by Lexi Johnson
The man pointed to himself. “Aranion,” he said clearly.
“Aranion.” Sade smiled. “Thank you, Aranion. For your help.”
Aranion cocked his head. Wisps of hair escaped the tie he’d pulled it back with, to fall in moonlight strands about his face.
He sighed, muttered something, and then said “Sade,” and pointed behind her.
Sade turned. Behind her…
Behind her, it was as if she were staring through a soapy pool into her backyard. Blue and red lights flashed from the street, and two police officers were walking over her lawn.
Sade was shocked. She could only have been here a few minutes, after all!
She shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.
There was no way she planned simply to step out of thin air in front of a bunch of cops. If there was one thing that years of watching TV crime dramas had taught her, it was that cops thought in straight lines. She glanced down at her T-shirt. The hem of it even had a smear of his blood.
Lacking a believable alternative explanation, once the cops matched the blood to Michael’s… well, she’d be their number one suspect.
Best to wait it out.
There was a rustle, and Sade looked up to see Aranion walking towards her. He stopped and knelt in front of her.
He placed his fingers under her chin, and looked into her eyes, as though searching for something. His gaze was a deep blue-grey that reminded Sade of the sky just before a storm. She felt as if she had known those eyes forever.
The area just below her field of vision brightened. She glanced down, and saw that his hand was glowing.
Sade’s heart thudded. When he’d done this before, just a few minutes ago, he’d knocked Maria, her neighbor, flat! --
Sade tried to pull away, but he grabbed her shoulder and held it with a firm grip that belied his size. Even if he hadn’t put a hand on her, Sade suspected his gaze would have held her fast.
Run. She had to run. Get away. Just because he’d rescued her didn’t make him safe!
His entire body was glowing now -- and she realized that it wasn’t just him, the glow surrounded both of them. She was warm, hot, and there was a voice in her mind. It whispered just outside the edges of her consciousness, and although she couldn’t understand its words it wanted something. The voice multiplied into a chorus, a cacophony of whispers all speaking in different tongues, all frantically overlapping, until Sade was sure she’d gone completely insane…
“Stop!” Sade screamed.
Around her, the tiny sounds of the forest that she hadn’t even noticed all ceased, and all she could hear was her own panicked breathing.
“Sade?” he said, his voice rich and concerned. “Are you okay?”
It took Sade a moment to realize that he was speaking English. She stared at him, shocked. “What did you do to me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said -- Aranion, she told herself: his name was Aranion. “I had to put a geis on us both, so that we could understand each other. I wasn’t even sure it would work with a mortal -- but it was clear that you were agitated and didn’t understand what I was trying to tell you.”
She could understand, now, what he was saying, but the liquid silk of his voice was just as enticing. Sade thought she would be content to lie in his arms and listen to him speak forever…
As if that mattered in the slightest right now.
“It was…weird,” she said cautiously.
“Yes,” Aranion said, looking at her intensely – curiously, she told herself. “The spell took hold of you very strongly. It must be something of your mortal magic. The geis should have felt like a tickle over your mind -- nothing more.”
“Well, it was more like a whole football field full of people stuffed inside a closet shouting and banging cymbals.”
“What’s a football field?” Aranion asked curiously.
Sade shook her head. “Don’t worry about it.”
She sighed. “Listen,” she said. “I think it would be better if I lie low here with you for a day or two, at least until the police have left my house.”
“The police? Are those the ones with the metal chariots that flash red and blue?”
“Yeah, that’s them,” she said grimly.” “And even though Michael’s body is gone, his truck is still in my driveway, and there’s enough blood on the grass that they’re going to know something’s up. Not to mention what’s going to happen when Linette wakes up.”
If Linette woke up… The sudden thought struck her with horror. What had Sade gotten herself into when she followed this man into another world? “You didn’t kill her – Linette, the girl from next door… did you?”
Aranion looked horrified. “I’d never shed the blood of an innocent!”
That was a relief. Sade hadn’t even realized she was holding her breath till she let it out.
“She’ll wake in a day or so,” Aranion continued, “as though from a long slumber. And she’ll remember nothing.”
“Was that another…?” What was the word he’d used? “Another geis?”
“Yes, but a messy one,” he said. He looked slightly sheepish, slightly chagrined. “We do not make a habit of enchanting mortals, you know. In fact, should anyone find out that I crossed over to your world, the punishment would be severe.”
“Severe… like how?”
“My name will be stricken from the annals of the World Trees,” he said, “and I will be stripped of my magic, given the ordeal of a thousand cuts, and, once weakened, will be chained to the cliffs of the Hell’s Teeth, just outside the Bane Sidhe’s Court, for the dyre-drakes to feast on what remains of my flesh.”
Sade stared at him, trying to see if he was joking, but he looked completely serious. “Jesus,” she said, feeling her skin go cold. She hadn’t recognized half the words he’d used, but it all sounded bad. No wonder people didn’t know about these gates, or what lived on the other side of them, if this was the punishment people here received for crossing over.
“Though,” he went on, “perhaps my father will find some way to mitigate my sentence. He is King, after all.”
Sade blinked at him – still serious. She shook her head, trying to clear it. “You seem very calm about all this,” she said. It was an understatement.
Aranion shrugged. “There reaches a point of despair beyond which you simply can’t be afraid,” he said.
That made Sade look at him in a new light. In the serious expression on his fair, strange face, she could see now the lines of tension in it, the worry and fatigue in his beautiful eyes. Son of the king or not, it seemed as if Aranion had things rough – even rougher then she did. Sade felt her own problems retreat into the background.
“Listen,” she said, “maybe you can just pin it on me. Say that I just wandered through, or something? Unless you guys as rough on trespassers as you are with your own?...”
Aranion shook his head, though his lips turned up in an unlikely ghost of a smile. “It’s unlikely that two mortals would just happen to fall through,” he said. “And then that I would kill one of them. And, in any case, even if they would believe it, as an elf, I cannot lie.”
Sade wasn’t sure which was more shocking: what Aranion had just said about being unable to lie, or that this devastatingly handsome man had just claimed to an elf. “What?” she said cleverly.
Yes, granted, he did have the ears. And the look. Well, not the look like the department-store elves who supposedly made toys at Christmas, but the unbelievably-handsome look, like in those Peter Jackson movies.
But who just… came out and said they were an elf? As if it were the same thing as saying they were Cambodian or Jewish?
Sade hadn’t been into fantasy movies since she was a child. But all of a sudden, she seemed to be living in one.
It all seemed… impossible.
“Well, uh,” she said, trying to be practical. “We’ll have to do something about Michael’s body, in any
case. Can you… I don’t know… can you set it on magic fire, or something?”
Aranion looked thoughtfully – even a little sadly? – at the corpse. “I may have to risk it. But the rangers are already hunting me – have been ever since I left my father’s court. And every time I perform magic, I leave a mark on the astral plane, making me easier to find.” He sighed. “In truth, I more than half expected them to be here when we arrived. But I suspect the Gate is muddling my footprints.” He studied the body again, then seemed to come to a conclusion. “The best thing would be to leave him for the carrion eaters,” he said, decisively. “They’ll be here soon enough, anyhow. The ones who eat the dead have sharp senses.”
The carrion-eaters will be here soon enough? The rangers are already hunting me? All this sounded bad to Sade. Very, very bad.
If she had any sense of self-preservation, she thought, she’d go back through the gate and take her chances with the cops.
But… she couldn’t just abandon Aranion, not after he’d chosen to risk a horrible death to save her.
“Maybe you could go back with me?” she suggested. But then, how would she explain him: a man with moonlight hair, who had no records at all and didn’t even speak English? Not to mention the fact that the cops would surely be looking into her life, and her relationship with Michael, as they investigated his disappearance. ‘Missing ex’ plus ‘mysterious new lover’ would certainly equal ‘suspicious’ in anyone’s eyes.
Aranion shook his head again at her suggestion. “There is too much iron and death on your side of the wall,” he said. “You make your homes from the bones of dead things. Even your chariots, for all their eyes glow with a facsimile of life, have no spirit inside. Besides -- once your people realized my true nature, the torture they’d wreak on my flesh would make the dyre-drakes seem a mercy.”
Sade’s instinct was to argue with him. But the truth was, she couldn’t say what her government would do if they got their hands on Aranion. Waterboarding might well be the least of it.
And even if Aranion wasn’t found out as an elf – an alien being, after all -- he had killed someone in cold blood, right on her lawn. Sade couldn’t ignore the possibility that one of her neighbors had seen or recorded some of it from the surrounding windows. After all, someone had called the cops. It was even possible they’d seen her and Aranion dragging Michael’s corpse through the Gate.
“So,” Sade said, thinking it through. “You can’t lie at all?”
Aranion said, “I can refuse to answer, or I can answer with a truth that is misleading. But I can’t lie directly. None of us can.”
“Wow. That’s got to be rough.”
Aranion shrugged. “As a people, we’ve made a fine art of misdirection.”
Misdirection, was it? There had to be an answer in that. Sade could feel it, hanging at the edge of her awareness…
But the horrors of the evening were starting to catch up with her. If this truly was a dream, shouldn’t she have woken up by now? If not, then all of this… Michael’s finding her, his dead body on the mossy ground, and now these threats of torture and death… all of these must be real.
She couldn’t deal with this. She couldn’t stand here and keep chatting about these things over the corpse of her dead ex-lover.
“I need to…I can’t stay here…” she began. Where did she want to go? She gestured, vaguely, toward the trees – the only visible direction of escape, or possible shelter.
She hated the idea of leaving Michael’s body to be eaten by whatever fantastic monsters might live here – she really hated it. But he was already dead.
She and Aranion weren’t so safe. Not from flesh-eating monsters, nor from these elven rangers who were hunting Aranion. Sade wished she was back in the city. At least there, she knew what she was running away from.
Aranion was looking at her – strangely, maybe wistfully.
He said, slowly, as if it was difficult for him: “You should go home.”
Sade looked back at him.
She said, her own voice slow: “You’ve seen me before. When I was a child. That’s why you helped me, isn’t it?”
Aranion nodded. His eyes never left hers.
“Then I can’t leave you to be killed.” Sade held out her hand.
“There’s something drawing us together,” she whispered. She hadn’t really meant to say it. But she added, “You feel it too.”
Aranion nodded again. “I know,” he said.
He took her hand. His grip was strong, his skin soft. And he smelled way, way too good for someone who’d just killed a man.
“Then we’re in this together,” Sade said.
It was an absolutely terrible idea, of course. To fall for an elf who was on the run from a death sentence, not to mention whatever he must have been running from before to warrant these rangers hunting him… I always have had a weakness for the bad boys, Sade thought, a little wildly.
But the electric heat that passed between them when their flesh touched convinced Sade that she had no other choice. Maybe she never had had any other choice.
Then this was her choice, at least for now.
They walked together into the woods.
Chapter 4: Claimed
Sade showed no signs of recognizing the magic that passed between them when she took Aranion’s hand. But the elf knew it, and despaired.
How could he have a latent soul bond with a mortal? It should have been impossible. But there it was, growing stronger with every moment they were together.
The bond wouldn’t be sealed unless it was consummated… but, until then, their sheer proximity would make their need for each other stronger and stronger, until one or both of them succumbed.
His thoughts were in a turmoil. If I cared about Sade at all, he thought, I would shove her back through the gate right now, and then run for both our lives. Even if it kills me.
But the thought of losing her -- the thought of having another man’s hands on her -- made him burn with fury. No -- Sade was his.
Now, he only had to work out how to keep both of them alive so that they could have a future together.
They walked and walked. Above, milky white light began to shine through the canopy of leaves.
“It’s dawn,” said Aranion.
Sade looked surprised. “We’ve been walking all night?”
“No, only an hour -- perhaps two, I think. Time moves at a different rate than in your own world,” Aranion explained. “That is why it seemed as if your justice-keepers arrived so quickly, when we were watching through the gate.”
“Oh.” Sade sounded thoroughly lost.
He could only admire her strength and courage. In the course of a few hours, she’d lost her world, and been thrust into a new one that was more strange and dangerous than anything she’d ever known. Worse, her only guide here was a twice-fugitive elf, who had greeted her by killing a man in cold blood.
He briefly debated telling her about the soul bond. Shouldn’t she be informed? But Sade had enough burdens at this moment. He had no need to add to them. Not yet.
“How far away do we have to get before we can sit down for little while?” Sade asked. He realized she must be exhausted.
“We can stop here,” Aranion said, pointing to a hollow in one of the nearby trees. It was appealingly sheltered by vines, and soft moss padded the ground.
Sade nodded. “I’m also going to need to…relieve myself.”
Aranion’s face warmed. It wasn’t at the thought of Sade tending to her needs -- all living creatures had those needs -- but at his own compulsion to follow and watch, to make sure nothing nor no one else dared touch her. They had been in each other’s presence not even a day. But the desire to protect her – and, more, to mark her, to brand her with his lips and teeth, to claim her as his own -- was painfully strong…
“Aranion?” Sade looked up at him. Her pupils widened. Perhaps it was in response to the force of his b
arely restrained lust.
Aranion bit the inside of his cheek, hard. The pain centered him, and he managed a normal breath.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You can go over there.” He pointed toward another opening between the trees. “I’ll keep watch,” he said, deliberately turning his back. He was going to have to do something to keep himself in check. Otherwise, this bond would be consummated well before sunset. And, no matter how bravely she was acting, how much he admired her strength and courage, he could not, in good conscience, chain her to his fate.
Leaves rustled behind him. Footsteps approached. “I’m finished,” Sade said in a soft voice. After a moment, she added, “You wouldn’t have anything to eat, would you? Or some water?”
Of course, she would need to eat. And drink.
Aranion pulled the waterskin from the belt at his waist and handed it over. “It’s just water,” he said. “I have some fruit also,” he added, reaching into his satchel for the remains of his supplies. “And I can gather some other food. We will need it.”
“Thank you,” Sade said. What followed was an awkward silence.
He shook himself out of it. Leading her to the rough shelter he’d pointed out earlier, he handed her the satchel.
He looked into her eyes. “I’ll be back,” he assured her.
Sade looked terrified at the thought of being left alone. But she put on a brave face and nodded, clutching the satchel to her chest.
Gods, but he wanted to stay with her! The thought of her warm, willing body in his arms almost undid him…
“Do you know how to use a bow?” he asked.
Sade shook her head. “I can fire a gun,” she said.
That meant nothing to Aranion. He reached into his waist-belt and pulled free a silver dagger. “If anything tries to hurt you, use this.”
Sade nodded again. Now she looked even more terrified than before.
“Nothing should bother you here,” Aranion said. “I’ll be back soon.” With that, he slung his bow over his back and forced himself to turn and leave.
The need to find food distracted his thoughts, at least for a short, welcome time. The fastest thing, he thought, would be to gather mushrooms and tree moss to make soup.