“Then how did you find her?”
Something was wrong, every instinct inside him screamed it, but the problem was he couldn’t pinpoint why he felt that way. Only that he did. Which made any type of reasoning nearly impossible.
“It’s really not very hard when you know what to look for.”
Her look was shrewd, and her tone clearly said there was more meaning behind those words than what he could take at face value.
“But,” she laughed, waving a stubby hand in front of her face in a broken butterfly motion, “if you want to know the answer to that riddle, it’ll cost you more.”
The undulations of her gown hypnotized him as she moved in closer. Her scent of cherry blossoms smacked him in the nose. “I could tell you much, Huntsman,” she traced a red lacquered nail down his chest, “you only need to ask.”
Swatting her hand away, he took one step back and then two. “I’ve come for Lissa, nothing more.”
“Suit yourself.” There was a twinkle in her jade green eyes. “You know the price you must pay.”
The tumbler full of green stuff was shoved back into his face. Aeric glanced around, no one was paying any attention to them, it was as if the bartering of a life were commonplace to here.
“I’ve not got all day.” Her smiles and charm were gone now. A pencil thin brow lifted with impatience.
A tap, tap, tapping broke through his thoughts then. It came from her dress. Or rather from what he’d assumed to be black bows on her dress, the tapping came—not from bows—but polished shoes.
“That’s not a dress, is it?” He asked the first thing that popped into his mind.
She licked her lips. “Want a closer look?”
With a curl of his nose, he turned the tumbler toward his mouth. And for a brief moment, just an instant, he could have sworn he’d seen the shadowy, black vapor of a skull and crossbones.
“Bottoms up,” she cooed, and then somehow had forced the cup to his mouth. He opened his lips in reprimand, but it was too late.
The stuff was thick and slimy, and sickeningly sweet. It traced down the back of his throat like ice and settled in his gut like flame.
Hacking and coughing, he bent over and grabbed hold of his middle as his vision literally seemed to spasm out of control.
Spots of light swam in and out of focus; his head throbbed with the beating of his heart.
Pillar thwacked on his back with a firm hand. “Now, now, it wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“What did you give me?” he managed to wheeze after a second, lungs booming from his coughing.
Once more the patrons were looking at him. Most of them wearing amused grins, and some, like the Walrus and Owl, outright laughing.
The fire was beginning to settle down, but he kept rubbing at his eyes. Because everything still looked fuzzy, blurred around the edges.
“Only what I was paid to give you,” her smile was pure venom, it made his skin crawl. “Go,” Pillar jerked her head toward the glass case, “take her and leave.”
“Paid? Who paid you? What was that?” he pointed to the empty cup she’d snatched from his hand, but she’d turned her back to her him and refused to answer any of his questions.
Wiping his runny nose with the back of his hand, wanting to get out of here, needing time to mull over what that might have meant, he turned and trotted to the case. Lissa blinked open her eyes and then looked at him with a dazed and confused expression.
“Aeric?” she whispered, voice echoing hollowly inside the case.
It crossed his mind that maybe the case was spelled, or there was still some treachery afoot, but he was able to lift the glass lid with no problems.
Setting it aside, he planted his palms on his thighs. “Can you walk?”
She nodded. “I… I think so. Where am I?” She glanced around, a furry frown marring her kittenish features.
He shook his head. “C’mon, we’ll talk outside.”
“But we are outside,” she said.
It was on the tip of his tongue to deny it, but when he flicked his eyes up to point out the patrons, he was the one stunned. “What?” He stood up, and gaped at what he saw.
No longer were they inside the ramshackle bar, in fact, the bar was gone. The termite infested boards, the disintegrating porch, Walrus, Owl, Pillar, piano… all of it, all gone. They were outside and night was threatening.
Evergreen trees towered them on every side. More remarkable was that the trees didn’t appear to be anything other than just plain trees; there were no polka dots, no slithering, killing vines.
Where before he’d stood inside a massive clearing, they were now just inside a small circle of cleared ground with massive pines towering all around them like guarding sentinels.
“What is going on?” he growled. “We were just inside a bar. You were in a glass case. And there was a caterpillar woman, a jowl-faced Walrus of a man and an owl-eyed—”
Her brows dipped lower and lower, but that wasn’t what cut his words off mid-stream. Lissa had shifted again, but this time she looked very different.