Storybound

by Emily Mckay

  So I do the only thing I can think of: I shove the can straight up his nose.

  I go in deep—like, elbow deep—past the spongy tip of his nose to the delicate soft tissue of his nasal cavity. He yelps, jerking his head back.

  Unfortunately, my entire arm is still in his nose. The can of pepper spray is wedged in there and, even though I’ve let go, my wrist is still attached to the strap. He shakes his head side to side and my entire body goes with him. My body slams against one of the brick walls. Blinding pain blazes through my shoulder as my arm suddenly goes limp.

  I feel the strap on the pepper spray snap, and my arm slides out of his nose. I drop to the ground with a bone-jolting thud only to have a massive paw land beside my head. I roll out of the way.

  Above me, the hellhound howls in pain and rage. Shaking his head, trying to dislodge the can of pepper spray, he backs away, growling.

  I crawl toward Master Flores. Before I reach her, she struggles into a sitting position. The hellhound looks from me to her, as if trying to decide which of us is the threat.

  She is, obviously, but I’m the one he’s after.

  He shuffles in my direction. But before he can lunge for me, a blaze of bluish-green light shoots over my head, right into the hellhound’s front haunch. It yelps, crouching low and snarling.

  I look behind me. It’s Kane, framed by the open door to The Volume Arcana.

  He’s standing, feet planted wide, the hood of his leather jacket thrown back, arm outstretched, his blackthorn blasting rod gripped in his hand.

  The hellhound bares its teeth, a low growl rumbling through its chest.

  Kane twitches the blasting rod and another burst of light shoots out from the end. Except it’s not light, it’s something else. Liquid fire infused with anger and will.

  Even together, the Curator and I were not a match for this hellhound. Kane, on the other hand, is a threat to it.

  The hellhound knows it’s beaten. But it’s still pissed off.

  In what I can only imagine is angry defiance, the hellhound snatches the Curator up in its mouth before turning clumsily and galloping off.

  Emotion surges through me. Frustration, anger, and exhaustion combine to wash away the fear that gripped me during the battle.

  I collapse onto the ground.

  Shit. My presence here has endangered everyone. The princess and the Curator have both been dragged off and I don’t understand why.

  The hellhounds must have been there for me. They are bred to track down and drag away Dark Worlders. Not Tuathan royalty and religious leaders. So what the hell just happened?

  For a second, Kane just stares down at me, his expression inscrutable. Then, he crouches, sliding his arm under my good one and helping me up.

  “Let’s get you out of here,” he says, his voice exasperated.

  I expect him to drag me back into The Volume Arcana. He doesn’t. Instead, he cups his hands in front of him.

  He mutters words I don’t understand. Then he slowly pulls his hands apart, the space between his hands swirling with energy.

  In the books, Wallace describes this as pulling a loop.

  It’s a power only Kane has. Rare, tricky, and dangerous as hell.

  He is magically stretching open a hole in space, looping this spot to another.

  When the loop is as big as a Kane-sized doorway, he once again wedges his shoulder under my arm and drags me through.

  Excerpt from

  Book Five of The Traveler Chronicles:

  The Traveler Undone

  When I got back to my apartment above The Volume Arcana, the princess was missing.

  When the Red Court hired me, the job seemed simple enough. Keep the princess safe and hidden until right before her wedding, then escort her to Saint Lew. As long as she gets there safely, I get paid a ton of money.

  So I’d stashed her in the safest place I knew of.

  And now she was gone.

  Funny thing was, my wards were still in place.

  So either she’d walked out of there on her own—unlikely, since she knew her life was in danger—or someone I knew and trusted was working for Smyth.

  Which explained how he knew about my mother’s medallion and how he got his greedy Sleeker hands on it.

  So now I need to find the princess and my mother’s medallion.

  The list of people who could have betrayed me isn’t very long.

  If I’m going to find my mother’s medallion, rescue the princess, and figure out what Smyth is up to, I’m going to need all the help I can get. Which will mean calling up every favor from everyone I’ve ever trusted.

  So yeah, I’m going to go pick a fight with my worst enemy and I’m going to do it knowing that one of the people who has my back is actually working for him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It’s dark where we land.

  I can see the night sky above me, but its milky gray color tells me there are streetlights on somewhere nearby.

  The ground beneath me is hard and rough. And it stinks. Bile pools in the back of my throat, gagging me, until I bend over at the waist, hands braced on my knees, and let it drip out of my mouth.

  Fighting my nausea, my brain works overtime to piece together all the shit that just happened, but my thoughts seem to be running around inside my head, waving their arms in panic.

  When I straighten, wiping the back of my hand across my mouth, Kane is watching.

  Which is perfect. Because who doesn’t want to wretch in front of her dream guy?

  Even though I’ve been reading about loops for years, I never thought I’d travel through one. Or that it would feel so god-awful. Which sort of makes sense. Thresholds are naturally occurring gateways and I got dizzy walking through one of those. A loop is a hole ripped into space by pure force. No wonder wedging yourself through that feels like shit.

  This alleyway is darker and creepier than the one near Book People. I know instinctively—and from my years of reading the Traveler books—that there are hundreds of ways to die in this world. Suddenly, what seemed like a great adventure earlier, now seems extraordinarily dangerous.

  Kane comes back over to me and squats so that we’re at eye level, since I’m sitting on my ass.

  “You always react this badly to a loop-jump?”

  “Can’t say that I do.” I shove my hair out of my face. “So. That was a hellhound.”

  “Yep.”

  He helps me to my feet and then reaches out a hand and places it on my dislocated shoulder.

  I wince, expecting searing pain.

  For an instant, there is pain blazing through my body. Then there’s only warmth.

  “Relax,” he mutters.

  Yeah, right. I’m in a parallel universe, where magic is real and hellhounds want to kill me. Kane is here. Touching my arm. And I’m pretty sure I had been sitting in a puddle of human piss. This is possibly the least relaxed I’ve ever been.

  Before I can quip my disdain for his suggestion, the muscles of my arm seem to melt. They loosen and stretch. He eases my arm down and away from my body. With a gentle pop, my arm sinks back into the socket.

  When he releases me, I give my shoulder a roll. It still aches, but there’s no blinding pain and I can move my arm again.

  Kane stands with a disgusted grunt, all traces of the tenderness from a moment ago now gone. “If you don’t want more attention from the barghest, you shouldn’t be walking around with an open wound.”

  My palms are scratched and tender, dotted with blood in several places. My blood.

  Right. The red blood of Dark Worlders is “tainted” with too much iron. The blood of the Tuatha is bright blue with copper. The scent of iron is how hellhounds track humans down.

  I dig through my messenger bag, but don’t find anything to bind a wound. All I have is my Leatherm
an, so I use the knife to cut off the bottom few inches of my T-shirt.

  “Why didn’t you bring me back to your loft?” I ask. “We’d be safe there.”

  He arches an eyebrow. “You think I’m going to bring a total stranger—a Dark Worlder, at that—past my wards and into my home?” He gestures to the alley in general. “This is safe enough for now. Covering that wound should buy you enough time to open another threshold into your world.”

  “You know,” I mutter, as I fold the knife closed on my knee and drop it back into my purse. “I thought you’d be nicer.”

  “You think I should be nice?” he asks in obvious disbelief. “After all the trouble you’ve caused me?”

  “Well nicer.” I hold the fabric to my palm with my thumb and start wrapping the strip of cloth around it.

  “Look, we gotta get out of here,” he says. “That hellhound might come back. Can you open a threshold or not?”

  It takes me a few seconds to realize the “we” in that sentence didn’t mean him and me together.

  “You can’t leave without me.”

  “I already saved your ass once, Cupcake. Why should I do it again?”

  “I don’t need you to save me.” Strictly speaking, this is probably a lie. But I run with it. “The Curator brought me to you because you need me. I can help you,” I say, stumbling along behind him. “You need an Untethered Sleeker to help you find the lost Oidrhe.”

  Kane’s steps slow, so I keep talking. Trying to remember the things Master Flores said. “If you can’t find the lost Oidrhe, all you hold dear is at risk. If Smyth—”

  Kane goes rigid. Then slowly he turns around. “What did you say?”

  “Um…” Clearly, something very wrong. “All you hold dear is at risk?”

  “After that.”

  “Smyth?”

  His gaze goes thunderously dark. “Do you work for Smyth?”

  “No! I’m a Dark Worlder.” I wave my hastily bandaged hand. “My blood is red. Remember?”

  “But you are Sleeker bred.” His gaze is still narrowed with suspicion.

  “I don’t know. My parents were from Indiana, which I don’t think is a hotbed of Sleeker immigration. But the Curator swears I am. There’s a fan theory that the barrier between worlds was more fluid before the Iron Age and that the Tuatha used to intermingle and sometimes even marry Dark Worlders. So that certain isolated populations throughout the world have a concentration of recessive Tuatha DNA.”

  I break off abruptly. I’m rambling. And clearly, it’s not helping.

  I take another step forward. “I don’t work for Smyth. I promise. I don’t know if I have Sleeker blood or how to use my Sleeker powers if I do.” He’s so tall, I have to tip my head back to look at him. “But I promise I will help you.”

  There’s this crazy moment when he looks into my eyes. Like, deep into my eyes. Like he’s trying to read my very soul.

  And suddenly, I’m painfully aware that this is Kane.

  Kane the Traveler. Kane the warrior. The misunderstood and mistreated hero that I’ve loved from page one of that first book.

  I feel myself sway toward him. Is this the real reason I’m here? For him?

  Did his…I don’t know, his gravitational pull, or something…actually pull me across the universe for this very moment? Because that’s what it feels like. Like my connection to him is so strong, it could cross any distance.

  But then he jerks me toward him and slams me into the wall jamming his forearm up under my jaw.

  “What the hell?” I gasp.

  His mouth twists into a snarl. “Here’s what I don’t get, Cupcake.” He says the words with deadly gentleness. “Why would Smyth send you? Why would Smyth send an assassin so weak, she’s never even loop-jumped? Why would Smyth send someone who doesn’t know a hellhound when she sees one? Unless Smyth is smart enough to send one hell of an actress.”

  My vision is blurring to black at the edges. I can’t breathe. My legs flail, kicking uselessly as panic eats through the part of my brain that should know how to break out of this hold.

  I summon the last of my strength to swing my legs up to wrap around his waist. I hook my feet behind his back and leverage my weight against him. He drops me before I can do any more.

  I fall hard on my back and instantly roll back onto my feet.

  “You could have killed me.”

  “Exactly.” His mouth twists wryly. “And if you had even a drop of magical power, you would have fought back. So maybe Smyth didn’t send you.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. The Curator brought me to you.”

  “Like I’m supposed to trust that old fool.”

  He gives his arm a shake and the blackthorn blasting rod that he stores up the sleeve of his jacket drops into his hand. It’s a sixteen-inch wand of supple wood used to focus Kane’s powers. He also has a three-inch steel blade bound to the side. It’s deadly even if he doesn’t use magic. He whips it up and presses the side of the blade to my neck.

  “Who are you?” he asks.

  The metal of the blade is warm against my skin, maybe from the pulse of magic coursing through the blackthorn. Maybe from being stored inside his jacket, against his arm.

  Part of my brain is ticking through my self-defense moves. If it was just a knife, I could disarm him and escape. But it’s not just a knife.

  I saw what he did to those hellhounds. He can kill me with a single blast. Besides, I don’t need to escape. I need him to trust me.

  I tip up my chin and meet his gaze. “I’m Edie.”

  He stares at me for what seems like forever. His eyes are hard and icy, despite his warm brown irises. There is no softness in him at all.

  “Smyth is just using you.” Kane pulls the blade about an inch away from my neck and gives me the stink eye. “And if he thinks I’ll be distracted by your beauty, he’s wrong.”

  “My beauty? Wait. What?”

  He thinks I’m beautiful?

  Kane presses the blade to my throat again.

  Okay. Bigger problems. I should focus on those.

  “He sent you here to fight me,” he says, his voice cold. “And he didn’t even tell you who I am.”

  “I know your name.” I should keep my mouth shut, but I don’t. “You’re Wesley Kane. You go by the name Kane the Traveler. You’ve been hired by the Red Court to rescue Princess Merianna.”

  “Wrong again. I am Kane Travers. And I never work for the government.”

  He spins the blasting rod in his hand and touches the blunt tip to my temple. Then the world goes black.

  Excerpt from

  Book Five of The Traveler Chronicles:

  The Traveler Undone

  If someone has enough money to hire me, they probably either robbed someone, oppressed someone, or cheated someone to get it. Or they inherited it from generations of people who did that. Or worse.

  No one gets a lot of money without taking it from someone else.

  Now, to be fair, when I say no one, I’m including myself. I take from a lot of people. But what do you expect? That’s what all thieves do. I’m just honest about the cheating I do.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  When I wake up, I’m in a cage.

  It’s the same frickin’ crate the princess was in earlier. My muscles hurt, I’m still a little nauseated from loop-jumping, and every bare inch of skin has the impression of the cage waffled into it. The cage isn’t big enough for me to lie flat in, so whoever shoved me in here—spoiler alert: I’m guessing it was Kane—just wedged me in.

  I still have my messenger bag, so there’s that.

  Also, on the plus side, the cage isn’t in the stinky warehouse on the second floor. It’s in the middle of Kane’s darkened living room. At least, I think that’s where I am.

  In the first book, A T
raveler Arrives, Kane wins a warehouse, in a shitty part of downtown, in a poker game. He rents the first two floors to The Volume Arcana, does business out of an office on the third floor, and lives on the fourth. As Wallace describes it, it’s a dingy shithole with mismatched furniture and bad lighting. Wallace was being generous.

  Something that passes for a galley kitchen sits at one end. There are a couple of threadbare chairs and some bookshelves. Then there’s a vast stretch of emptiness surrounding my cage. As soon as my head clears, I look for a way out.

  There wasn’t a lock on it when the princess was in it, but he’s added a nice big padlock. Of course.

  I sit up, groaning.

  If the Curator is right, I’m the only person who can find the lost Oidrhe. Right now, I’m so disappointed in the real Kane that I will happily go off and find some other lost Oidrhe to take his place.

  For the moment, I’m not letting myself think about the fact that Kane the Traveler—my book boyfriend—is possibly a psychopath who locks women up in his living room. I mean, he does think I’m an enemy assassin. So possibly that counts as a good reason.

  I wind my fingers through the links of the cage and I pull back my legs and ram them against the door to the cage.

  It gives only a fraction of an inch, and the clang of metal against metal rings in my ears. I do it again anyway. And then again. Someone has to hear me.

  The fourth time I slam my feet against the cage door, I hear a door open and a light flicks on from the shadows behind me.

  I whirl around to see Kane standing in a doorway, backlit by the light in the other room. “Knock it off.”

  I twist around so I’m facing him. I kick the wall of the cage. “You want me to stop making noise? Let me out of this goddamn cage,” I nearly scream in frustration. Instead, I just yell at him. “What the hell is wrong with you?” My voice cracks with what sounds suspiciously like despair. He is not going to make me cry. I push as much anger and snark into my voice as it will carry. “Is this some kind of sick joke? Or are you actually a serial killer?”