Uninvited (Etudes in C# Book 3)

by Jamie Wyman

  Like a splinter, thought kept meddling with my calm with its reminders of life.

  Why does the ground breathe? Why do I sense the things around me as if I still have skin?

  These pebbles of thought were the beginning of a landslide. That heavenly delight of floating, of being made of little more than air and light, drifted away. My limbs grew heavier and more solid. I became aware of a hundred tiny aches and pains, including a knot in my hip and a dull, insistent thud in my chest.

  Details came to me sluggishly as my brain—so quick to analyze—couldn’t quite wake up. I had a body. A body that had been in the same position just a little too long. I wriggled around and stretched legs that felt a million miles away. My toes touched something fleecy. Clothes on my legs. My chest bare. And cold. My nipples were at attention and brushed against something as if huddling for warmth. And warmth there was. It embraced me, just as it had moments or years before. It curled around my back, draped over my side, and rested heavily on my hip as it held me pressed against it.

  Beneath my hand, the feathery patch of earth still rose and fell with a delicate rhythm, but there was more now. The warmth came not from a sunny radiance but from the flesh beneath my fingers.

  I opened my eyes.

  No lush green meadow or sunshine here. Just a dark room with little more than a bed and a table. Glancing up, I saw a sphere of wan amber radiance. Embers or feathers of light dripped down from the orb, extinguishing before they could land on me. I blinked and swallowed, my throat dry as kindling. When I tried to moisten my lips with a sandpapery tongue, I tasted blood.

  A subdued snuffle drew my attention. I let my eyes peer through the shifting shadows just enough to see that I lay with my head pillowed on someone’s shoulder. My hand lazed on the dark tuft of his chest hair. Weak, my head filled with lead, I turned my chin. Marius snored gently, eyes fluttering as he dreamed. With a light touch, his hand stroked my hip.

  I gasped and scrambled to my knees, covering my bare breasts. Marius’s hand fell limply to the sheets—my sheets, I realized—but otherwise, he remained sound asleep.

  Looking at him, my heart hurt. The delicate, orange light fell over his form as easily and beautifully as paint caressing a canvas. Shadows deepened around the muscles of his arm, the lines of his face. He stirred, the arm that had been holding me now stretching over his head. A white bandage dotted with crimson was wound around his left palm, and bruises bloomed over his cheeks. A series of gashes marred his shoulder.

  My poor satyr.

  I reached out to touch his hair, so glossy and thick, but stopped just short. My stomach twisted, and my mind roared with confusion. We were in my room at YmFy. But this wasn’t right. Nothing was right. Sure, that was my closet, my table, and my bed. Marius snoozing away in it, no less. But how the hell…?

  Hell.

  With a jolt, I remembered everything. Pitching forward with horrified nausea, I began to cry. The tears streamed down my face, and I fought against the anguished moan swelling beneath my skin. Clamping a hand over my mouth, I eased out of the bed as quietly as I could and padded to my bathroom, closing the door behind me.

  I gave into the shakes and sobs. Images boiled in my mind: Belial’s distorted face, his words a fetid mist on my cheek. Llyr shouting, his home burning. Malcolm holding the gun. The shot that landed home. And Marius…crying. My knees trembled, and I slid down into a squat, my hands still gripping the basin.

  There were things I remembered then that no one could see, mysteries revealed that I could never unknow. Things I couldn’t put into words if I sat down with every dictionary and thesaurus of every language ever spoken. Shapes and voices in the Void. Love. Such heartbreaking, soul-filling love. And peace in its truest sense. A world as serene as fresh snow, yet warm as springtime.

  And it was gone. I’d been cast out. Pushed back into a body with aches, pains, and questions. Back into a world with strife and screaming uncertainty. The pristine solace had melted away leaving intangible, unspeakable truths burned into my being. No way to purge them, no way to explain or give them voice. No one to ask or share with. Just this horrible burden and this inadequate form. This goddamn human body with its unique and beautiful existence.

  I was alive.

  And I wasn’t sure if I should be grateful or not.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I Will Survive”

  After crying myself dry and sobbing on the bathroom floor for a while, I crawled to my feet and stepped into the shower. As I cleaned myself, I let all thought wash away with the old skin. I kept my eyes closed the whole time. I didn’t want to look at my body, didn’t want to see. I just let my hands slide over the familiar curves of flesh and bone that I’d known for my own personal eternity. And if I didn’t look at my body, I couldn’t see the wound. I could still imagine that maybe none of it had happened. Or maybe I could try to salvage that anchorless warmth from the meadow…

  None of that worked, though. When the water ran cold, I was still alive. Still human.

  Joy.

  Drying myself, I dared to look in the mirror. My stomach flopped at the sight of the bullet hole and all the terrible truth it represented. Just above my breasts and to the left of center was the dime-sized blemish. The outside of the circle was an angry red while the center was comprised of pink, puckered tissue.

  The red ring of death, I snickered to myself.

  A quick turn revealed that I had a matching wound on my back. I gave the skin on my chest an experimental poke. Beneath the first layer or two of skin, white lines of light appeared and flashed out of sight beneath the healthy flesh. Another jab and I saw the pattern of the lines—circuitry like a microchip.

  This answered at least one question. I’d been saved—yet again—by one of Karma’s cybernetic implants. But like the hydra of old, cutting off one line of questions just birthed two more. And none of them would get answered naked in the bathroom.

  I opened the door and peeked out into the room. Marius was gone, his amber sphere with him. Someone had turned on my bedside lamp, though, so the room was not entirely dark. I peered around. Satisfied that I was now alone, I stepped out and went about the mundane routine of getting myself ready. I didn’t bother with jeans. I’d just died and been ripped out of the afterlife, for fucksake. If I had to be in this body, I was going to revel in comfort as long as I could. Pink flannel pajama pants and a baggy black T-shirt would suffice. The silver cuff that Loki had given me clung to my wrist with a cool, easy weight. Slipping into a pair of fluffy slippers and twisting my hair up into a clip, I looked like exactly like Cat Sharp should.

  Now if I could just feel like her again.

  I shambled out of my room and down to the common area without any idea what day it was or who I might meet along the way. The kitchen, though, had chai, and chai was what I wanted almost as badly as I needed answers.

  I found Flynn waiting for me in the kitchen, two steaming mugs on the table in front of him. When he saw me his face lit up, a smile spreading from ear to ear.

  “She lives,” he sang.

  “More or less,” I said, hoping the bitterness didn’t seep into my voice.

  He winced. “You sound like hell.” He pushed one of the mugs across the table to me and, with his foot, shoved out a chair, indicating that I should sit.

  I stood rooted to the spot. Checking over both shoulders, I avoided looking at Flynn and asked, “What time is it?”

  “About two thirty.”

  “Morning or afternoon?”

  “Afternoon. Monday, in case that was going to be your next question.”

  I sat down and blew out a long sigh. Curling my hands around the hot mug, I let my eyes drift in the middle distance as I sussed it out: I’d lost a day between Glastonbury and YmFy.

  “What happened?” I asked my chai.

  “I’m hazy on some of the details,” Flynn said, “but the quick of it is that you got shot. Marius used your fob to teleport the two of you here. We worked fast
and furious, got one of Karma’s implants into you, and…” His words trailed off.

  I looked up into his face. Flynn chewed on his lip, his eyes trained to the floor as he mulled something over. When he felt the weight of my stare, his eyes darted up.

  “We almost lost you,” he whispered.

  I ground my teeth.

  I should be grateful. I should be throwing my arms around him and thanking him tearfully, not wanting to scream at him that he was wrong.

  When I opened my mouth, all that came out was a hoarse, “Almost.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “Enough.”

  “Care to fill me in? Marius wasn’t exactly talkative after he… Well, after you two got here.”

  Shaking my head, I avoided his question. “Where is he?”

  “Took off awhile ago.”

  “What?” My head shot up, and hot panic flooded my whole body. “He’s gone?”

  “Said he had to go make sure the others were okay,” Flynn explained. “What others?”

  “He can’t have just left.” My heart jackhammered with true fear. My stomach felt knotted, yet empty. Incomplete. “Not without saying anything. And without me? Is he stupid?”

  Flynn’s voice hardened. “Well, yeah, but that should hardly come as a surprise.”

  “Shut up!” I screamed. I wiped tears out of my eyes with the heel of my hand. “Gah, I’m sorry. I have to go.”

  “What? Cat, you can’t just—”

  “I need to.” I sprang up from the chair and sped down the hall back toward my room. While my mind mentally packed my bags, words spooled out of my mouth. “I need to get back to Glastonbury and make sure Llyr and Mal are all right. Well,” I said, after a quick thought, “maybe not Mal. He shot me. He can fuck off.”

  “Glastonbury? Nothing you’re saying makes any sense. Will you just slow down?”

  I rounded the corner, barged into my room, and made a beeline for the closet. I started tossing things onto the bed and continued thinking out loud. “I’ll have to reverse the teleporter to get back. If I can. Not like I’ve got pipes to get me there. Dammit, Marius, why did you leave without me?” I fought back more tears—and my building anxiety—by focusing on what I needed to do. Pants. A few shirts. A jacket. “It’s July. I don’t need a damn jacket,” I growled to myself. “Teleporter. Reverse that. Assuming it’s still charged, that is. If not, I’ll have to spend the time charging it, but then that shouldn’t be too hard really if I just give it a bit of my own juice.”

  Flynn grabbed my shoulders, spun me around, and shoved his face up to mine. “Cat, stop this and talk to me!”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  His hands went limp, and I easily broke out of his hold.

  “Wouldn’t understand?” he asked, clearly wounded.

  I ignored him, focusing on stuffing things into my bag.

  “This is me, Cat. Me. What the fuck makes you think I wouldn’t understand?”

  How could he? Even with his infinite knowledge and ages of experience, how could he understand this? This ache in my chest, this crazed need to be somewhere else. This bitter hatred that he’d brought me back from…

  “Glastonbury?” he asked, exasperated. “Llyr? Mal? I don’t know what any of that means because you won’t tell me what the hell happened.”

  “Hell,” I snapped. “That is exactly what happened. Be—” His name caught in my throat, and I coughed with dry heaves. I pitched forward—hands to the mattress—and tried not to vomit. I looked up and saw a bloody stain on my sheets.

  “Is that mine?” I asked soberly.

  “It’s not mine,” he said, his tone grim. He pawed through his spikes. “We didn’t move you after we got you patched up. Not exactly a priority to make the bed, you know.”

  I nodded, numb. I eased down on the mattress and drew my knees up to my chest. Flynn sat beside me, waiting for me to explain.

  I blew out a shaky breath and began. “Loki wouldn’t take Marius.”

  For the next half hour or so, I reviewed the trip to Sapphire and the revelation that Marius was not an only child. I told Flynn about our trip to Glastonbury and meeting Llyr. When I told him that the old satyr had begged me to protect his son, Flynn laughed.

  I narrowed my gaze at him. “What’s funny?”

  He shook his ginger mop. “Don’t worry about it. Go on.”

  “Anyway, while we were at the cottage, we received a visit from a certain prince of Hell.”

  Flynn’s eyes darkened. “Belial?”

  I nodded. After giving him a summation of the very one-sided fight with the prince, I shrugged. “You’re going to have to fill me in from there,” I said.

  Flynn bobbed his head. “Well, the teleporter went off and I came to check on you, make sure Marius hadn’t gotten you into trouble. And I found…” His eyes went out of focus, face drawn with remembered horror and anguish. When he spoke again, his voice was raw. “Christ, it scared the fuck out of me. I show up in the doorway and Marius has you in his arms.”

  My stomach flopped with a dull ache at the memory of waking up being held by Marius.

  “You were limp, Cat. And pale. Well, more than usual,” he added, trying to inject some humor into his voice. I gave him a half-assed smirk. “He was freaking out. There was blood everywhere. I grabbed one of Karma’s implants while he got you to the bed, and…well, you know how that part works.”

  I did. The previous year, my life had been saved by one of her cybernetic gadgets. A bit of blood from a willing donor, a bit of power, and the circuitry would meld with the body, healing it. Karma had explained the specifics to me, but I still didn’t quite grok it all, like why something that was going into a wound would need blood from another source to do its thing. Such was Karma’s magic, though. And it was damn effective.

  I took my hair out of the clip and let it fall just so I could drag my hands through it in frustration. Flynn circled me with his long, lanky arms and planted a kiss on top of my head.

  “Don’t scare me like that again, okay?”

  I nodded and let him squeeze me. The longer he hugged me, though, the more my insides squirmed and rebelled. And don’t think I didn’t feel guilty. Flynn was my best friend, but at that exact moment, I felt…lost. I found no solace or comfort in his embrace. No gratitude that he and Marius had brought me back from death. I didn’t want him to hug me. I didn’t want him near me telling me how wonderful it was that I’d lived.

  I wanted to go back to the serenity of the meadow, the blissful weightlessness. But I knew that path was closed to me now. With the same searing knowledge gained from being well and truly dead, I knew that I could not seek out that place. If I saw it again, it would not be on my own terms.

  I ached for it, though. I craved peace, and if I couldn’t have the real thing, I wanted to be in the crook of Marius’s arm. Safe. A piece of that tranquility here in the land of the living.

  But I couldn’t have that, either. For so many reasons.

  What a life, eh?

  Fresh tears welled in my eyes, and I trembled with the force of them. This only made Flynn tighten his hold around me. I choked down another wave of my own anguish. Rather than fill the emptiness in me, my sadness only expanded it.

  Gently, I pushed against him and broke the moment. “I have to go back. To Glastonbury,” I added, although the clarification was more for myself than for Flynn.

  “Why?”

  “Why not?” Marius sang from the doorway. “It is glorious this time of year.”

  My eyes shot up at the music of his voice. He lounged against the door to my room, a smile on his face and his gaze sparkling. Fully intent on rushing to the door and wrapping myself around the satyr, I launched to my feet. Though relief buoyed me, fear lay heavy in my stomach like a lead weight. This push and pull left me standing stone-still.

  “Hey,” I squeaked like a lame eighth grader. “You’re back.”

  “So are you.” Marius’s smile faded a
s his eyes drifted down and focused on my chest. As if he could see through the T-shirt, his mouth twisted with disgust. His throat tightened visibly, and his next words came out bitter and hoarse. “Up and about, I see. Feeling all right?”

  “More or less,” I said.

  Seeing him there… Oh gods, a part of me stamped my feet that I was not allowed to need him or rejoice in his return. But him standing in the room restored life to this bone-weary soul. Some of the sadness ebbed away simply by being near him.

  Marius looked more like himself in a pair of faded jeans, a green shirt, and a pair of Birkenstocks. I tilted my head with a question. “More of your threads, Flynn?”

  “Pan’s balls, no,” Marius answered. “While I appreciate the earlier loan, I don’t feel comfortable in another man’s clothes. I popped to a shop on my way back from Father’s house. He sends his regards, Catherine, and says he’s glad to see you’ll live to torment me another day.”

  I smiled, genuinely relieved. “He’s okay?”

  Marius nodded. “Not a scratch on him. Some fire damage to the front of the house. Needs a new door and a good breeze to clear away the stink of Hellspawn, but otherwise the old homestead is just fine. More than I can say for Malcolm.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked with perhaps too much venom in my voice.

  “Father nearly flayed him alive. First time I’ve ever seen Mal remorseful about anything, honestly.”

  “I should fucking well hope he feels bad for nearly killing Cat.”

  Marius sobered. “You weren’t there, Flynn. You don’t know what we saw.” For a moment, his lovely green eyes swam out of focus. “One moment Belial had her by the throat. The next she was standing alone. Mal had pulled the trigger before he realized who he was shooting. Stupid bastard was trying to help her, but Belial outsmarted him.”

  “Doesn’t sound difficult to do,” Flynn snarled.

  “No one ever accused Malcolm of being the ripest grape on the vine,” Marius said with a shrug.