Even so, she paused as if she had felt the touch, and her breathing hitched just a little.
For a moment their gazes locked and what’d seemed nothing but black when he’d first seen her eyes were now twin pools of indigo ink, bottomless and viscous and indescribably lovely.
He opened his mouth, ready to say… something. But then she blinked and reality crashed in on him. What the hell was he doing?
Taking a giant side step away from her, he glanced to his right. Pretending to study the forested landscape.
“I can only warn you that things will get harder,” she continued on, this time sounding a little breathless. “I will help you find her, if I can. But now you owe the broker a boon, I fear I may have gotten you into a worse mess than ever.”
“But can I trust you?”
“You shouldn’t.” She shook her head, a long blue curl slipped from the knot at her head, laying enticingly upon one rose tipped breast that’d reappeared.
She was so translucent now she was very nearly invisible. But it was easy enough to imagine her whole, to recognize that she was a beautiful woman if she could ever maintain her form long enough.
“I told you where to make camp, look what happened to you.” Her look was defeated, almost humiliated and Aeric scoffed.
“I was an ass yesterday, I think we can both admit it.”
She neither denied it nor agreed.
He chuckled. “It’s okay, it won’t hurt my feelings. Look, Lissa, twice now you’ve bailed me out of perilous situations. I was arrogant to believe I could stroll into Wonderland and do here as I’ve done everywhere else. I would die before I admit this out loud to anyone else, but I’m pleased to have you around.”
Her smile was radiant and he clenched his fingers.
As beautiful and alluring as she was, he did still have questions. Who was the broker? How had she managed to escape the obvious trap? Was she really being honest about this with him? That was perhaps the one that bugged him most.
But she was practically skipping along beside him and he just wasn’t in the mood to spar today. He’d ask his questions soon enough.
The path they walked seemed to stretch on into infinity, they were still within the shadowy forest, and every so often when Aeric looked down there were holes. At some point they should exit the trees, and yet, it almost seemed to him as if they walked a giant circle. Rather than going out, the bridge was subtly looping in on itself.
So what initially appeared to be a straight shot out was actually not.
Stopping, Aeric grabbed the pocketknife out of the sheath in his boot he always carried and cut a notch into the thick branch of the tree nearest him.
“What are you doing?”
Flipping the blade down, he shoved it into his pocket. “Does any of this feel familiar to you?”
She looked around them. “How so?”
Jerking his chin for her to keep walking with him, he licked his canine. “Like we’re moving in circles.”
“I’m not sure actually.”
“Maybe not.” He shrugged. “So tell me, Lissa, how is it that I was able to touch you that first day? I felt your kiss?” Her face turned a bright sheet of scarlet. “Now you’re as solid as shadow.”
She sighed. “It is like that with me sometimes. I cannot control this body and I’m not sure why. It is why I switch to feline, that one stays fully corporeal. Does this bother you?” She glanced down at herself.
“Not as much as it did. I just find it different,” he admitted truthfully.
A puff of smoke enveloped her, until she was once again the powder blue ball of fur. Her tail swished sensuously back and forth. “Better?”
Not really. He actually preferred the woman to the cat, regardless that parts of her were sometimes missing. But he shrugged instead, not wishing to put those thoughts into words.
“Look.” She pointed with her paw, when he turned to look, he immediately noticed the notch in the wood.
He traced the roughened edge of it. “We’re lower.”
“What?” She jumped onto the railing of the bridge, shoving her black little nose closer.
“See.” He tapped his finger to it. “When I cut into it, I did it at eye level.”
“It’s at your jaw line now.”
He nodded. “We’re not actually walking in circles. We’re going down.”
“Like a spiral staircase.”
“Similar. Come on,” he started forward, “let’s see where this leads.”
She trotted alongside him for a while before he asked again, “Who’s the broker?”
“A man.” Her eyes looked shuttered.
“Just a man? No, I don’t believe that. Not here. He’s called the broker, he’s important. So who is he?”
She sighed and hung her head, her whiskers twitched as she said, “legends call him many names. Trickster. Coyote. Loki—”
“Bloody hell, you made a deal with Rumpelstiltskin?” He wanted to smack his forehead. Hard. “Why would you go to him? Of all people, Lissa, not him.”