by Amie Gibbons
And now I was sick for a completely different reason.
We kept walking, but Grant glanced back.
“What’s wrong?” he whispered.
Why wasn’t he using mental speech?
“What if they don’t rape each other, like it’s a crime at least, but they have no problems with raping outsiders?” I asked mentally.
Grant nodded.
I gasped.
“You’d already thought of that!”
“I insisted on coming for a reason.”
“What?” AB whispered.
I shook my head and jerked my chin up as we hit the edge of the giant gates.
They were big enough for a few cars to go in and out.
And I saw some kinda well-worn sliding tracks in the hard-packed sand from the gates to the water.
Maybe from towing boats?
“What?” AB whispered again.
I shook my head.
No need to put the thought in her head and freak her out.
I was already freaked out enough for the three of us.
Cuz if Grant was, you’d have to tell it to his face.
We walked past the door, the magic on it making the hair on my arms stand straight up.
I took a deep breath as we walked through the entrance into the city.
And it looked like a city.
We stood in a large square with cobblestones making sidewalks around the paved road going through it.
The buildings were a hodgepodge, suggesting they went up at different points in time and that these guys weren’t big on tearing down the old to make room for the new, just built around it.
There was a giant building stretching along one side of us, multiple windows and balconies saying it was apartments. It was a blazing white, kinda like the buildings in the Mediterranean. Something to do with reflecting the sun.
So this place was probably usually more hot than cold.
The buildings across from us on the square were smaller, stand-alone ones that looked like little shops you’d see in any resort town.
One had dresses hanging in the window.
There was an old woman with decorative leather bags on a blanket in front of one of the shops. She sat cross-legged, reading a paperback.
Squat buildings made of ugly grey squares, like something outta the Soviet Union sat on the other side, a harsh contrast to the glowing white, pretty buildings.
Little alleyways spun out from the square, obviously what passed for streets around here, but you wouldn’t be able to get cars or anything through them. Only one street, jutting off at an angle from the square between two of the shops, could possibly let a car through.
And the square had a garden in the middle of it.
Power boiled in the patch of earth, so strong I could see glimpses of it even through the spelled glasses.
Kids dug in the dirt, pulling weeds, I noticed after a few seconds.
One girl around ten threw a weed at one of the boys, and she shrieked and ran as he jumped up.
He chased her past us and out the gates, both yelling in some gibberish and grinning.
“Don’t know why I thought they’d speak English,” AB whispered.
I nodded.
I’d been kinda hoping that too.
And maybe some here did.
But they obviously would have their own language.
“Maybe we should’ve brought Thomas,” AB said.
I raised my eyebrows at her.
“He’s a polyglot,” she said. “Picks up languages like that.” She snapped her fingers.
“Wouldn’t help in one day,” Grant said.
I pulled the compass out of my oversized pocket. It pointed to the left, close to one of the little roads.
I put the compass back, shaking my head.
Couldn’t remember the last time I’d worn something with pockets.
It was weird.
We got a few looks as we followed Grant through the square.
One of the older kids working the garden yelled something in that gibberish.
Could’ve been directed at us for all I knew.
I couldn’t even come close to describing it or comparing it to any language on Earth.
So I went with gibberish.
Was to me anyway.
“The bomb’s not an option,” I said mentally to Grant. “At least not around here. Maybe in like their army base or something, but these are normal people, and kids, and I can’t.”
He nodded.
He’d already known that.
“Maybe they aren’t that bad, and we just get bad ones on Earth, cuz those are the ones inclined to invade. I mean, that’s how demons are. Obviously, I mean, not all humans are alike. No such thing as just good or evil. So makes sense Fae would be the same way, I mean-”
“Ryder!” Grant cut me off. “Stop babbling. I need to concentrate.”
I flinched. “On what?”
“Sensing.”
That was it?
I rolled my eyes and we hit the alleyway.
He was keeping an eye out for magic, for threats, for anything? What?
I took a deep breath as we stepped into the alley, the buildings keeping it all in shade.
My stomach flipped.
This was like walking down a street in some strange city, like Athens.
But there, I at least knew what the signs of a bad neighborhood were.
And that I could take down most humans with magic alone.
Here?
I was not among the most powerful beings around.
I probably wasn’t even average.
I did not like that.
The hair on the back of my neck and my arms stood straight up, and I focused on taking deep breaths.
The street was lined with shops and closed doors that could’ve been anything from homes to offices for all I knew.
The place wasn’t built with any logic resembling human design principles.
For one, the clashing designs would make any architect flinch.
You couldn’t have a large light pink apartment building next to what looked like a church, with its pointed roof and bell tower done in all stone. It just didn’t work.
And there wasn’t enough room between the two buildings for two people to walk side by side.
At least, not without being really thin or really cozy.
Down that alley was where the compass pointed us though.
“How big is this place?” I whispered.
“You tell us,” Grant said.
“Like… three hundred square miles. And there’s a few million here.” I shook my head. “How did I know that?”
“Magic,” AB said. “So it’s about the size of New York City. How are we going to find our way out?”
“I’m mapping it,” Grant said.
“Why is it so empty?” AB asked.
“Middle of the work day.”
“Oh, duh. Wait, it’s a Sunday.”
Grant shrugged. “Could follow different schedules. Most people are in the buildings, and all the shops are open.”
Neither of us asked how he knew that.
I walked up to the slim alley, if you could even call it that.
What was a word for a road smaller than an alley?
My heart thundered as I entered, glancing back.
Grant nodded and pushed AB lightly so she was behind me.
And he took up the back.
Of course he did.
I smiled.
At some point I’d graduated from being the person protected in the middle to the person taking point.
My hand hovered near the gun on my hip and I forced it down, only for it to come back up.
So I just let it go where it wanted.
Maybe my subconscious knew something I didn’t.
Wait, that was probably exactly it.
I was psychic.
And if anything, I was more psychic here.
I took out the compass, focusing on Shaw
n.
Flash.
The world wasn’t white like it normally went in my visions before showing me whatever, it was a pitch black so complete it made my mind want to run off.
I sucked in a breath, trying not to panic.
We were on the other side of the astral plane, or in the middle of it, since demons were on the true Other Side.
If it was white on our side, and black here, what was the demon side?
Maybe white again?
I shook my head mentally. Not important.
The world melted onto the black backdrop, slowly, like painting with flowing wax.
The vision was fuzzy and off, making me as nauseous as the Fae, and I could only process in clips.
A crowd in a square. Different than the one we’d just been in.
People in the middle. Three maybe?
They were put into locked wooden things.
Stockades.
The word came to me after a moment.
The crowd cheering like something in medieval times.
But I knew it was modern day by the clothes and the cameras snapping photos.
I pulled outta the vision and heard my knees crack as I hit the cobblestones before pain shot through me.
“Ryder!” Grant fell next to me as I bent over, holding my middle.
I shook my head, focusing on shoving my stomach down.
“Vision,” I said after the queasiness rolled away. “He’ll be in some square in a while. I think I’ll know it when I see it. But it was later in the day, close to sunset, I think. Visions here are hard.”
“How far?” Grant asked.
I shook my head. “At least a few miles. Closer to the middle of the city. But not the real middle… like the middle of some district, I guess? We’ve got a walk ahead of us. But I got the sense he’s close to that point right now, so we can follow the compass. But that’s where we’ll find him. Like it’ll take us that long to get there. Not sure how we’ll find him through the crowd.”
“Crowd?” AB asked.
I nodded. “They had a few people locked in stockades. Like somethin’ outta the Renaissance Fair, but real. And people were watching in the square, but not like all around. Most were on one side, I think.”
“We get to that square then,” Grant said. “Ariana, picture the square you saw, and think about floating the image to me.”
I looked at him but closed my eyes.
Picturing the giant square, the mismatched buildings lining it. The line of stockades in the middle, only three occupied.
People cheering.
Suggesting something was gonna happen.
My stomach flipped with the memory, but I focused on pushing the picture over to Grant, the same way I mentally spoke.
“Got it,” he said after about a minute of me thinking hard at him.
“Wow, guess my upload speed on pics is slower than words,” I said. Then snorted. “Just like with uploading online.”
AB chuckled, but it was dry and forced.
She rubbed the middle of her forehead as I stood, and I knew this place was getting to her.
Or the stress of waiting for something to pop out and attack us was.
Or both.
I hadn’t been this scared since I’d been kidnapped by a serial killer last year.
And that fear had been tempered by boredom pretty fast. Then he’d come back and I’d be terrified again. Then bored again for a lot longer.
Kinda like how vets described war.
###
We’d wandered for over three hours, stopping to rest, drinking from our water bottles, and grabbing a snack here and there, before we found the square.
The streets got more and more crowded the closer to the middle and the later in the day we got.
We could tell when the typical work day was done, cuz people walked through the streets in crowds, coming out of the buildings in trickles.
Like any work day in our world.
Except here, everyone walked or flew overhead instead of getting into their cars.
Yep, of course the Fae could fly.
Kinda made me wonder what the point of the high walls were then, but they probably had spells that stopped people from flying in over the top.
It was hard to remember this was a magical world with the glasses blocking the magic from drowning my vision.
We got a few looks here and there.
A few sneers.
Probably due to lookin’ so messed up and dirty.
We’d brushed off the sand as we dried, the air hot enough to help us out with that even in the shade, but we were still dirty and dusty and wearing grubbies.
And I knew we smelled.
Not that these creatures had any room to talk, considering how bad they smelled to me.
And there was a thought.
“You think they can smell us, sir?” I asked mentally.
“What?” Grant said.
“When my magic was up, I could smell them, and they smelled bad. Like a garbage can behind a restaurant with food spoilin’ in the sun bad. You think they can smell us, and that we smell as bad to them?”
“Possible,” he said. “No one’s bothered us yet though.”
The key word in that sentence being ‘yet.’
We walked into the square. It was already filling up enough that we had to squeeze past a few Fae, working to get toward the middle.
One big woman snapped at AB in their weird language as she shoved by.
AB ignored her.
I don’t know if she even realized the snap was directed at her.
Knowin’ how oblivious AB could be, she probably didn’t.
The woman reached out like she was gonna grab AB or something.
I was in front of her so fast even I didn’t notice me move, and I blocked her arm, staring her down.
The woman’s eyes flew wide, and I narrowed my eyes.
Channeling my best Grant glare.
Her eyes grew bigger as she whispered something in their language.
I shook my head at her.
She opened her mouth, and I reached inside her mentally before I realized what I was doing.
I grabbed onto the water running through her system.
Felt it in her body.
And pinched a blood vessel closed.
I turned and plowed through the crowd to catch up to my friends as the woman clawed at her neck and dropped in a dead faint.
I let her blood go.
We got near the front as people pushed in behind us.
Some looked as ragged as we did. Others were in suits and business casual, pretty similar to what we wore in our world.
Made me wonder how much crossover there was to make styles similar enough that we didn’t stand out.
I mean, obviously colors, patterns and exact cuts weren’t in line with what was in season right now in Nashville, but the clothing in general looked like what we’d been wearing in the western world for the last thirty years or so.
I reached for my compass.
But my hand froze as the crowd around us cheered.
The air charged.
I looked around.
What was I missing?
Grant tapped my shoulder and nodded to my right as I looked up at him.
I leaned over the barricade to see around the person blocking my view.
The three prisoners were being marched out from the building to the far right, hands shackled together in front of them. Their legs were shackled too, wide enough that they could walk, but they wouldn’t be able to run easily.
One was an older man, probably only around fifty, but a worn fifty, in filthy clothes and no shoes, the dirt and scraggly hair on his face and head making it hard to tell his features.
One was a guy around my age, with a torn long-sleeved shirt, jeans, and sneakers that looked broken in and well worn, but generally good quality. He had shaggy blond hair and a few days’ stubble, and his big brown eyes flashed as he screamed at the crowd.
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Screaming for help maybe?
He sounded too pissed for that.
Probably cursing them out for cheering for whatever was about to happen to him.
The last was a young woman, probably closer to AB’s age.
She wore a black suit skirt, a button up red top with frills, and a pearl necklace. Her dark brown hair was a giant rat’s nest, and her bare feet were dirty, but other than that, she looked clean and put together.
She held her head high, glaring at the crowd.
The cheers turned to whispers here and there.
They sounded shocked.
Whoever she was, she wasn’t supposed to be here.
I focused on her.
Knowledge slapped me across the face.
She was part of the Family.
It showed up in my head with the capital F.
She wasn’t supposed to be arrested and punished. Only commoners were given such treatment.
She’d had to have done something pretty bad to actually be held accountable for it.
I couldn’t keep the sneer off my face.
They had some kind of Feudal/Socialist system here. There were the people who were the ruling class, and the rules didn’t apply to them usually, and the rest who were the commoners, and had to take whatever punishment the rulers dealt out.
Speaking of.
Across the square, from a closed off courtyard with trees so big I couldn’t see the building behind them, three people walked out.
I could tell they were different, no extra magic needed.
They glowed with power that pierced even AB’s spell over my glasses.
Just enough for me to see, not enough to make me sick.
The three men were tall and had sharp features, all with that sorta inbred New England blue-blood look that always made me think of snotty, near English accents, while they talked about what they’d do for the little people on TV.
They wore long velvet lookin’ blue robes with random stripes and swirls of gold.
Ceremonial robes, if I had to guess.
They didn’t look like this was a particularly new thing to them, but I could tell they didn’t wear those robes often.
They served a purpose.
I could almost hear someone thinking those robes helped channel power.
Not like these creatures needed it.
They fed off the crowd.
The jewels around their necks pulled in energy.
I could only see it as it concentrated and sank into the gems, but I knew if I took the glasses off, I’d see the wisps of the power being sucked outta people going into those stones.