by Jasmine Walt
“I guess we can hunt those things, whatever they are,” I said, pointing at the herd off in the distance.
“I’d rather find something smaller,” Iannis said as he came to stand by my side. “There are probably rabbits and deer, or something like them anyway.”
I bit my lip, fighting back the surge of disappointment that threatened to overwhelm me. “I guess we need to replenish our energy before we try the spell again,” I said forlornly.
Iannis put an arm around my shoulder and kissed the top of my head. “Don’t despair,” he murmured against my scalp. “We’ll figure this out. And just look how far you’ve come as a mage. Did you ever think you would end up traveling to different worlds?”
“No,” I admitted, leaning into his embrace. “If we ever get out of this, we’ll have some great stories to tell our children.”
Iannis hugged me a little tighter at that. “Yes, we will. And our grandchildren too, though I doubt they’ll believe us when they get older. Now let’s find something to eat, and some shelter.”
I shifted quickly into panther form, then took off through the grass at a trot, intent on exploring while Iannis set off to find a place to camp. At this level, it was easy to pick up the various scent trails, and in no time, I caught a scent very similar to rabbit, though there was an appetizing clover-like odor mixed in it. My mood picked up as I followed it for a good half mile, then soured as I found its burrow. I didn’t need to dig into it to scent the litter huddled beneath it, or the tiny animals’ fear. No matter how hungry I was, I wasn’t going to kill a mother and leave her babies to starve.
The next scent trail I picked up was more promising—a small group of deer, just two miles south of the weird bison herd I’d seen earlier. The bison themselves were tempting, but I didn’t think I could take them down without the help of magic, and the deer were much easier. I killed a young, yellow-furred male with very little effort, then used a levitation spell to bring it back to Iannis.
Thankfully, our serapha charms were working once again, and I was able to find Iannis quickly. He’d made camp at the top of a hill, not too far from the forest, and already had a good fire going.
“That was fast,” Iannis said as I changed back into human form. “You were gone for little over an hour.”
“I was motivated,” I said with a smile as I set to helping him skin and gut the animal for dinner. “After being separated against our will, I have no intention of letting you out of my sight any longer than necessary.”
“The feeling is entirely mutual,” he said with a tender smile that made my stomach flip-flop.
We roasted the deer over the fire, then used the pile of large branches and leaves Iannis had gathered to build a shelter for the evening. The meat was juicier than I expected—the deer in this world were fattier than the ones on Recca. Soon enough, we were lying back on our sleeping bags in the tent, listening to the fire crackle as we snuggled.
“If we try not to think about it too much, we can almost pretend that we’re on our honeymoon,” Iannis said, and I laughed.
“I’d envisioned white beaches rather than camping in the woods, but this will do in a pinch,” I said, skimming my hand through his long hair. It felt so good to have him back, and as he stroked a hand gently down my side, my skin began to heat. “I don’t see any reason why we can’t celebrate,” I purred, moving closer.
Iannis slipped his arm around me, and our mouths met in a deep, passionate kiss. We took it slow, with soft, loving kisses, and I let myself melt into him, forgetting about the worries of the world. His strong muscles flexed beneath my hands as I rubbed slow circles around his back, and then he rolled me over, trailing more kisses along the edge of my jaw, then down my neck.
“It feels like an age since I’ve last made love to you,” he murmured against my collarbone. I felt a tingle of magic, and then suddenly our clothes were gone and we were skin to skin. I arched my hips into his hard length, and he pressed me back down with a growl, biting down. I moaned as his hand slid between my legs, where I was already wet and aching, and I opened readily for him.
“Yes,” I moaned as his thumb found my sweet spot. He slid two fingers inside me as he stroked my clit, and I came almost immediately, arching off the ground again as pleasure speared through me. I scored my nails down his back as he kept going, using those talented fingers to drive me wild as he sucked one of my nipples into his mouth. I was on fire, a deep hunger clawing me from the inside, and I wanted to wrap myself up in him until I didn’t know where he began and I ended.
“Please,” I panted after he’d sent me over the edge again. I reached for his cock, and he hissed as I gently began to stroke him. “I want you inside me.”
“More,” he said, wrapping his hand around mine and urging me faster. I kissed him hard as he did, loving the feel of him in my hand as I tasted him. He groaned into my mouth, and I took advantage of the distraction, rising up to flip him onto his back.
“Gotcha,” I said with a grin as I slowly lowered myself onto him. We both moaned as he filled me completely, stretching me until I was both satisfied and aching for more. Bracing my hands on his rock-solid chest, I began to rock up and down, gently at first, then faster as the pleasure began to build inside me. Iannis’s eyes blazed, his violet irises taking on a warm glow from the flickering fire, and he gripped my hips, pushing me faster as he thrust.
I leaned down for a kiss, and he grabbed my ass and ground my hips against his hardness, triggering another climax. I groaned into his mouth as I shook with pleasure, holding on for dear life as he continued to pound into me. Warmth filled me as he came inside me with a rush, and his body stiffened beneath mine in joyful release.
Sighing, I collapsed against him, and we lay there in silence, panting as we worked to catch our breath. His heart hammered against my ear as I traced patterns through the light dusting of hair on his chest, and as his heartbeat evened out, it became a comforting sound lulling me to sleep.
“I love you,” Iannis said softly as he stroked my hair. I mumbled that I loved him too, then fell asleep to the sound of the fire crackling and his slow, steady breathing. There would be time enough to worry about our circumstances tomorrow—for now, just being here with him was enough.
18
The next morning, I awoke to the sensation of something warm and heavy sliding along my leg. At first, I thought it was simply Iannis rubbing his foot against my calf, but the something began to wrap around my leg in a way that a human leg definitely wasn’t capable of.
“What the…” I mumbled blearily as I pulled the blanket aside. My eyes widened as a bright yellow snake lifted his massive triangular head and flicked his forked tongue at me. “Fuck!” I yelled, trying to leap to my feet, but the snake squeezed harder, preventing me from getting up.
“What is it?” Iannis shouted, jolting upright. He swore at the sight of the boa, who was rapidly winding itself around my body, though luckily my arms were still free. The giant reptile was halfway up my torso when my brain finally kicked in, and I pulled one of my crescent knives, then grabbed the snake by the throat and impaled him with the long end of the weapon.
“Eww,” I groaned as black blood splashed all over my face. I gagged as I accidentally got some in my mouth, and turned my head to spit it out.
“Well, that was quite a scare,” Iannis said as he pulled the now limp snake off my body. The reptile was very heavy, a good twelve feet long and six inches around, and I shuddered in disgust as I watched Iannis drag the carcass out of the tent. “Do you think we should have it for breakfast?” he called over his shoulder.
“Ha. Ha.” I rolled my eyes, then got to my feet and took stock of myself. Thankfully I hadn’t been wearing my clothes, but the snake blood had gotten all over our sleeping bags. I used a cleaning spell to take care of the stains, then pulled on my clothes as Iannis came back into the tent.
“Is that really necessary?” he asked, still buck-naked himself. “It isn’t as if there’s anyo
ne around to see us.”
I laughed. “We can’t spend all day having sex,” I said. “And besides, I’d rather not be naked when the next predator comes by to eat me.”
“True,” Iannis agreed as he donned his robe. “It seems the fire wasn’t enough to warn them off. I’ll have to put a protection spell around the perimeter.”
We cut off some of the leftover deer and broke our fast as we watched the quasi-bison graze in the distance—Iannis and I decided to call them “quasis” for short.
“How were you able to get away from Solantha at a time like this?” I asked. “I know you’ve got Chen to run things in your absence, but with the Convention about to start, and you gone, she must be pulling her hair out.”
“Yes, and I feel bad about leaving her alone to deal with that mess,” Iannis said. “But without you, there can be no wedding, and the Convention is of little import to me. Of course I had to come after you.”
“How did you know that I was in Manuc?” I asked. “Were you able to sense me? The serapha charms weren’t working before. Ta’sradala must have done something to them.”
Iannis shook his head. “They didn’t work for me either, and I was terrified that meant you were dead. Luckily, Liu saw you being pulled into the pool—she was hiding in a cherry tree nearby. From the way she described the scene, I gathered someone with incredible power had to have taken you, and the list of suspects was short enough. No living mage could have done it.”
“Not even you?”
“Not even me. Coupled with the recent letter from my mother, Manuc seemed like the most likely place to start looking. In fact, Aunt Deryna sent a message warning me of what had happened that found me just as I was embarking on the east coast.” He looked grave. “She warned me to prepare for the worst—that it was unlikely I’d still find you alive. It is a good thing she underestimated you, as so many have done before.”
I grimaced. “No, her prognosis was pretty spot-on. I’m very lucky to be alive. Your grandmother definitely didn’t intend for me to survive those awful tests. And now that she sent you off to that horrible desert with me, I can’t imagine she cares for anyone at all. All that bluster about you being part of the family…I have to wonder how she treats her enemies, if this is how she acts toward her loved ones.” I shook my head in disgust.
Iannis laughed sharply. “At least now you know why I don’t like to speak of my Tua heritage. I’ve often wished my mother were an ordinary mage or even human. My greatest ambition is to be as unlike Ta’sradala and her ilk as possible.”
“When you consider how helpless we were against Tua power, maybe you can better understand the resentment of ordinary humans and shifters against mages.”
Iannis frowned. “It is not at all the same. We are not congenitally capricious and amoral—”
I raised an eyebrow. “In some cases, it is exactly alike, especially from the victims’ point of view.”
Iannis was silent for a while, but the frown lingered.
“Besides, not all Tua are evil like Ta’sradala, no matter how powerful they are compared to us,” I continued on, mollifying my accusation a bit. “The younger ones I met were a lot more reasonable and actually helped me survive. I think you were just unlucky to get stuck with Ta’sradala as your ancestor.”
“Very likely,” Iannis admitted. “Kidnapping my grandfather was rather outrageous, even for her race.”
“In any case, I’m very glad you found me, even if we are stuck in this place,” I said, squeezing his hand. “Now we just have to figure out how to get out of here.”
He brightened at that. “Once we can get back to Recca, we can use my gulaya to go straight home,” Iannis said. “But we need to figure out how to ensure the dimension spell takes us there rather than somewhere else. We got lucky last time, landing in a world with breathable air and food, but we may not the next time around.”
“I wish I could transmit the dimension walking spell, the way the Tua did to me,” I said. “There are…technical aspects that I don’t understand, and I’m not sure I even have the words to put them into human language. I feel like if we could just figure out the formula behind the magic, we could direct the spell to where we want it to go.”
Iannis frowned. “The only way I know of doing that is the knowledge transfer.”
I bit my lip at that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do a knowledge transfer—I knew how the spell worked, thanks to Fenris’s knowledge, and it could only be done once. If the transfer was successful, Iannis would have access to my entire lifetime of memories. Fenris was incredibly brave and selfless to give me access to his past—if I scoured them thoroughly enough, I could access his most intimate secrets, his most humiliating moments, recollections of all the stupid things he had said and done over the long decades of his life. I did not want to know all that about Iannis, and would have refused if he’d offered. Was I really willing to give Iannis that same power over me? I trusted him with my life, but could our upcoming marriage survive if I exposed myself so completely to him? I would have to live with him afterward, knowing that he had intimate knowledge of everything about me, that I had no secrets left.
“I’m not sure that I’m ready to do that,” I said cautiously. “Not unless there really is no other option.”
Iannis nodded. “I don’t blame you. It is a big step, and irrevocable.”
We spent another two days and nights out on that prairie as we tried to figure out the solution. This time we hunted down one of the quasis, knowing the meat would last us much longer than a deer. The herd of giant bovines were unafraid when we approached in human form, telling us that they had never been hunted by our kind, but the moment I changed into a panther and sprang for the weakest among them, an older quasi with a marked limp, they scattered. Between my hunting prowess and Iannis’s magic, we were able to bring down the lame quasi easily enough, and we enjoyed its meat even as the novelty of our surroundings began to wear off.
On the third morning, as I sipped a weak tea we’d brewed from some prairie flowers that Iannis had determined were safe to ingest, I sorted through the knowledge the Tua had given me for what seemed like the millionth time. On a whim, I gathered it all together, then repacked it into the shining trunk it had come in, conjuring it again in my mind’s eye from wherever it had disappeared to.
I wonder if I can replicate the trunk in my mind, I thought as I drummed my fingers against my thigh. I held the knowledge in my mind’s eye and concentrated, willing a duplication to form. To my delight, the trunk blurred, then split apart into two separate ones.
“Iannis,” I called. “Come here a second!”
“What is it?” he asked, moving away from the fire he’d been tending. He crouched down beside me, his brow furrowed in curiosity. “Have you found something?”
“I think so,” I said, pressing two fingers against that furrowed brow. I felt the knowledge pass between my mind and into Iannis’s, and he gasped, his violet eyes going wide.
“Did it work?” I asked, breathless with excitement. “Can you see the spell now?”
“I believe I can,” Iannis said wonderingly. He sat down with a thump in the grass next to me and stared off into the distance, unseeing. “Yes, I can see what you meant about the technical aspects of this spell. This is going to take some time for me to puzzle out.”
“But you can puzzle it out, right?” I asked eagerly. Was this it? Were we finally going to be able to get home?
“Yes,” he said impatiently as he pulled out a leather-bound book and a pen from his magical sleeve. His eyes gleamed, alight with the joy of a difficult challenge as he opened the book and began to scribble. “No wonder you had trouble with the technical part …” he murmured after a minute. “It would seem the Tua use an entirely different system of mathematics than we do.”
“Do you think you can crack it?” I asked eagerly.
“I certainly hope so.” He didn’t even look up at me. “Now give me some peace and quiet. I have work t
o do.”
19
Iannis spent the rest of the day scribbling down formulas in his notebook, then scratching them out. I busied myself making things out of the parts of the quasi we had saved—Fenris’s outdoorsman knowledge included instructions on how to magically tan hides and use the leather to make clothing and bedding, how to craft weapons and tools from the horns and bones, and even ways to use the hair and sinew to make thread, headdresses, and ornaments. Fenris had culled some of the spells from the antique memoirs of mage explorers and pioneers who had first traversed and settled the area of the Federation, and since he remembered everything he ever read, I spent some time revisiting those old accounts. By the time lunch came around, I’d successfully turned the quasi horns into a set of spear handles and had several large pieces of hard leather.
Not exactly useful, but it kept my mind off my impatience to go home, so I could give Iannis space to work.
“I think I am getting closer with each iteration,” Iannis said as we wolfed down a quasi-bison stew I’d made using some herbs and tubers I’d found while foraging in the woods the previous day. “If I am able to figure this out, what we have been given is going to revolutionize both physics and mathematics. And as for the practical applications…” His eyes shone with the possibilities despite his frustration, and I had to smile.
“I’m sure you and Elnos will be holed up in your study for days, once we finally get home,” I said. “The two of you are going to become mad scientists together.”
“Inventors,” Iannis corrected with a smile. “And we’ll probably publish a number of papers that should interest all the universities on Recca. Unfortunately, figuring out how to apply this knowledge to travel between dimensions practically, and safely for that matter, is proving more difficult than I anticipated. I need to get it right—now that I know more, I understand just how risky our last jump was. We are very lucky to be alive.”