“You drank the Nihilistri,” he muttered. “And I’d like to point out it hasn’t done a thing to improve your mood since.”
Despite how much she wanted to believe him, she couldn’t. Even when his cool hands over hers around his throat gently started to pry her fingers away from his flesh. “Why?”
“Why what, Jessica?”
“Why did you give it to me?”
His smile widened. “This may be the first time my own penchant for revealing as little as possible is indeed backfiring on me.”
That wasn’t funny.
“You’re deflecting,” Jessica growled. She’d meant to tighten her grip on his throat, but her hand just wouldn’t obey.
Why the hell not?
The bank would have cracked a joke about her having feelings for the fae who’d died and come back again—or died completely, only to have his body stolen by someone else. Something else, even.
“You need more proof,” Leandras muttered, awkwardly trying to dip his head in the usual way but apparently finding it difficult while lying on his back with a vestrohím’s hand at his throat like a loaded gun. “I’m not quite certain how to convince you without rehashing the last few months of our...adventures together. And we just don’t have the time.”
“I still need proof.”
“Jessica, there are eyes and ears everywhere. Please—”
She let off a warning burst of black smoke and sparks in her free hand, bringing it dangerously close to his face. Even under the dark like of her magic, the black starburst of veins where she’d struck him in her sleep was visible on his cheek. “If you can’t prove yourself, I have no problem getting rid of you. I already watched him die once.”
His silver gaze flickered toward her threatening hand. “You can’t be serious.”
“Try me.”
“All right. Fine.” A small snort of amusement escaped Leandras, though it was dampened by his immediate swallow afterward and his gaze resting on her flickering power that could crush him in an instant if he made a wrong move. He looked up into her eyes again and whispered, “I wish I could go into specifics without jeopardizing our purpose here, Ms. Northwood, but this will have to suffice. You most likely would have died two nights ago if I hadn’t intervened. As evidenced by the mar on my cheek, which I know you recognize. Then you gave me a name, among other macabre details. And your...friend on Earth is no longer the only voice you hear.”
Jessica blinked quickly, still sneering at the fae man because now she had to backtrack and accept the fact that this was really him.
No one else called her Ms. Northwood when they were pissed. She’d given him her name—the one with which she’d been born—and the friend he’d mentioned could only have been the bank. The other? Yeah, that was the Brúkii.
So what the fuck had she just watched?
Leandras had come out of that forced teleportation looking like a Naruli copy of himself, writhing and on the edge of death again, and she’d felt his life leave his body. The only thing she’d had left to draw out of him was what had killed him—Ati’ol’s magic.
There had been nothing else...
Leandras tightened his grip on her hand around his throat and lifted his head off the loose dirt to raise it toward her. “Will that suffice?”
Jessica jerked her hands back and lurched away from him, scrambling backward across the ground and staring at the fae man who’d died and was somehow resurrected.
Not by her. No fucking way had it been her doing.
Right?
As he hauled himself up to sit hunched over his outstretched legs, Jessica grabbed her mouth to keep back the scream threatening to burst out of it instead.
What the hell was going on?
After heaving a massive sigh, Leandras tried to run a hand through his hair and only managed to streak it with even more dirt. Small pebbles toppled down onto his shoulders and plunked against the dry earth. Then he slowly met her gaze again and nodded. “Thank you, by the way. I don’t believe I mentioned that.”
“You—” Jessica swallowed. “You have some serious explaining to do.”
“Yes. At this point, that’s rather the least I can offer in return.” He looked up at something behind her shoulder and frowned. “But not here.”
She spun around in the dirt and found herself staring at a massive wall of black stone curving in a wide circle twenty yards in front of them. The thing was a hundred feet high at least, and on the other side stretched a collection of stone buildings. Or at least their rooftops. Those closest to the wall barely rose above the border, but the building heights gradually increased, leading up to a single black spire in the center taller than anything else she could see.
The spire was only visible because it blotted out the eerie green light of the churning storm above them.
“Where are we?” she muttered, entranced by the feeling of being both compelled toward and repulsed by those buildings of black stone.
“Ryngivát,” Leandras replied. He cleared his throat, pushed himself to his feet, and unsuccessfully dusted off his clothes. “I’m sure Ati’ol’s still laughing in her cave about this one.”
Ryngivát. The Naruli woman had mentioned that before. That everyone would know what Leandras wanted once “word of the Laen’aroth’s coming” reached that far.
“To be perfectly honest,” he added, his footsteps drawing closer, “I’d hoped to save this trip for the very last.”
“Why?” When she looked up at him, she found the fae standing beside her with his hand extended in an offer to help her up. She took it and stared at him, waiting for a response.
Leandras nodded toward the wall, looking less physically uncomfortable than when he’d been on the verge of death in the lobby of her bank. But the distaste in his curling upper lip somehow seemed far worse now. “It’s the last place I want to be. And seeing as the city itself hasn’t yet fallen into ruin beneath the earth, I can only assume the Heart of Ithríl is precisely where I left it.”
She studied his flaring nostrils and sneering grimace of contempt. “Okay, so before we get surrounded by half-naked magicals underground with hunting knives or snared in sentient vines or chased down by any more giant insects, now would be a good time to tell me why you don’t look relieved by that.”
His silver eyes flickered before his gaze settled on her face again. “Because I’m not.”
Chapter 27
Wonderful. The Laen’aroth was afraid to step into the first real sign of civilization they’d found since dropping through the Gateway door, and now he’d just admitted he wasn’t relieved to be that much closer to his next artifact on their moronically suicidal scavenger hunt across Xahar’áhsh.
Jessica stepped away from him and eyed the fae up and down. “If that was supposed to make me feel better—”
“It wasn’t.” The sternness in his gaze held her back from jumping into yet another argument right here. “I promise you answers, Jessica. It’s unlikely, but there’s still a chance our arrival has gone unnoticed. I highly recommend we utilize—”
“With that giant light you coughed up from your dead body into the sky?” She huffed out a humorless laugh. “There’s no way that went unnoticed.”
He craned his neck to study the roiling storm clouds churning with green light just as another thunderclap split through the air. “Light?”
“Yeah. Whatever was killing you... I mean it did kill you, ’cause I know for a fact you—”
“What happened?” Leandras stepped toward her, looking crazed and wild again like the time he’d burst into her bank all up in a panic about needing to make his goddamn withdrawal.
“I just told you. You died, I thought I was going to, and I guess I managed to pull that shit out of your body to—”
“To the light, Jessica. In the sky. What happened?” Leandras grabbed her by both shoulders and spun her roughly to face him. “Did you see anyone? Hear anything strange? Whatever you can remember.”
“The only magical I saw was you. Dead and alive, in that order.” Jessica frowned at him. “And yeah, I’d say hearing you breathe at all again counts as pretty fucking strange.”
“Answer the question!”
“It disappeared in the storm!” She shoved him away from her and turned partially toward the stone wall, eyeing him sideways. “And you don’t get to question me like that without giving me a single goddamn answer. Which you said I deserve like thirty seconds ago, so don’t try to twist this into another endless game, okay?”
“You do deserve them.” He cast a quick glance over his shoulder, scanning the nothingness of destruction stretching out behind them, then whirled back toward the wall of Ryngivát and quickly eyed the ramparts there too. “Once we’re safely hidden.”
“From whom?”
Leandras snatched her hand again and hauled her toward the wall. “Everyone, Jessica.”
That was real fear making his voice tremble. The kind she hadn’t heard from the fae man who always seemed to downplay every awful situation in which they kept finding themselves.
She’d thought he’d been scared when she’d almost died in the bank lobby from magical burns and a knife wound that had probably included a part of her kidney. She’d thought he’d been scared when he’d kept her from walking right into the doorway on her own before he’d helped her stake her claim with a misplaced warded rune on her neck. Even when she’d broken the Laenmúr’s circle in the warehouse to fight off the intruders trying to keep them from completing phase two of the reckoning, she’d dismissed his shouts for her to stop as nothing but fear of their failure.
Now, she recognized how wrong she’d been. All those times, Leandras had acted in anger and urgency, focusing on the job at hand to get it done before something else could stand in his way.
But this? This was the Laen’aroth being distracted from his purpose by a terror she could practically feel through his hand closed tightly around her fingers as they raced across the barren earth toward the city wall.
Jessica couldn’t blame anyone for being afraid of anything. She’d been running from her own fears—and admittedly a high probably of being murdered by them—for almost half her life. Leandras had a right to be scared of something, just like the next magical dealing with forces way beyond their own control.
But he hadn’t been scared of the sentinels or the Skirra or even falling into the floral hands of the Naruli. He wasn’t trying to hide Jessica; he’d all but told Ko’alyn she was the Guardian, and Ati’ol had already known.
So why was he now so terrified of being found out here with her? Of heading into Ryngivát that had been the topic of his cryptic conversation with the glow-in-the-dark underworld tribe?
It was all she could do not to pepper him with questions once they reached the cold stone wall spanning farther across the wasteland than she could see.
Once Leandras finally stopped, he looked straight up to scan the top line of the wall, then flicked his wrist in a quick gesture and covered himself in silver light. The light faded to reveal a clever little illusionary disguise of his own. He’d dressed himself almost the exact same as he’d dressed Jessica in her own illusion, though his clothes were all black, and he’d left off the stupidity of a cloak.
“How different exactly is the dress code around here?” she muttered, looking him up and down.
“It depends on where we are.”
“So the cloak’s not part of the getup.”
Leandras eyed her sharply. “It explains your transient nature. As long as no one tries to speak to you.”
He turned away from her then to run his hand along the smooth stone and walk down the line of the wall, occasionally glancing up at the very top.
Jessica folded her arms and didn’t bother looking up with him. That would only play into his apparent paranoia. “This is definitely the first time I’ve seen you get all jumpy about a possible attack.”
“Or a possible heralding of new guests into Ryngivát,” he muttered, scrutinizing the stone.
“Oh. Well that’s not so bad.”
“No, Jessica. It’s worse.”
A surprised chuckle escaped her. “Seriously? How could a welcome into an actual city out here in the middle of nowhere be worse than what we got in... Okay, you still haven’t explained the whole underworld part.”
The fae man froze, slowly turned back to fix her with a warning glare, then pressed directly inward on the stone beneath his hand. There was a soft click, a blaze of deep-purple light, then the stone disappeared to reveal a passageway. “It can be much worse and most likely will be if we’re found out. I understand you’re shaken by witnessing what you so aptly described as my death, but please be silent. I would very much like to stave off a second death in one day.”
He gestured toward the opening, clearly waiting for Jessica to give her consent.
She narrowed her eyes at him and muttered, “I knew it.”
Leandras tsked in aggravation and headed into the passage, waving her forward as he scanned the flat, lifeless expanse of this world beyond the city walls.
The only thing Jessica had to go on now was his promise that she’d get her answers. So she clung to the highly unlikely fulfillment of that promise and silently agreed to humor his sudden and uncharacteristic obsession with not making waves.
Once she stepped into the passage, the purple light flared again behind her to return the stone wall to its original makeup. Then they were in complete darkness again.
She waited for him to light the way, but Leandras didn’t cast a single spell, his footsteps echoing across the floor in front of her. “Light, maybe?”
“Not here,” he whispered harshly. “And I said be quiet.”
Gritting her teeth, Jessica turned her attention to the sound of his footsteps and gauging how much farther ahead of her he was in the passage. The last thing she wanted was to bump into him and unleash the full fury of the Laen’aroth’s terror on accident.
The bank would have found that pretty funny. It probably would have added its obnoxiously witty flavor to the joke and kept it going.
A small smile flickered across her lips as she reached out to feel the walls on either side of her in the narrow walkway. Here she was, in a completely different world connected to hers only by a single portal, and she was still hearing the bank’s voice in her head. Sort of.
Leandras’ footsteps stopped, and Jessica stopped behind him, waiting for their next move. The whisper of his hands sliding across more stone filled the passageway instead, then another purple light shimmered in front of them to reveal one more doorway.
The sudden and chaotic noise from the other side of the wall nearly knocked Jessica backward. Shouts and growls in the sometimes guttural Xaharí tongue mingled with the rumble of wooden wheels, the clink of metal against metal, the pounding of footsteps and rustle of large crates and sacks lugged from place to place. A screech from some kind of bird ripped through the air, followed by a squabble of multiple avian voices and a sharp bark of annoyance from a magical’s throat.
“Are those...chickens?”
Jessica frowned at the bustle of movement racing back and forth in front of them before Leandras grabbed her wrist and hauled her out of the passage. It shut itself back up immediately, but she didn’t have time to explore anything else before the fae man whisked her quickly behind a cart selling what was probably supposed to be produce here. Except for nothing on the cart was like anything grown from the earth in her world, and all of it looked like it had been sitting out for days to rot under Xahar’áhsh’s nonexistent sun.
Another quick tug from Leandras, and they slipped through one more doorway carved into an extension in the outer wall.
So now they were in the city, with full illusions at least as far as their clothes went, and they still had to hide from all the magicals out there who weren’t even paying attention?
“Okay, what—”
He pushed her back against the wall and pressed hims
elf against her, clamping a hand down over her mouth. Leandras’ eyes were wide again, but he seemed to have recovered some of his old dignity. His gaze burned with warning as he stared at Jessica, his face inches from hers, and slowly shook his head.
Then he released her, stepped back, and lifted a finger for her to wait.
She rolled her eyes and tried to peer around the corner of the stone doorway as he did the same, but he shoved her roughly back again.
If they didn’t find this “private place” to have the conversation where he told her what the hell was going on, she’d drag him right out into the center of that bustling square and torture it out of him.
Which would be pretty damn fitting, seeing as the whole setup here did actually feel more like the Renaissance Festival than the Renaissance Festival did, and Jessica was a witch. Maybe she’d get strung up and tortured, and that would finally make him talk.
Leandras took four precise steps backward, moving slowly and scanning the dusty ground. When he pointed at the dirt in front of his foot, a small click issued from the ground—barely loud enough for Jessica to hear above the din beyond—followed by a soft rosy light. He flicked his finger, and a trapdoor popped open, sending a layer of dirt shivering down around either side and crumbling into the gaping hole.
A literal trapdoor.
Forget jumping through the Gateway into another world. This was going back in time to an alternate history where magicals lived in castles and strongholds without electricity instead of humans.
Pressing his lips tightly together, Leandras looked up at her again and pointed at the hole in the ground.
Jessica raised an eyebrow.
He tilted his head in warning and jabbed his finger at the hole one more time.
Sure, there was something to be said for having gotten to the point in their precarious relationship—acquaintance, friendship, unwilling partnership, or whatever the hell it was—where they could have a whole conversation without words. But this was ridiculous.
Still, if doing what he ordered now with nothing but hand signals would get her that vital sit-down and an in-depth explanation, it was better than causing a scene.
The Poisoned Veil (Accessory to Magic Book 4) Page 26