If this kept up much longer, she’d go deaf before the fae had a chance to answer her questions.
At least they didn’t come across any other magicals or whatever passed for lifeforms in this place. Not like Jessica had any idea how to actually identify those lifeforms. It was easy on Earth. If something walked and talked and breathed—if it grew green leaves or responded to stimuli—it was alive.
For all she knew, their enemies were part of the storm. She could be breathing them into her own body right now like all the dust she’d pulled into her lungs when they’d landed here.
If she hadn’t been so focused on maintaining Leandras’ rapid pace across the wasteland, she would have stopped to see if she felt any different. But his dose of spellcast energy-bomb still hadn’t faded, and Jessica had absolutely no idea what she felt now.
Her pounding heart. Her searing lungs. Her own shoes around her feet as she ran across dry earth and scattered pebbles despite what looked like someone else’s leather riding boots rising halfway up her calves.
She couldn’t let herself feel anything else, especially not the fear and doubt that would have crippled her if she had the time to fully explore them.
Leandras pulled up suddenly, staggering forward across the loose earth with a hiss. Jessica stepped around him just in time to avoid crashing into his back, her gaze darting across the vast expanse to find what had made him stop.
“Did you see—” The ground gave way beneath her next step, crumbling into nothingness beneath her. The world tilted backward and jerked to a stop before Jessica would have tumbled over the side of the jagged cliff to certain death miles below. Even certain death for a vestrohím.
Which made it an idiot’s death.
Her stomach lurched beneath a heavy wave of vertigo, then Leandras hauled her back from the edge and clutched her against him.
Her breath escaped her in short bursts. For a moment, she thought her knees would buckle, but they held. Then again, it could’ve been nothing more than the fae’s arms wrapped tightly around her from behind that kept her standing.
Jessica had to try twice to swallow, feeling his chest rise and fall against her back. “I...”
“If I’d known this was here, I would have given a warning,” he muttered in her ear. “Are you all right?”
“Well.” She puffed out a sigh and couldn’t stop herself from staring at the seemingly bottomless chasm dropping away mere feet in front of them. “I’m not dead yet, so that’s a start.”
He released her, and they both stepped warily away from the edge of the cliff. Leandras glared at the long line of jagged earth stretching out for miles on either side. “We’ll find somewhere with safe passage down.”
“Safe passage?” Jessica dipped her head and widened her eyes in disbelief. “As in climb down there?”
“I don’t expect you to have a better idea.”
“Yeah, how about around?”
“Lower your voice,” he growled through clenched teeth. “We’re still not safe out here.”
“We’re not any safer scaling this cliff,” she whispered harshly. “I can run if I have to, but I don’t do rock-climbing.”
“Jessica.” He slowly lifted his head, studying the blackened sky.
“No, I’m serious. If there’s a giant sinkhole where you don’t remember it, it has to end eventually—”
“Get down.” Leandras leapt toward her and hauled her to the ground.
A painful jolt went through her ankle and hip when she hit the dirt, even with the fae man’s legs halfway cushioning her landing. “What—”
He clamped a hand over her mouth and brought his lips so close to her ear, he barely had to whisper. “Lie perfectly still.”
Her breath quickened through her nose as she gazed all around, her view limited by lying on her back, halfway propped against Leandras’ chest with her legs splayed out in front of her on the dirt. It was the least comfortable position, but comfort went right out the window when a massive shadow snuck across the barren earth toward them, rippling where it fell away over the edge of the crumbling cliff.
Slowly, Jessica lifted her gaze, making sure to heed his warning and only move her eyes.
A giant, bloated mound of darkness had descended from the never-ending storm that made up the sky. She couldn’t make out the details without moving, but she quickly realized she didn’t have to; the mass drifted away from them, casting its shadow across them both until it reached the edge of the chasm and descended farther.
The thing’s surface was a mix of hard, glinting black shell and a softer, porous membrane that shuddered in small pockets. Those also glistened in the muted green light of the sky, and Jessica was sure that if she reached out to touch the thing, it would feel like running her fingers along a toad fresh out of an algae-slimed lake.
She could have reached out to touch it, though wanting to was out of the question.
A larger ripple of movement shuddered across the bloated outer membrane, and with it came a puff of hot, rancid air through gelatinous slats opening below a thicker piece of black shell. Like an air vent.
Or gills.
If Jessica hadn’t already put two and two together that this floating stink bomb was a living creature, the four eyes the size of her head opening along the membrane definitely would have done the trick. They blinked with a wet, sucking click, as if the thing had just woken up from a long, deep sleep and now tried to orient itself.
She tensed as the closest eye facing her and Leandras rolled in its socket, revealing nothing but swirling whiteness.
That better mean the thing was blind, or they were screwed.
The grotesque balloon-creature sank slowly beneath the edge of the cliff, blasting off another puff of nauseating fumes through its gills or nostrils or whatever the hell they were. The gusts of air cracked against the wall of the cliff, sending up puffs of dirt as loose rocks fell beneath the force and toppled end over end into the chasm, clacking against the cliff face.
Leandras held her there against him for another thirty seconds until the creature’s huffing breaths were drowned out in the silence between thunderclaps. Then he tapped her shoulder, and she immediately rolled off of him before jumping to her feet. The fae man stood quickly and ran a hand through his dust-coated hair as he glanced at the sky.
“What was that thing?” she whispered.
“I haven’t the slightest.” He nodded for her to follow him along the edge of the chasm, though now he walked three feet from the edge to avoid disturbing the ground any further.
“I’m not buying it,” Jessica said softly as she caught up to his side. She didn’t feel even a little guilty for letting him walk between her and the sharp drop. “You knew exactly what that was.”
“I know what it used to be,” he admitted, scrutinizing the landscape around them and now adding an occasional glance at the storm clouds overhead for good measure. “It seems the sentinels have changed as much as the rest of my home.”
“Sentinels. Like some kinda floating guard dog that comes out of the sky?”
Leandras nodded curtly. “Once deployed by the Laenmúr for sending messages. On rare occasions, they offered...tactical assistance. They’ve clearly been repurposed.”
“To do what?”
As if the gaseous sentinel had been waiting for her question, a shrieking cry rose from the bottom of the chasm beside them. Whether it was a scream of terror from another magical or some kind of animal in this world was anyone’s guess, but it hardly mattered who or what the victim was. The curdling shriek cut off abruptly, followed by a series of crunches and wet smacks that had no problem echoing their way up over the lip of the cliff.
Jessica stopped dead in her tracks and turned toward the sound, her eyes wide.
Leandras only turned toward her and gestured over the drop with a small wave of his hand, which he somehow still found necessary. “That.”
Her mouth worked soundlessly as she tried to fit all those gruesome pie
ces together, hoping even more now that the cry had come from some Xahar’áhsh beast and not someone like her—someone who had absolutely no idea what they were doing in this world.
“We need to keep moving,” Leandras muttered. “Look for dips in the cliff’s edge. Anything sloping at an angle that isn’t straight down.”
“Yeah.” She swallowed. “I didn’t need that warning to stay away for the edge, but thanks anyway, I guess.”
“We won’t be staying away from it.” The fae man gazed into the roiling sky again a second before another thunderclap blistered through the air. The echo of it so close to the chasm sounded like three separate bursts of the same crack all at once. When the sound faded, Leandras dipped his head to meet Jessica’s gaze with stern resolve. “We’ll be climbing down it.”
“Are you insane?”
“I imagine everyone here most likely is at this point.” He turned away from her and kept moving along the cliff’s edge. “Hopefully, I’ve spent enough time in your world not to be afflicted nearly as much.”
Jessica blinked rapidly, then hurried to catch up with him. “Hey. I thought I was going on this nightmare walkabout with the Laen’aroth, not the Mad Hatter.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know— Shit. Forget it. I’m not climbing down into the pit of despair with you, Leandras. So find another way.”
“There is no other way.”
“Why not?”
“Because the first item I left here to retrieve was a mile that way.” He pointed out into the gaping chasm again without looking away from his diligent search for a safe path down. “That was before this...sinkhole, as so you so aptly put it, formed itself in my path. Be that as it may, the Madraqór is down there now. So that is where we go next.”
Gritting her teeth, Jessica glared at the back of Leandras’ head as he kept moving around the perimeter. “Any chance we can find one somewhere with fewer flesh-eating balloon-monsters?”
She’d muttered it under her breath, but apparently the fae man hadn’t lost his sense of hearing in this world along with his sanity.
“It’s the only one, Jessica.”
Damnit.
Before they’d stepped through the Gateway, all she could hope for was that they wouldn’t be met with an onslaught of the Dalu’Rázj’s forces waiting to take them down the second they fell out of that floating door.
They’d managed to evade that gruesome scenario altogether. But climbing down into this pit full of who knew how many repurposed creatures seemed like an even worse death sentence.
Well, it wasn’t like Jessica hadn’t inserted herself into any number of situations threatening death and dismemberment and unbearable agony—by choice and without it.
Just hearing herself trying to rationalize Leandras’ ridiculous plan made her wonder if she hadn’t already lost her mind too.
It took them another half hour of walking along the edge of the chasm before Leandras spotted something he thought would work as an acceptable path down to the bottom of otherworld hell. At least, it felt like half an hour. For all Jessica knew about this place and the way time moved through it—which both the fae man and the bank had mentioned doing funny things between worlds—they could have spent five minutes or a week traversing the jagged line of the cliff’s edge.
Even if it had taken them months to find this spot Leandras apparently felt good about, Jessica still wouldn’t be ready to make the climb.
“See that jutting lip trailing down toward the ledge just there?” He leaned toward her and pointed, but the path that wasn’t actually a path was impossible to miss.
Jessica leaned away from the edge and stared at him.
For the first time since they’d arrived in this world, the fae shot her one of his famous smirks worthy of a vestrohím’s knuckle sandwich. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of heights.”
“I’m not,” she muttered before forcing herself to eye the precarious trail cut into the crumbled cliff wall.
That part was true. Heights didn’t bother her nearly as much as the idea of falling from so high that even her ability to heal herself would be completely useless.
“Then by all means.” Leandras nodded at the dipping edge of the cliff, which did exactly what he’d said they’d been looking for—dipping slightly less downward than straight. “Lead the way, Guardian. I’m right behind you.”
“You’re an ass.”
“I rather prefer to think of it as chivalry.”
She snorted. “This isn’t a ‘ladies first’ kinda thing, and you know it. It’s not a Guardian thing either. You’re the one blazing this screwed-up trail here. You go first.”
“If you insist.” Rolling up the sleeves of his dress shirt with quick flicks of his wrist, Leandras dipped his head, then turned around to start climbing down. He held her gaze for as long as possible before he had to look down for his next foot- and handholds.
Jessica crouched at the edge and shook her head.
Even here, where they were taking what felt like the ultimate chance climbing down into this thing, he still found a way to mock her at the worst possible time.
She didn’t feel bad about making him go first, but when his foot slipped on crumbling rock six feet down before he’d had a chance to move sideways along the aforementioned jutting lip, her gut twisted in sharp, stabbing knots.
Leandras quickly found his footing again and clung on without moving farther. For a moment, he looked like he was seriously reconsidering his decision. Then a low chuckle escaped him.
“You are insane,” Jessica muttered.
“I enjoy safety and comfort as much as the next fae, Jessica,” he said between bouts of soft laughter. “But I must say there’s nothing quite like wondering if your next step will be your last.”
“Well quit wondering and just get down to that ledge already.”
“Are you coming?”
She groaned and watched him sidle across the cliff face, occasionally looking away from the rock to eye her with a crooked smile. “Yeah, I’m coming.”
This was yet another perfect reminder to never let herself get mixed up with another fae. Of course, the others she’d spent time with hadn’t taken her between worlds and down into dark pits where they’d probably end up being eaten or crushed or sucked up by some kind of living quicksand. But they sure as hell had been a lot more fun, however short-lived the encounters.
When Leandras had moved far enough along the lip to not be centered directly beneath her, Jessica turned around and slid herself over the edge of the cliff. The small bits of rock jutting from the wall were a lot sturdier than she’d expected. Leandras had already proven not all of them were that steady, so she moved with careful, gut-wrenching slowness along the same path he’d taken.
The cliff wall curved slightly as she sidestepped down the sloping lip. Her fingers ached after only a minute of crimping down hard on the insufficient crevices. After five minutes, they burned like she’d been trying to scrape off her own fingerprints against sandpaper.
Ten minutes of clinging to the cliff face made her arms tremble, and small beads of sweat formed at her hairline and trickled down her temples. Leandras was maybe five feet farther along than she was, and neither one of them were anywhere close to reaching the halfway point to the ledge he’d indicated.
That ledge had started off as her end-goal—the wedged stability of an unmoving carrot on a stick. But once they’d spent at least twenty minutes shuffling sideways and trading off tiny grips in the rock hand-over-hand, the only thing Jessica could focus on now was the next move right in front of her.
Slip the fingers of both hands into the same crevice. Peel her left hand away without undoing the right. Reach for the hold a foot beside her and four inches down.
The work was debilitating.
She hadn’t been joking when she said she didn’t climb. Jessica had spent a lifetime physically and emotionally on the run, turning to her magic and the power behind it when she hit wal
ls otherwise impossible to break through. Even getting into a fistfight or hauling aside moronically brave security on any number of jobs with Corpus hadn’t required this much purely physical endurance.
Sure, she could try to use her magic, but only ever having used it to repel and obliterate her obstacles was one thing. The idea of even a sliver of her own power backfiring and sending her plummeting down to her end before they’d even had a chance to do anything in this world nearly terrified her into freezing up.
For the time being, her magic had definitely frozen up too.
When she didn’t think she could hold on any longer and the urge to check her progress grew strong enough to tear her gaze away from the wall, Leandras’ voice drifted up toward her from his own desperate perch on the thin lip no wider than the toes of their shoes.
“Cálindor.”
Jessica tried out a careless laugh, but it came out sounding like a cough. “If you say so.”
“The Gateway still stands there, obviously.” He blew out a long breath and reached sideways for the next handhold. “But the stronghold no longer does. I hadn’t realized it had already been taken.”
Cálindor. That had to be the name of the destroyed building where Leandras had given her a last-minute illusionary makeover. Now she was even more grateful that he’d chosen that route instead of forcing her to change into real clothes of this world. The cloak fluttering around her arms would have been way more trouble as she tried not to climb to her death, though watching the dark fabric moving naturally across the stone where she meant to grab the next handhold was a major mind-fuck. At least she didn’t have to try swishing it out of the way with a stupidly stuck-up flare.
“Was that...” She grimaced as her sore, stiff fingers clamped down into the next crevice. “I mean, did you know the place?”
“Well enough to find my way through the Gateway.”
“Yeah. Obviously.”
“Obviously.” The fae let out a strained chuckle. “At one time, Cálindor was the central bastion for certain...factions in this world.”
The Poisoned Veil (Accessory to Magic Book 4) Page 21