by Tyla Grey
He barked out a short laugh. “If I wished to, I could be miles from you in seconds.”
Startled, Eve shot him a sideways look of annoyance. “What, you can read my thoughts as well as get into my mind?”
“When you send them that strongly, yes. You might as well be shouting.” He turned his head to look at her while he leaped over a gnarled tree root. “Surely you can read people too?”
Piece of cake, she thought. With most people, anyway. Even if she couldn’t read their thoughts, she could sense their intentions – like when the Marriott brothers had been plotting to waylay her on the way home from high school. The tree branch that almost took their heads off soon changed their minds about that idea. They had no idea it was Eve who had engineered that little ‘accident’, but her grandmother did. She knew even before Eve called in to see her.
“So, you’re psychokinetic too,” Nana Alice told Eve, looking at her with more concern than anything else. And yeah… maybe a little pride. “Best not to let anyone know about that. And make sure you control it.”
The trouble was, Eve had no idea how to control it, so she just followed her instincts and set up shields so that her mind was encased in the equivalent of psychic titanium. Before sending any more tree branches flying people’s way she’d have do something similar to cracking a safe.
In front of her, Hunter stopped: they had reached the edge of the trees. Immediately, the same razor-edge of fear that she’d felt earlier lanced into Eve’s heart. She stopped in front of a tall, dark trunk and closed her eyes.
Terror. Sending her weak at the knees. No. NO.
“There is a reason you have always feared this place,” Hunter told her, his voice surprisingly gentle. “Your mother took care to guard the passage to the Otherworld with a protective spell. She couldn’t risk your coming through. If you feared it, you would stay away.”
A protective spell.
She turned to face him, shaking her head. “Look, I’ll do whatever you say. This is obviously bad shit. But just tell me, what is my mother – a witch? An enchantress? Is that what all this is about – she’s pissed off somebody and so now they’re after me?”
“She is fae,” he said, “and so are you.” With that, he urged her in front of him, forward into a dark tunnel that wound through the looming trees. He turned her around, but kept a hand on her shoulder. “This is a portal to the Otherworld. I will protect you, but prepare for anything.”
Eve was barely listening. Fae…? She was fae. Oh, how weird was that.
No, only part-fae, because her father was one-hundred-percent human …
Steel-like fingers propelled her forward, so she had no choice but to move ahead. Prepare for anything. Right. This morning she’d been a human working in a medical complex helping people with makeup; now she was –
Before she had time to finish the thought, the trees closed in and dark energy pulsed around her, and her whole life changed.
***
Eve blinked. She had expected to be sucked into some kind of tunnel and be spat out the other side into Fairyland, but it still looked like San Mateo County to her. She was standing in the middle of a dirt trail, eye-to-eye with a startled jackrabbit that abruptly skittered away into the scrub. Nausea roiled in her stomach and her knees threatened to give way.
She forced down the queasiness and raised her face to the thin rays of sun coming through oak leaves above her. The air around her felt different, though. It was lighter, more insubstantial. And there was a promise of… things, just out of reach.
Really, she had no words to describe what she was feeling right now.
Hunter’s warm hand left her shoulder, and he moved to face her, his face inscrutable. “How do you feel?”
“I’ll be okay in a minute.” Gradually, stability returned. Taking slow, even breaths, she regarded him curiously; he was subtly different, too. She now had a sense of layers within this man; more than she had been able to feel back home. “Where are we, exactly? It looks the same as the San Francisco area, but it can’t be.”
“You’re still near where you live. You’ve just moved to a different dimension. The place we left was earth-bound.” The whole time he spoke, his eyes checked the perimeter, and she could tell his senses were on high alert. But she was sure he had relaxed fractionally, too – probably because whatever was hunting her hadn’t been standing there waiting for them.
“Is this the same time and year and everything as where we left?”
“At the moment, although time shifts in strange ways in the faerie world. It would be quicker to move through time to where we want to go, but you can’t yet move through time and dimensions concurrently. We have to use faerie portals to take you where you’ll be safe.”
Her eyes moved over his very human-looking body, trying to imagine him dematerializing and appearing in some other time. No. Too weird. Her thoughts turned again to that the one amazing, inescapable fact that she kept repeating to herself: her mother was alive. The word ‘mother’ sounded so foreign. Her emotions were all over the place; she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to meet her, or damn her to hell for ignoring her daughter for nearly three decades.
“Am I…” she cleared her throat. “Am I going to meet my, um, mother?”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible. They will be monitoring her in all kinds of ways to try to get to you. “ He looked at her assessingly. “I know you can run for some distance, but we have to move fast. I need to lay a false trail for a few miles, cloak us both, and then slip through SF Gate 2.”
SF Gate 2? It sounded more like a terminal at San Francisco airport than a gateway to another world. She shook her head. “Fine.” Actually, it wasn’t fine at all. She had a thousand questions, but he was clearly anxious to be moving. Okay: she would go along with what he wanted – for a while. But once they stopped, she was going to pin him down about where she was going and who was after her. She gestured at the path ahead. “Let’s go, then.”
He didn’t move. “Before we do, it’s best if I establish a psi-link so I can monitor you more easily. If I feel you’re getting tired, I’ll just slow the pace.”
“A psi-link?”
“A connection between our minds.”
Eve stared at him, wishing she could read his thoughts. He seemed to have shields in place – just as she did. But hers were for a different reason. Did she want him to know the extent of her powers? If only she could be certain that she could trust him.
Someone else in her mind? No thank you. She set her jaw. “That won’t be necessary. I won’t get tired.”
The look he gave her made her feel like a stubborn two-year-old. “A psi-link means that I will also be able to sense an imminent attack on you. I need to be able to react immediately.”
She cast a nervous glance around. Attacked. Right. “Is this going to feel the same as what you did back at the house? When I could feel you coming into my mind?”
“More or less. It will help if you don’t fight it this time.”
She gritted her teeth and reluctantly allowed him superficial entry, while automatically shoring up the long-established barriers to the deeper layers of her mind. She so did not like this. She didn’t know this guy. Who knew what he might be able to do once he was in?
***
Hunter eased into her mind as gently as he could, teasing his way along unfamiliar pathways. It took less than ten seconds to go in deep enough to find anchor points, but ten seconds was unheard of with most of the people he encountered. It was usually instantaneous.
Even though she was permitting him to enter the outer layers, he could feel her resistance. None of them had realized she was this strong; she was, after all, only one quarter fae. Their surveillance over the years had shown her to be a highly skilled empath and healer, building a career path on Mortal Earth with psychokinetic abilities handed down from her EarthStar grandfather – of whom she knew nothing. He was aware that she thought her powers all came from her grandmother, Alice
.
Then, masked by the strongest shields he had ever seen, he spotted a tiny dark orb nested in the layers of her mind. It throbbed and pulsed with power, and when he moved closer to examine it, a wave of heat roared back at him, fierce and protective.
Whoa. What was that? He backed away, intrigued, and felt the protective wall draw back to surround the orb. Somehow, it still managed to exude threat. Stay away.
It seemed the prophesies had been right. Eve did have far more potential than most people dreamt of.
He withdrew from her mind, leaving in place a gossamer-fine psychic connection, and nodded. She was still looking at him unhappily; a frown creasing her brow and a warning in those silver-gray eyes. At that moment she looked uncannily like her mother.
Who was waiting to hear that he had accomplished his task and kept her daughter out of the hands of Roth and his followers.
“Come.” He turned and started running, flowing over the rough ground and leaves in a way that he knew she couldn’t hope to emulate. Not yet, anyway. At first he moved much slower than usual, but the psi-link showed that she was handling it easily. He increased the pace, and she kept up with that, too.
Is that the best you can manage, O Great Hunter?
The unexpected humor drew a grim smile out of him. She was resilient: most humans would not be taking events this well. He responded telepathically. I can move at ten times this speed – but can you?
Want to try me?
Not now. I can’t risk losing you. Almost there.
He ran for another half a mile, then stopped and turned. Eve was right behind him, a sheen of sweat on her brow, but breathing a lot more easily than he had expected. Short strands of blond hair stuck to her forehead, and he could see himself reflected in her sunglasses. She bent forward, resting her hands on her knees, and sucked in several deep breaths to recover.
“Now what?”
“We just laid the trail,” he told her. “It’s time to disappear.”
***
Eve straightened up and looked at him, noting that his eyes were constantly scanning the terrain; they didn’t rest on one spot for more than a nanosecond. He was still on full alert, ready for anything. Through the link that he had established, she could feel his awareness reaching out in all directions.
Behind him, she could see the ocean disappearing into the horizon. They had circled around out of the canyon on to the coastal prairie, and another few hundred yards would take them down across rocks onto the beach.
“Disappear, you said. How?”
“We’re at an intersection of worlds here. They will think we’ve gone through SF2, where I usually operate – and where your mother lives.” He nodded to his left.
Eve’s eyes followed the path indicated by his movement. She could see nothing but more trees. And rocks. And leaf mulch. Your standard canyon-type-stuff. She’d take his word for it that there was another portal of some kind there.
“But we’re not going that way?”
“No.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “We’re going that way.”
“To the rocks?”
“To the ocean.”
Eve’s gaze tracked across the rocks to where waves were rolling in, spending themselves on the sand. Sunlight glinted off the water, sending shards of hard bright light into her eyes. She didn’t see a boat anywhere. Somehow she felt that a boat would be far too mundane a mode of transportation for Hunter anyway. So what did that leave?
Swimming?
She looked back at him again and sighed. “I hardly dare ask.”
“I know you can swim,” he said, “and your genetic structure protects you from cold that would kill many humans after twenty minutes. This won’t trouble you. We swim out just a few hundred yards, then dive. I have to cloak you for that distance. It will feel strange, but it is necessary.”
His words about cloaking barely penetrated. She was still stuck on the ‘…then dive’ part. Any time she had dived under a wave, she had seen nothing but water and sand. Dive to where?
And how could she breathe? Despite having fae blood – which still sounded bizarre – she also owned a pair of very mortal lungs. Which tended to fill with water if the owner didn’t come up for air.
Then abruptly, the link that he had built between them was gone. Instead, the air around her seemed to shimmer and fold, and the trees and scrub surrounding them faded. Eve instinctively put out a hand, trying to feel whatever it was surrounded them. There was nothing there – nothing to feel, but it was like looking through a veil.
“That’s the cloak in place. It will stay there until I remove it.” He turned. “Follow me.”
Feeling a bit like a pet dog, Eve obediently trotted after him. He seemed content to walk, this time, rather than run. Maybe he was feeling more secure with the cloaking thingummy in place. Without needing to focus so much on putting her feet in the right place, Eve took the time to study her escort.
As well showing the bulge of the knife he wore at his belt, the fitted t-shirt outlined conditioned trapezoids and rear delts. Plainly, he worked out. That is, if beings from another world did something as mundane as ‘work out’. Maybe they had combat training instead, to deal with the bad guys who were supposed to be pursuing them. Eve usually worked her back muscles with barbell shrugs and weighted hyperextensions. He probably trained with a battle-ax.
Why did she feel that she knew him? There had to be more of a link than him transporting her across worlds as a baby. She frowned at his back as they left the shelter of the trees and moved down to the rocks that rose up from the edge of the sand. He had said “I know you can swim” – but how did he know? He – or ‘they’ – had to have been monitoring her. Had she, maybe, caught a glimpse of him when he was watching her, though the years?
The thought sent an odd tremor through her. This man, watching her as she went about her daily business. Like a guardian angel.
Or a stalker.
Had he been lurking about when she was a teenager? When she’d brought down a tree branch on the Marriott boys?
When she was on her first date? Ugh.
Something else to put on the long list of things to ask him about.
He jumped easily down over the rocks, and strode to the water’s edge. Foam lapped at the toes of his boots. He focused on a point near the horizon at about ten o’clock, and pointed. “We swim in that direction. I’ll go first. When I stop, it’ll be time to dive, then you swim along the sea bed in the same direction.”
“And then what?” Eve asked, nerves adding a tremor to her voice.
“You’ll feel yourself slip across. Remember the sensation when you came across from Human Earth?”
Since it had been less than an hour before, she was hardly likely to have forgotten the nausea and disorientation. Oh joy. “Yes.”
“It’ll be much the same. You’ll be in the water, but you’ll come up and it will be another dimension of the Otherworld. It’s still the San Francisco area. We just refer to it as SF3.” He moved behind her and put both hands on her shoulders. They burned like brands; Eve had to restrain a gasp. “I’m directing your energy so you can learn to connect with the path to SF3. Look where I told you to swim. Tell me when you feel the path lock in.”
Tell him when she felt a path lock in? Eve sucked at her bottom lip and stared at the glittering points of sunlight in the direction he had pointed, and tried to ignore the fact that the heat he was pouring into her was going straight between her legs, surging in and filling her with erotic fire. It was unexpected, and wholly shocking. Holy cow. Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“Concentrate!” came an annoyed hiss in her ear.
All right for you, buddy, Eve shot back before thinking. Then she froze, aghast. Could he feel what she was feeling? Did he know what this was doing to her? Oh, crap. She blinked and stared fiercely at the sea. Lock on, dammit, lock on.
Then it happened: the heat inside her coalesced into a laser-bright ray that lanced out and locked onto a point in th
e ocean. Bang. Just like that, she was locked in. Amazing. She huffed out the breath she hadn’t even realized she was holding, still feeling heat from his fingers.
“Your concentration span,” he said, removing his hands from her shoulders and moving to her side, “is equivalent to that of a small child.”
Eve treated him to a super-special Black Look, doing her best to ignore the sexual heat that still lingered below. “Seeing this is all pretty new to me,” she said coldly, “I think you’re being a bit harsh. You might be used to locking on to invisible paths, but I’m not.”
Was that a glint of laughter in his eyes? Shit. He did know.
Embarrassed and more than a bit annoyed, she directed her gaze at the horizon. “Hadn’t we better get going? Since this is all so urgent.”
She turned and squelched her way into the shore dump; freezing water lapping against her ankles. Swimming in shoes was going to slow her down some. Could this day get any odder?
Without waiting to see if he was following, she speared under the incoming wave and struck out strongly, drawn along by the path he had established in her mind. Irrationally, the thought hit her that a homing beacon like this would be handy for the next ocean swim. Then she remembered that she probably wouldn’t be doing any more ocean swims for a while. Maybe never.
He didn’t have to tell her when they reached the point where they had to dive. The sensation of a path opening up in front of her simply stopped, and so did they.
“Ready?” He didn’t give her time to agree or disagree. “I’m removing the cloak. Dive immediately, and you’ll be drawn through.”
The translucent veil around them lifted.
And all hell broke loose.
***
The sky darkened; wind whistled around their heads, and the gently swelling waves turned an angry dark green and reared up, spray flying. Eve saw Hunter’s eyes widen as he looked past her to the beach, then he yelled “Dive! Dive!”