I cocked an eyebrow and fended off a smile. “Is that so?”
“I have a foreign creature wrapped around my heart to keep it warm and beating. It was either Dragonheart or The Faculty.”
“Wouldn’t that make me Sean Connery?”
“You said it, not me,” Max quipped.
I wanted to laugh, but the realization that Max might have a point made the whole situation far less humorous than I’d have liked. Was it possible the brujo was right? Could the fire elemental keep him alive, indefinitely? And, if so, did that mean we’d be stuck together forever? I shuddered at the possibility.
“Are you cold?”
“Seriously, doesn’t this worry ye?” I asked, gesturing back and forth between us. “The bond, I mean, and this t’ing between us.”
“This thing?” Max echoed.
“Ye know, this insane attraction...” I clamped my mouth shut, my cheeks burning. Jesus, what if he didn’t feel it? Too late, I realized that I’d never thought to ask if he craved my touch the way I did his.
“Your face,” Max said, grinning. “Of course I feel it. But I felt this way about you before, when we first met, so it is hard for me to know how much is metaphysical and how much is simply...physical.”
The way the brujo said that last word sent a flare of sizzling anticipation through me, and it seemed I wasn’t the only one; the barest embers danced along his exposed skin, writhing along the swells of his body. Out of curiosity, I closed my eyes and expanded my other senses the way I had with Gretel earlier that morning. The instant I did, however, it was as though dozens of tiny needles were pressing against every square inch of me. It wasn’t painful but wasn’t entirely pleasant either—as if my brain couldn’t make up its mind whether to enjoy what was happening or loathe it. Regardless, I couldn’t place the sensation. The powerful scent riding the air, however, was much more familiar. Tobacco. Not the stale odor of club clothes saturated in cigarette smoke, but the spicy, full-bodied bouquet of smoldering Corojo leaves.
Unable to handle the skin-prickling sensation any longer, I opened my eyes. And that’s when I saw it for myself: the Salamander. The elemental didn’t curl around so much as clutch at Max’s heart, its reptilian body wound around the organ’s bulbous mass, its clawed hands and feet snared along the various valves like some infernal gargoyle welded to a cathedral spire. When at last I got to its head, I found the Salamander staring at me with blazing white eyes nestled in a face that glowed like heat-treated metal. An absurdly long tongue of pure flame wriggled out from its scaled lips, and then—I would have sworn—it winked at me.
“Quinn?”
I forced myself to stop staring at the creature before it did anything I would regret—like come leaping out of Max’s chest in some perverse rendition of Alien. Instead, I took a few deep breaths and let my pulse return to normal.
“Sorry,” I said, breathily, “what was it ye were sayin’?”
“I was asking you when you were planning to leave,” Max replied, sounding concerned. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. And as soon as possible, actually. Your sister tells me I have a little over a week before this Hex Moon hits, and I’d really like to be back before it does.”
“You think you will be able to make it to Branson and back that fast?”
“Camila told ye I was goin’ to Branson?”
“Petal told me. Though she did not say why.”
“It’s a business trip. Sort of. I have to track down an old friend and pass along a message. Worse, I’m on the clock. Which means the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can get back here.” I waved the phone. “I was going to see about rentin’ a car, provided I can sort t’ings out with me bank. And track down me license.”
“That sounds like it could take a while.”
“Aye,” I admitted, sighing. “I’d prefer to fly, but without a passport that’s a non-starter. Besides, I’m a bit of a nightmare to be around once the sun sets. Even with the sleepin’ potion Circe gave me, I’d be puttin’ too many people at risk.”
Max paused for a second, then headed for the door, beckoning. “Follow me but leave Camila’s phone. I do not think you will need it.”
“Huh?”
“Hurry up.”
“Max, I’m sorry, but I really need to get this mess sorted. I can’t just go off—”
Except Max was already through the door. He’d left it open, which meant I was able to make out a couple of Faeling bystanders peering from the windows across the street. I wavered for perhaps a solid minute before cursing and clambering to my feet. Then, for reasons I couldn’t entirely articulate, I tossed the cell phone on the couch and went after the brujo.
At first, the alleyway seemed deserted. Overhead, the pastel sky continued to spin and whirl like some glorious art installation. But then I caught the sound of footsteps and saw Max’s broad shoulders at the far end of the street. I jogged after him, waving.
“Oy! Slow down!”
“This way!” he called.
“What is it ye want to show me, exactly?”
Max turned a corner without answering, disappearing into a shadowed recess I hadn’t noticed when I first walked down the alley. By the time I caught up to him on the other side of that dark corridor, however, there was no need for a reply: I had my answer.
It was a Jeep. Thick-bodied with matte black fixtures and a burnt orange paint job, the sporty four-door Wrangler sat in the middle of the enclosure on bulky rubber tires that poked out from the undercarriage and went up to my knees. A fifth was mounted on the back beneath a hard-plastic cover rimmed in stainless steel. All in all, she was a beauty. How they’d managed to park her here, of course, was a mystery—though hardly the biggest I’d encountered today.
“So, what do you think?” Max asked, his voice cutting through the stunned silence. A set of keys dangled from his hand. “Road trip?”
“Are messin’ with me, right now?” I gaped at him. “Is this even your Jeep?”
“Sí, she is mine.” Max walked around to the passenger side, manually unlocked the door, and held it open. “I bought her outright with cash, so the bank never came to collect. Hop in.”
“Hold on, ye meant now?”
“You said you were in a hurry. The sooner we leave, the sooner we can return. Besides, this will make things easier for Camila. No matter what she has done for them, the Fae will always choose to follow one of their own if given a choice. With you gone, they will have no reason to question her judgment. And with me gone, she will have no reason to question her own.”
I shuffled from side to side, more than a little hesitant to jump at Max’s generous offer. Honestly, I’d intended to make the journey alone; letting someone crash my reunion seemed like an unnecessary complication. Still, the brujo’s logic was sound.
“Tell me, when d’ye get so smart?” I asked.
Max barked a laugh.
“I’m bein’ serious.”
“Are you saying you thought I was just a pretty face?”
“That’s not what I meant,” I countered, smirking. “Smart was the wrong word. Insightful would be a better term for it. I mean, first ye talk to me about Maria like you’re her therapist, and now you’re hittin’ me with incisive reasons to leave town that I hadn’t even considered, yet.”
The laughter in Max’s eyes died away, leaving them cool and calculating. “Remember when I told you about how I could see spells?”
“Aye. Ye said ye knew how they worked.”
“I can do that with people, too. It is not as precise, but I can sometimes pick up on what they are feeling. It is intuitive, I think. Like a seventh sense.”
“Ye mean a sixth sense?”
“That I have, already. It is what makes me a brujo.”
I waited to see if Max was messing with me, but—deep down—I could see that he wasn’t. Of course, it was also clear he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the fact that he’d died and come back as a human barometer; the brujo
had turned to study the car’s interior rather than meet my gaze. In a way, he and I shared that discomfort. It seemed I was constantly evolving, and rarely by choice. Perhaps that’s why, rather than delaying further, I walked over and slipped into the passenger seat.
“You’ll have to drive,” I insisted as he went to shut the door.
“It is my Jeep,” he replied. “I was planning to drive, anyway.”
“I meant you’ll have to drive through the night. Can ye handle that? The sun sets in a couple hours, and I have to be passed out when it does.”
Max’s brow furrowed in confusion.
“Sleep,” I explained. “It’s all that keeps me inner goddess from makin’ a guest appearance, and I have no idea how she’ll react to this strange new world.”
“Should I be worried?”
“No, not if I take this.” I fetched a slim tube fashioned from carved bone from the inner lining of my jacket. “Circe made it for me. Tastes awful, but it’s plenty potent. So long as ye drive safe and be sure not to wake me up in the middle of the night, it shouldn’t be a problem. Once the sun is up, I’ll take over. We can do it in shifts.”
“Tell me, how would you have done this on your own, exactly?”
“With great difficulty,” I acknowledged, cagily.
“Uh huh,” the brujo drawled. “Buckle up.”
Chapter 15
Most dreams are fragmented things brimming with implausibilities that, for reasons we cannot explain upon waking, make perfect sense within the context of the dream. Absurdities like having a clock for a pillow or kissing a stranger with your best friend’s face or being you and also not you, simultaneously. Dreams are strange, occasionally senseless, and often hazy.
Except, of course, when they are none of those things.
This dream was like that. It was vibrant and linear and so real it felt like I’d stepped over a threshold into yet another realm. Except I hadn’t, because I couldn’t move; I stood rooted at the base of a hill so steep it nearly blotted out the sky. Beyond, pale light pulsed against storm clouds that roiled and churned at alarming speeds. I could see figures among them—shapes that could have been women, or men, or even animals. A few had sinister aspects, their edges jagged and forked. Others were little more than formless silhouettes, as if they couldn’t decide what they wanted to be. Each and every one of them, however, had one thing in common: they were waiting for something, or someone.
Tension rode the very air.
The instant I recognized that feeling, I realized I was not alone. Someone stood beside me—a presence, only. Though I couldn’t turn to look, I experienced a distinct impression of familiarity. A sense that I knew this person, whoever he was. Knew him well enough, in fact, to picture what I would see if I turned.
He’d be a young man, about my height, his body hidden beneath a scarlet cloak that emphasized the russet undertones in honey blonde hair which would have been shoulder-length had it not been so coarse. Instead, it rippled outwards to form a mane around a pale, angular face dusted with freckles and dimpled at both cheeks. Though I recalled them best of all his features, his eyes came last: pale green and rimmed in gold, they were so like our mother’s that it sometimes hurt to see them in someone else’s face.
My brother spoke, and still I couldn’t turn.
“The stone must scream for you.”
A hand drifted into view. His hand—delicate and long-fingered—pointing to the hill. No, not to the hill, I realized, but to the rock formation which stood on top of it. I squinted until I could make out the exact shape of the tor; thick slabs of cragged stone emerged to form a crude throne garlanded in thick vines and patches of moss. Except, the longer I stared at it, the more I realized there was nothing crude about it. Instead, it struck me that this ancient seat was, in many ways, what a throne should look like. What all thrones aspire to be. Indeed, the sight of it stirred something within me—a wistfulness I’d never before experienced. And, with it, a sense of profound loss.
That delicate hand settled on my shoulder and squeezed as though its owner understood what I was feeling. Then, so gently I didn’t even realize it was happening at first, he turned me until I could see his face.
Or what was left of it.
I stifled a scream at the sight of his hairless scalp and the grisly bone peeking out from beneath his rotting cheeks. His eye sockets gaped like empty pits, staring at nothing. He was dead—not undead, but truly dead. I wasn’t certain how I knew that, but I did.
His voice when he spoke again was a ghost’s voice, haunting me with its fervor...not to mention the fact that the lipless mouth never moved. “The stone must scream for you. Or all is lost, and I died for nothing.”
Chapter 16
I woke with my pulse in my throat and Max’s head in my lap. The brujo stirred but somehow slept right through both my harried breathing and the incessant creaking of the leather seat. Frankly, I couldn’t tell you how long it was before I was able to think past the fear. All I knew for certain was that, by the time I could, the sun was cresting between distant hills steeped in shadow and wreathed in fog—a panorama only partially obscured by the condensation on the windshield. By comparison, the view from the rear window was much clearer; majestic evergreens hemmed the two-lane highway we’d pulled off of, the road snaking across the rolling countryside like a ribbon of stone.
In a way, it felt like I’d woken to a landscape as alien to me as the one I’d encountered in my dream; when I’d crawled into the backseat to crash just before sunset, we’d been surrounded by Connecticut's lush vegetation—a stark contrast to this much more temperate climate. Which of course begged the question: where were we?
Part of me considered waking Max and asking, but another part relished the silence. It gave me time to think and replay the dream in my head before I forgot it all. Of course, it quickly became apparent that wasn’t going to happen; I could recall the whole thing as though it had been seared into my mind—the hill, the figures in the clouds, the throne of stone. And, of course, the dead man’s face.
My brother’s face.
Well, not my brother, obviously. But the brother of whomever I’d been in the dream. I shuddered, wishing I knew whether what I’d seen was real or a byproduct of Circe’s potion. She had warned me about its potency, even going so far as to say no ordinary human could wake from it. Problem was, it hadn’t felt like the sort of lucid dreams you can get on painkillers. It’d felt, well...prophetic.
“The stone must scream…” I muttered under my breath, trying to pry meaning from the senseless phrase.
Max twitched, awoken by the sound of another car blasting by us. He groaned as he sat up, one hand pressed to the small of his back, clearly pained after having passed out at such an awkward angle. I could sympathize; my neck and shoulders ached, plus it seemed my right leg had fallen asleep where the brujo’s head had been. Pins and needles began dancing up my thigh as I unclipped my seatbelt and adjusted my weight.
“How far d’ye get before ye had to stop?” I asked through clenched teeth as I reached over the seat to snag a plastic water bottle from the cup holder. My mouth was uncomfortably dry—another unfortunate side effect of Circe’s sleeping potion, I gathered.
“Branson should be seven miles that way, give or take,” Max replied, groggily.
“How is that even possible? It’s been, what, twelve hours since I passed out?” I gaped at the brujo. “Wait, I didn’t sleep through two whole nights, did I?!”
Max grunted a laugh. “No, just the one night.”
“Then that makes no sense. How did we get here so fast? It should’ve taken most of today, even without ye stoppin’.”
“You did say you were in a hurry.”
“I was! I mean, I am. But that still doesn’t explain how this happened.”
“You may not know this about me, but I have always had a thing for fast cars.” Max let his head fall back and closed his eyes as though he planned to go back to sleep. “When I was a
niño, I used to sneak out of our abuela’s house on Friday nights and go with my cousin to watch the street races that took place on the outskirts of town. Have you ever been to Florida? Well, one thing you notice as soon as you get there is how flat it is. Most people do not know it, but Florida is actually the flattest state in the country.”
“What’s that got to—”
“There are whole swathes of Florida,” Max interrupted, “where there are no palm trees, or golf courses, or beachfront apartments. There, the horizon is sometimes so empty it feels like you are standing on an ocean made of grass. And that is where the street racers meet, because the flatter the terrain, the straighter the road. And the straighter the road, the faster you can drive.”
“Oh?” I found myself drawn in by the anecdote, dimly aware that I’d learned more about Max in the last few minutes than I’d found out in all the time I’d known him. “And what does any of that have to do with how we got here hours ahead of schedule?”
“When I finally got together enough money to buy a car,” Max continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “I itched to do what I had seen those street racers do. I wanted to peel out and press the accelerator down until the frame shook. But the roads on the east coast are winding, and traffic is never light. So, instead, I bought this Jeep.”
“So, I guess I’m goin’ to hear this story whether I like it or not, huh?” I muttered.
“At first, I will admit I was disappointed. Not so much about the Jeep as what it represented: that neither of us were going to be able to go home anytime soon. Camila must have noticed, though, because she quickly came up with a clever solution. A few of them, actually. She modified a displacement spell to straighten the roads as I drove them, as well as a compulsion spell to repel the other drivers. Oh, and a hex to remain invisible to cameras and radar, so the police cannot ticket us.”
“Seriously?” I asked, astounded at his sister’s creative use of magic. But then, he’d told me how gifted his sister was from the beginning.
Moonshine: Phantom Queen Book 11—A Temple Verse Series (The Phantom Queen Diaries) Page 11