered as he reached for the handle of the door and opened it. Darkness beyond, no hint of where it went. Nick’s doors never gave a hint of where they led.
“Kiran is the demi-god, not us.”
“I felt like a god,” Nick said. “With all that rage. I didn’t turn into a dragon though. But I tore through the fae and we flew on the wind after dissolving into snow? Memory is a bit fuzzy in the end.”
“I bet you would have made a really hot dragon,” I told him.
He snorted. “One track mind.”
“Two actually, and as soon as we find Kiran, I plan to give a demonstration.”
“I’m on board with that, even if we are dead, assuming we can do that as ghosts.” He frowned at the door. “Do we go or wait here.”
“What would we wait for?” I tried tugging on the part of the bond that linked us to Kiran, but it had no give. “I don’t like this shield thing he’s doing.”
“He never kept me out like this before,” Nick agreed. “Is it part of having his power back?”
“Is that what this is?”
“I like the idea of that better than this being some afterworld where we have no tie to him.”
“Not loving that either,” I said as I tugged Nick toward the door. “Too bad you don’t have that big sword handy. In case we are in Underhill? Or some weird remains of the winter court?”
Nick blinked and seemed to think for a minute. “It normally comes when I call it, but even with Kiran’s magic swirling through me, I can’t feel it.”
“You lost thegodkillersword?”
“I don’t remember when that happened. Maybe Kiran has it?”
“Okay, but if there are monsters on the other side, you’ll have to distract them for a minute so I can shift,” I said as I dragged him through the door. We stepped out into the camper. Or at least it might have been the camper? I blinked as everything sort of blended together, the modern upgrades Sebastian had done to the camper, mixed with a growth of plants and trees looking like some sort of interior made from the forest? The layout was the same. The door we exited having been what had led to the sanctuary before.