Mortal Danger

TWENTY-TWO

The waterhole was literally that—a hole in the rock where water bubbled up in what was more a large puddle than a pool. It was set in a depression like a small meteor crater. Meteor, she thought, surprised, as the word opened up an image of a starry sky. Space. The moon, and meteorite showers that looked like falling stars.

She paused, savoring space and falling stars. Gan made it to the little pond first and knelt, tipping forward on its short arms to dunk its head underwater. It came up sputtering and then bent and slurped at the water like a… well, a dog. Or a wolf.

She looked at Rule. He would have drunk his fill when he found the waterhole. Now he lay nearby, his eyes open but head drooping.

He’s exhausted, she realized, and that troubled her. Had more time passed than she’d guessed? Or was something else affecting him? “How long have we been walking?” she asked abruptly.

Gan sat back on its haunches, having quenched whatever thirst a demon feels. “According to whose clock? Time’s more erratic here than you’re used to.”

“Time doesn’t change. That just… it doesn’t make sense.”

“It does here. Though…” Its forehead wrinkled. “Around you it might operate more the way you’re used to. I’m not sure how things work around a sensitive.”

A dozen questions tempted her with side roads, but she held to her course. “Take a guess about how long we’ve been walking based on, uh, your own clock.”

“Oh, maybe one of your days. I told you the Zone wasn’t far.”

Then Rule’s exhaustion made sense, she thought, relieved. He’d probably covered twice as much territory as she had, and it had been a long time since he slept. Maybe he’d been awake for a long time before they arrived here, too.

That was a disconcerting thought, stretching as it did into a past she couldn’t claim. She felt jealous, she realized. Jealous of Rule, for possessing what she’d lost. Jealous even of herself… the self who didn’t exist anymore, except in the memories of others.

Of course, if Rule had been awake a long time, so had she. “I’m not sleepy.”

“You’re still charged up with ymu. It lasts a lot longer than the kind of meals you’re used to. Once it runs low, you might get sleepy. Or mean. Or hungry. Or you might just keel over.”

Great. “You don’t know?”

It shrugged. “The only humans I know about who’ve taken ymu were possessed. It’s probably different if you don’t have a demon in you.”

But she was tied to one—the one currently blocking her way. She stepped around it so she could wash the dust from her throat.

Gan shoved her back.

“Hey!”

“You’ve got to look first. See that?”

Now that it was pointed out, she did. A small vine thrust out of a fissure in the stone right where she’d been about to step. Pale and leafless, it looked more like an albino worm than a plant. “So?”

Gan rolled its eyes. “So why do you think we’ve been avoiding those things?”

This was one of the snaky vines? “I don’t know. I asked, but you just hushed me.” She tipped her head, studying it. “The mature ones are a different color.”

“They’ve got a lot of blood in them.”

Oh. She bent to take a good look, wanting to be sure she’d recognize one if she saw it. “I don’t see any kind of mouth, but it’s got fine hairs. Or maybe they’re cilia.”

“Whatever you call them, they’re sticky. Real sticky. And they’re the eating part.”

“How? And why is it dangerous to me? It’s too little to eat anything but bugs.”

“You’d get away, yeah. But you’d have it stuck to you, and the sap would eat away your skin.”

She was very careful about approaching the water-hole after that. When she knelt she saw a number of flying insects skimming the water—pretty things the size of her palm, almost colorless but with iridescent wings. They lit on the surface and took off again, making little ripples.

She wasn’t crazy about drinking after them, so she just splashed her face. The water was cold, but her skin tingled with more than the chill. “It’s everywhere in this place, isn’t it?”

“What?” Gan plopped down on the bare rock next to the water, sitting in the tilted sprawl its tail necessitated.

“Magic. Not literally everywhere,” she corrected herself, looking for a spot with some of the dust for cushioning. Bare rock wasn’t as comfortable for her as it seemed to be for the demon. “But there are patches of it all over— the ground, the air, the water.” Sometimes as she walked she’d felt it drift by, like a breeze, only the air wasn’t moving. Just the magic.

That was different, wasn’t it? She felt sure she wasn’t used to having so much free magic floating around.

“You mean you can feel it? You’re not even trying and you feel it?”

“Of course. There’s nothing between my skin and everything else, and I’m a sensitive, remember?”

Gan snorted. “Better than you do, I bet. Unless you’ve found your missing marbles.”

Her fists clenched. “Not exactly crammed with tact, are you?”

Rule stood and came over to her, rubbing his head along her hip. She dropped a hand to his shoulder, and just like that she felt better. Easier, as if she’d been holding an immaterial fist clenched around some thought or fear for a long time and could finally relax.

“I’ve gotten a little of it back,” she said, speaking to him now. not the demon. “Nothing about me, but I remember… a place that isn’t like this.”

He made a low, rumbling sound. She looked to Gan for a translation.

“He says he’ll remember for you. Could you try to be quiet now? Or do you just have to attract an erkint or two?”

“1 think,” she said, still talking to the wolf, “that Gan gets especially cautious about noise when it doesn’t want to answer questions.”

He nodded.

“I have a lot of questions, and you probably do, too. But maybe we’ll save them until we’ve rested.” Not that she was physically tired, though it would feel good to get off her feet. She was weary of questions, of the void inside her that gave back only silence. “I’ll grill Gan later. I need to sit, and you need some sleep.”

Rule hesitated but then agreed by moving to a spot slightly sheltered by the rise in the ground that made her think of the lip of a meteor crater. He lay down and looked at her. He had lovely eyes, warm and dark and capable of conveying quite a bit of meaning. Right now they seemed to offer an invitation.

She took him up on it, sitting down beside him. His body felt warm and furry and good. She stroked his back. “Go on, get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.”

Again he hesitated.

“Not used to letting someone else do the watching, are you? It’s true, I won’t be as good a sentry as you. I don’t have your senses. But I don’t need sleep right now, and you do.”

He sighed and laid his head on her thigh. Within moments, he was asleep.

This, too, felt good. He’d been angry with her earlier, she knew. He hadn’t wanted her to take the ymu, or for them to leave the ravine. But either he’d gotten over his anger, or he’d set it aside. He trusted her to keep watch while he slept, and that mattered. It mattered a lot.

If she hadn’t had him with her here… well, she did, so there was no point in chasing that particular question. But even thinking it brought such a surge of feeling… like one of those ocean waves she remembered, it rolled up inside her, getting bigger and bigger.

Also like the waves she remembered, this one was salty. Her eyes filmed over with tears. He was the one good thing she had. “I’m so glad about you,” she whispered—soft, soft, so she didn’t wake him. “I’m so damned glad about you.”

Gan giggled. She dashed a hand across her eyes and turned to it, angry—but the demon was paying no attention to her. It was preoccupied with the flying bugs with the shiny wings. Its hand shot out, closing around one of them.

She ought to appreciate Gan’s presence, too. True, the demon acted from self-interest, but it had healed her wounds.

Gan popped the bug in its mouth.

Its habits weren’t exactly appealing, but she and the wolf would find it much harder to survive here without the demon’s guidance.

It grabbed another bug. This one it fed to the snake vine. It giggled again as the bug’s wings thrashed.

There was a reason she hadn’t bonded with Gan. She looked away.

Sitting still was hard. She’d wanted to rest, but now that she was resting, she wanted to move. She’d thought that the restlessness would go away once they left that ravine behind, but she’d brought it along with her.

She’d brought another feeling with her, too. One that fed the restlessness, though she sensed it wasn’t the cause. An achy, needy feeling.

She wanted sex.

Now that she was sitting still, the ache was obvious. But she’d felt it for some time without paying it much notice—ever since Gan gave her the ymu, she realized. She remembered the startling rush of strength and energy, as if her blood had gone from flat to fizzy in an instant.

Maybe she always felt this way when her body was healthy and rested. But weren’t demons supposed to be oversexed? Maybe these feelings came from Gan—she was tied to it, after all. Or from the ymu.

She glanced at Gan again. No way was she going to ask.

Gan had said that she and Rule used to have sex “when he wasn’t a wolf.” She frowned. It bothered her to think of him being different. Had he been a wolf a long time? What was he like when he wasn’t a wolf?

She wished she could remember. Funny… she knew about sex, knew what her body wanted. She could imagine the way a man’s hands would feel, but she couldn’t remember being touched. She tried to call up a single, specific image—a face, a name, a place. And failed. What did her bed look like? Who had been it with her? Had she had many lovers? Or… another word arrived, but this one slammed into her mind with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.

Marriage. What if she was married?

She looked at the wolf whose head was heavy and warm on her thigh, her brow wrinkling at the thoughts pinging through her mind. She wasn’t wearing a ring… but she’d arrived here without clothes, so the lack of a ring didn’t mean much.

She didn’t realize she’d reached for the little charm hung around her neck until her fingers closed around it. The faint, familiar buzz of its magic made her shoulders loosen. Her necklace had arrived with her. Surely a wedding ring would have, too.

The demon sighed, stretched its short legs and leaned back on its tail. “This is boring.”

Silence only mattered when the demon wasn’t bored? She scowled at it.“What?” it said. “Aren’t you bored just sitting there?”

It was like a child, she realized. A nasty little child who pulled the wings off flies—and fed them to carnivorous plants. But maybe demons didn’t sleep, so Gan didn’t realize it had to be quiet or it would wake up Rule. She shushed it.

Gan grimaced and pulled up a handful of the fleshy yellow grass.

She bet that once she started asking questions it would be hushing her and looking scared again. But they weren’t budging until she knew more.

She’d rushed her decision, she admitted. Or allowed herself to be pushed into it, with pain arguing loudly on the side of the demon. She still thought she’d made the right choice, but she’d made it with very few facts. Before they crossed the Zone into the other region, she intended to get some answers.

She looked to her left at the murky barrier stretched across the mouth of the valley like a T-shirt that was fifty percent spandex, fifty percent mist.

Spandex. T-shirt. She smiled with pleasure as the words shifted all sorts of images and concepts into her mind. Gyms and working out. Department stores and malls. Socks and athletic shoes… and oh, but didn’t she wish she had some of those right now!

Of course, she might as well wish for the whole mall so she could get a few other things, too. Panties, jeans, a shirt, a hairbrush… her hair must be a mess.

Her hair. She didn’t know what it looked like. Or her face.

The surface of the water had been too ripply from the insects to give her back a reflection. She hadn’t thought about it then. Now she needed to know.

The hand she raised trembled a little. She checked out her hair first. Not long, not short. Straight. Black, she saw when she pulled a strand in front of her face. And her face… she touched her cheeks, her chin, but didn’t know how to assemble the messages from her fingertips into a picture. Were ears always this big? What about noses? Hers felt straight, but was it long or short? She didn’t know how long a nose ought to feel. Or lips. Hers—

What was that?

She turned her head sharply and shook the wolf’s shoulder. “Wake up. Quick. Gan, what are those?”

“What are… shit!” the demon cried even as the wolf lifted his head, shook it, and turned to see where she was pointing.

Four great, winged shapes were heading toward them, coming from the direction of the Zone.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Gan hopped from foot to foot, clutching its head as it looked around frantically. “I knew stopping here was a bad idea! I just knew it!”

The wolf was on his feet now, but he no more knew what to do than she did. There was no cover, nothing to shield them from overhead, and she lacked even the most rudimentary weapon… and those things were huge.

And coming fast. She could see them clearly now.

For a moment, awe outweighed everything else. Watching those four sinuous shapes the color of old copper winging straight at them, gliding across air with the sideways sway of a snake crossing sand, carried by wings whose tips would span a small house, all she could think was: They exist. They really do exist.

Dragons.

A cold nose poked her. “What—? Oh. Yes,‘” she said as the wolf flattened himself as much as possible against the rim of the small depression. “Yes, I see.”

There was nowhere to run, no way to defend themselves. Their only chance was to be hard to spot. She curled up against the rock.

She couldn’t see the dragons anymore. The fear she hadn’t felt a second ago struck. Her mouth went dry. Her heartbeat slammed into overdrive. She craned her head around, trying to spot them without moving. This is how a rabbit feels, quivering in the grass while the eagle stoops, unable to see its death coming, but knowing. Knowing.

She clenched her fingers in Rule’s ruff. Maybe it was just coincidence that the dragons were flying this way. Maybe their vision was poor. Maybe…

The demon was still hopping in one place, halfway to hysterical. “They’ll eat me! They’re going to eat me, 1 know it!”

“Gan!” she called. “You’re making yourself a target! Shut up and get down!”

It looked straight at her, its oddly lovely eyes wide with terror. “They’ll eat me!” it shrilled. “I won’t be anymore! You have a soul—you’ll still be, but 1 won’t! All of me will be gone!”

She stared at it, helpless. Should she tackle it, wrestle it to the ground? Could she? It was small, but so much heavier than it looked—

“No!” she screamed, grabbing at the wolf—too late.

He’d hurled himself up out of the depression. Had he lost his mind? Did he think he could fight them, or outrun them, or—no. Oh, no.

“He’s nuts!” The demon stared after the wolf, too, as he raced away—not dodging, but running flat out—fast, so fast. Not running directly away from the dragons, either, but at an angle. “He can’t outrun them!”

No, he couldn’t. He was trying to draw them away. Offering himself as easy prey.

She was on her feet. She didn’t remember standing up. She watched as one of the greatest creatures of legend peeled away from the others, folded its wings, and dove, plummeting straight at Rule like an arrow loosed from a giant’s bow. She was still watching that terrible dive when two of the remaining three folded their wings and dove.

The one stooping on Rule struck, skimmed the ground, lifted.

Four long seconds later, a shadow dimmed the glow from the sky. Then the talons closed around her.