And God, it sucked—literally. I felt like I was about to be wrenched in two, the forces inside the portal far worse than the storm outside. It felt like my flesh was being torn from my bones, like I was about to be turned inside out, like I was coming apart at the seams.
Felt like freedom, I thought, gasping and sobbing as my power flowed around me, as the storm bands of the spell dissipated, as I shot out of the great maw and realized one absolute, inescapable fact.
I was still falling.
Shit!
I shifted—somehow—with no real destination in mind except down. Which my power interpreted as several feet above the ground and on an incline. One I promptly smashed into with my face.
And then rolled down, hitting every rock and stick along the way, before finally coming to rest inside a small copse of oaks.
For a moment, I just lay there, staring at the wildly thrashing treetops. Lightning flashed, rain poured, presumably thunder crashed, but I couldn’t hear it—my ears were seriously screwed up. Something to do with the awful pressure in that portal, which had left me looking at a scene out of a silent horror flick. All it needed was a guy in a cape.
Or a monster in a tree.
My ears popped after a moment, allowing me to hear the vulgar cussing going on somewhere nearby. Which broke off abruptly—I guessed because I’d just been spotted. “Well?” a furious voice squeaked. “Are you just going to leave me up here?”
I looked around and saw Rosier wedged in between two tree branches, glaring down at me. It looked like demon lords were sturdier than I’d thought. And then he started cussing again, fluidly, impressively, in a multitude of tongues, at Gertie, at the world, at me—
“Why . . . are you mad . . . at me?” I finally asked, when I could speak.
“You didn’t let her go!”
“What?” I stared up at him.
“The girl! I told you to let her go!”
“And then what? Gertie would have—”
“Transferred her attention to you!”
“Her attention . . . was already . . . on me,” I said, wondering what I was missing. “Did you hit your head?”
“Her attention was half on you and half on me. I needed her distracted—”
“For what?”
“For this!” And he held something out in his tiny fist.
Something that dropped at my side a second later, small and shiny and looking a lot like—
“A dart?” I picked it up.
“She wasn’t planning to kill you,” he told me, heatedly. “She was planning—”
“To drug me.” My fist closed over the small thing, and my head jerked up.
“I managed to lift it off her in the chaos,” he continued while I got shakily to my feet. “But I wasn’t close enough to use it and she had me by the back of the neck, like a misbehaving kitten! If you had listened—”
“I thought you were panicking.”
“I don’t panic.”
I looked back at him.
“I rarely panic. You need to learn some trust—”
“It wasn’t about the trust—it was about the crazy.”
“Sometimes you have to get a little crazy!”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, locating a break in the treetops. And staring upward at a sky boiling with clouds, at a rainstorm pelting down, at a smothered moon hiding the insanity until a burst of lightning flashed, just outside the range of my spell. And illuminated an upturned wagon suspended impossibly in the air above us.
With its rider still in residence, because, like me, she’d just performed a major spell.
And she was tired.
“Wait here,” I told Rosier.
“What? Why?”
“I have to get closer.”
“Closer? What do you mean, clos—” He looked up. And then back at me, his eyes going huge. “Are you insane?”
“You’re the one who told me to get crazy,” I reminded him, trying to gauge the distance.
“I take it back!”
“Just stay out of sight,” I said, a little harsher than necessary because the wagon was even higher than I’d thought. Gertie looked like a tiny doll, the horses like children’s toys, the floating contents of the cage hidden by curtains of rain and almost indistinct.
But shifting her to me—definitely my first choice—wasn’t going to work. Unlike shifting myself, that sort of thing wasn’t instantaneous. It had taken me several seconds to latch on to the hound; if it took me that long with Gertie, and she felt it—
I’d lose the element of surprise, and it was the only advantage I had.
I took a breath and shifted.
Spatial shifts are usually easy compared to time travel. Like walking up a few steps instead of thirty flights—or a couple hundred in the case of Wales. But they also aren’t usually done in almost pitch-darkness. Or aimed at a target that looked smaller than my palm. Or was wet and slippery and not entirely level.
Make that not level at all, I thought, rematerializing along with a burst of lightning on the rain-slick wagon top. The flash was all but blinding, and close enough to lift strands of my hair and make me jump. And to explain why Gertie didn’t immediately notice me.
Until I lost my footing and slid straight into her.
She fell, hitting down hard and sliding herself—into the hole she’d made in the roof to try to dart me. And it looked like I’d been right; she didn’t totally fit. But halfway was good enough, because she got stuck, which would have been perfect if the wagon hadn’t tipped and careened around from the shift in weight. And if I hadn’t been forced to grab an axle to hold on to. And if she hadn’t started slinging spells everywhere.
And if we hadn’t started to fall.
“Son of a bitch!” I yelled, feeling my time spell start to unravel.
Lightning flashed, this time close enough for a small branch to get stuck in the bubble of slow time. It spread weird, neon light around as we began to tumble head over heels—or wheels over cage. And the fact that we were moving at only a fraction of regular speed didn’t help, because that wouldn’t be true for long.
And then the axle I was clinging to burst into dust.
The spell Gertie had flung missed my head, but left me with nothing to hold on to, and we were about to go over again. So I threw myself at her, grabbing her around the neck, trying to keep her from cursing me out of existence. And because she was the only thing I could reach.
But she didn’t seem to like that, and a fist immediately started hitting the side of my head. “Get off me! Get off!”
But I couldn’t get off, frizzy purple hair in my mouth or not, budding concussion or not, cursing bitch or not. Because I still had to get the dart into her. And because we were Ferris-wheeling around again. And because Gertie’s butt wasn’t as big as I’d thought and was about to come out of the hole.
“Damn it!”
I grabbed her hair, pulled her head to the side, and slammed the dart into her neck less than gently—
And the next moment we were in free fall.