by Anna Durand
"If you attempt this," he said, "and you don't have the requisite trace of elemental energy, you will die."
I pushed away from him. "I have to risk it."
He folded his arms around me.
I squeezed my eyes shut. Padlocked my arms around him. Held my breath. And prayed.
The ground dropped away. The silence of a vacuum engulfed us as we spun round and round, up and up. Icy needles pricked at my skin. I gripped Nevan so hard my arms trembled from the effort. Whirling. Soaring. Shattering and reforming.
My feet plunked down on solid ground. Nevan's embrace loosened, though his hands lingered on my hips. The solidity of his touch grounded me, more than the actual earth beneath my boots.
The throaty roar of a waterfall pelted my eardrums. Light glowed on the other side of my lids. I peeled them apart.
And yelped.
We perched on the rock ledge alongside the falls. My right toe caught in a depression and I stumbled sideways, flailing my arms to regain my balance. My boot slipped off the edge, skewing my center of gravity. I lurched toward the precipice.
Nevan seized me around the waist, hoisting me up and over to plunk me down on the ledge. He braced my body with his, both arms snug around me, his hands fastened over my belly.
Terrible visions assailed my mind, of my body plummeting and crashing into the water, of bones fracturing, of water choking my lungs.
Nevan gave me a gentle shake and hollered to be heard above the thundering cascade. "Are ye damaged, love?"
"No." I mashed myself into him, my toes frighteningly close to the edge. "Terrified, but not damaged."
"It's a six-foot drop. Far from life threatening."
I peered at the pool below, at its water churning and foaming. "I don't like water."
"Then we have a problem." He nodded toward the gushing cataract behind us. "To reach the Unseen, we must first breach the falls."
"I don't like deep bodies of water, like ponds and lakes. A waterfall is doable."
He squinted at me, searching my face, a question poised on his tongue and evident in his eyes — but then he nodded, seeming satisfied. Nudging me away, he grasped my shoulders and rotated me to face the waterfall. "Jump."
The hairs at my nape bristled and my skin went clammy, not entirely from the water droplets peppering my arms and face. Jump into the falls? What if I blundered off the edge? Or smacked head-on into a rock wall?
"I've taken many mortals through the water," he said, his body blockading me from behind, leaving me no escape route. "This is not the dangerous part."
Great. That eased my mind. Not.
"I'll show you." Nevan hopped around me. His feet slapped onto the ledge in front of me. Water sprayed over his bronzed flesh, glazing it with a faint sheen. I stretched out my fingers to skate them over his damp skin, but just as I touched him, he spun away from me.
And leaped into the falls.
"Hey, wait!" I lifted my hands, as if I might hold back the raging waters or maybe part them like Moses. No such luck. I inched closer and my boots skidded on the wet rock. I flung a hand out to the solid sandstone cliff beside me, thwarting my fall, sparing my skull from a bone-splitting impact.
I took a fortifying breath. Straightening, my hand firmly on the stone wall, I edged toward the cascade. Drops spattered my face, raining particles of a chill on my skin as the liquid evaporated. The clean scent of water mingled with the dankness of wet dirt and the racket of water pummeling rock pulsated through my skull with deafening force.
What on earth was I doing? I worked in a rock shop, serving tourists who thought agate was the name of a teen pop singer. I did not allow strange, half-naked men to lure me into waterfalls.
Except today, apparently, I did.
From my position mere inches from the falls, I noticed the ledge extended behind the curtain of water, where I could just make out a yawning darkness indicative of an empty area beyond. Nevan hadn't thrown himself into the cliff of sheer stone behind the water. He'd leaped through the falls, into whatever space lay behind it.
Okay. I could do this. Saving myself from prison required a literal leap of faith, with Nevan on the other side to catch me. I tensed, bracing for the impact of hard, cold water. Clenched my fists. Shut my eyes.
"Porter!" Travis and his deputies rampaged toward the railing. The sheriff's voice echoed off the trees. "Porter, get the hell offa there! What in blue blazes are ya doing? Trying to break your fool neck?"
My attention diverged, like a TV displaying two feeds in a split-screen effect. My nails scraped at the rock, but my left foot skidded sideways. My fingers grasped at depressions in the stone, steadying my balance. I pushed away from the wall and confronted the curtain of water.
"Lindsey, no!" A note of panic quavered in Travis's voice.
I jumped.
The water swallowed me. Cold. Sharp. Tiny nails driven into my flesh. I cleared the falls and my boots struck solid rock.
Panting, but with both feet flat on the ground, I struggled to orient myself in my new environment. The frigid water left me shivering, my teeth chattering. My hair and clothes clung to me, sodden and heavy. I stood within a small cavern, from the outside hidden by the falls but now revealed before me. To my left and right, rock walls rose up to meet the ceiling, where it arched across the space at least five feet above. Water-filled depressions pockmarked the sandstone floor.
The thundering of the water had faded into a dull rumble. I glanced backward, but the cascade still blocked the entrance. I couldn't explain the dulling of its roar, though the effect reminded me of wearing foam earplugs.
To my left, a few feet away, Nevan braced his body with one hand on the wall.
"Why is the noise quieter in here?" I asked.
"Magic."
I supposed that was all the explanation I'd get, so I returned to surveying the cavern. The floor was level, if pockmarked, and strands of green copper ore weaved through the arching ceiling. In front of me loomed an unnatural darkness. It shimmered and swirled, in a striking echo of Nevan's eyes. In contrast to the bright metallic hues of his irises, this whirlpool gyrated with a fathomless blackness, as if it were made of crude oil sprinkled with starlight, a wall of glittering emptiness stretching into eternity.
The closer I approached to the shimmering void, the more colors I detected inside it. Thin ribbons of iridescent blue, green, and purple twirled within the black. I lifted a hand to touch it but felt nothing, as if I'd tried to caress the air. My fingertips disappeared into the opalescent shadows. Goose bumps materialized on my arms, heralding a tingling chill.
Get out of here.
My subconscious had a point. I ought to run. Right this instant.
I couldn't. I had to know.
Nevan's fingers wound around mine. He sidled past me, partway into the shimmering abyss. One side of his body vanished.
I stood paralyzed before the portal to another world.
He tugged my hand in quiet invitation.
My gut clenched. Ohhhh, this is a really bad idea.
I did it anyway. I marched straight into the blackness.
Light blinded me. Radiant warmth chased away the chill of the cavern, calming my shivers. I squinted into the brightness, which emanated from above like the sun. As my eyes adjusted to the change, I noted the source of the light. It was the sun.
Which made no sense. I'd walked into darkness. Yet here I stood, bathed in sunshine with a tepid breeze tickling my face.
Nevan strode past me, freeing my hand.
I turned in a circle, awed by my surroundings. Behind me, where the cavern and waterfall should've been, a six-foot-tall boulder hunkered. Water burbled up out of the boulder's top, spilling down its sloping sides and onto the ground, where the water collected in a pool about ten feet in diameter. Tiny waves lapped at the pool's edge, inches from m
y feet.
Everywhere around me, thick trees hulked at least a hundred feet overhead. In place of leaves, stringy stuff reminiscent of moss dangled from the branches. The sky shone an ethereal blue, as dark and lustrous as a sapphire. The sun blazed within the blue, a flaming diamond embedded in the sky. Unseen birds chirped and twittered, their songs like nothing on earth. Indescribable scents wafted on the breeze, tantalizing and mysterious, delicious and dangerous. Everything here struck me as beautiful but wrong.
Nevan leaned his hip against a tree trunk on the other side of the pool, his arms folded over his chest. Our trip through the waterfall had drenched him too, molding the loincloth to his flesh and slicking his hair back. My gaze tracked the lines of his muscles down his body, over his hips, along those powerful thighs. His skin had become a glistening tapestry, dappled with beads of water, kissed by the unearthly gleam of the sun.
My hand rose to my throat of its own volition, my fingers stroked my skin.
God, he was as beautiful and strange as the surroundings. The memory of of our scorching kiss rocketed through me, my body reliving the bliss of his hands groping and his tongue milking every ounce of passion from me.
"Come back to me," Nevan murmured, suddenly right in front of me.
I blinked rapidly, but couldn't shake the lightheaded awe — of him, of this place, of the surreal dream my life had become. "Imposs — wha — "
His lips curved in a closed-mouth smile and lines of amusement crinkled around his eyes. "You'll need to finish a sentence, or at least a word, if you're wanting me to respond."
Rationality burst back into me with a jolt. I'd have to wait until later to process everything I'd seen and experienced. As for the lust-inducing memory of Nevan's mouth… Best not think of that at all.
Nevan studied me with his glowing, amber eyes. His tongue slipped out to wet his lips.
I repressed the urge to squirm under his scrutiny. "I gather this whole 'touch of the Unseen world' stuff is designed to keep pesky mortals out of your precious realm of magic and creepiness."
"Naturally." He brushed a lock of hair from my shoulder, his fingers teasing my skin. "If it were easy to enter the Unseen, marauding droves of your kind would overrun our world."
I stifled a laugh, sort of. It broke out as a wet snort. "Come on, we lowly humans aren't that bad."
"You aren't bad at all." He ran his finger along the top of my ear, tucking my hair behind it. "Allowing the teeming hordes free entrance would rather negate the unseen aspect of this realm."
"I see your point." But another thought occurred to me, and I scrunched up my lips. "But you guys have free entrance to our world. That's not fair at all."
"Not free entrance." He twined a lock of my hair around his finger, winding it loosely, letting it fall, and winding it again, his gaze trained on the task. "There is a boundary which limits our egress."
"Your egress?" My derisive grunt turned breathless as he trailed his fingertips down my throat. Not fair at all. "Nobody talks like that. Besides, I haven't seen any walls or fences blocking your way."
"It is a magical boundary," he said on a sigh, as if I'd questioned the existence of gravity. "We cannot travel more than one mile from any of the gateways between the worlds."
"The waterfall. It's a gateway."
"All bodies of water serve as doorways."
"Hmm." I thought back to our encounter in my car, when he'd freaked out at the sight of a mile marker up ahead. "That's why you nearly got us into a car crash. We were approaching one mile from the falls."
"Ah… yes."
"Jesus, why didn't you just say so?" I rolled my gaze up to the heavens, shaking my head. "Could've saved us both a lot of grief if you'd told me the truth right then."
"Perhaps." He winked, grinning. "But where's the fun in that?"
"Do you honestly think it's fun to almost get me killed?"
His grin crumbled. "I would never harm you, if I could prevent it. What happened in your vehicle was an accident, one for which I have apologized."
"Yeah, I know." I paused, then said, "But you've been in my apartment. It's outside the boundary."
"Outside one boundary, but inside another. There is a small, secluded waterfall nearby."
"Guess I'll take your word for that. What happens if you try to cross one of these invisible lines?"
"Annihilation."
"Of the world?" I squeaked the question, my heart surging into my throat.
"No, love." He patted my cheek. "Annihilation of the immortal being who tries to violate the boundary."
"Oh." I yanked my hands out of my pockets to rub my arms. "Guess I can understand why you flipped out in the car."
"I did not flip either out or in." Nevan backed away, tripped over a rock, and staggered forward, about to collide with me. Sputtering a curse, he righted himself with a little hop. "I requested you stop the car."
"Requested?" I laughed. "Oh, come off it. You totally flipped your lid."
He frowned, brushing himself off. "We'd best track down the bloody leprechaun, if we're to have any hope of resurrecting your deceased friend."
"Shoplifter."
"Pardon?"
"The dead guy. He was a shoplifter, not my friend. I didn't know him and I damn sure didn't like him."
"I appreciate the clarification." In one swift movement, he planted a firm kiss on my cheek, stepped away, and tugged my hand to urge me into motion. "But I wasn't concerned about your relationship with a corpse."
As we headed across the clearing, I bumped my shoulder against his arm. "And what about when he's not dead? Will your green beast rear its head again?"
He froze, forcing me to stop with him. "You think of me as a beast?"
"No, it was a joke." I'd nicked a nerve, but why? An instinct warned me not to pursue the topic further, at least until I'd learned a little more about my would-be savior. Pasting on a smile, the one I wore so often it hurt, I said, "Let's find this leprechaun, okay? I'd really prefer not to go to prison."
"Leprechauns are terribly unpleasant."
Enunciating each word with exaggerated lip movements, I said, "Take me to the leprechaun."
"As you wish."
Nevan shepherded me into the shadows of the forest, down a dirt path veiled in shadows. The further we traveled, the more his smile faded and his body stiffened. I struggled to keep up with his brisk pace. Underneath his flippant disguise, he must've been annoyed at the prospect of visiting a leprechaun. Pardon me, a bloody leprechaun.
Jeez, I hoped he hadn't meant that literally.
The path dead-ended at a small clearing. Nevan stopped at the edge of the trees, his body blocking my view. He turned sideways, his expression no longer amused but tight with tension. Whoa. He must've really disliked leprechauns.
"There," Nevan said, jerking a thumb toward the clearing. "You'll need to do the talking because the leprechaun won't speak to me."
"What did you, sleep with his sister?"
Nevan flinched. "Indeed I did."
"Oh." I'd been joking, but his confession spurred a stab of jealousy. I didn't want to know, not really, but my mouth seemed to have a mind of its own. "Of course you did. How many women have you screwed?"
He rubbed his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. "I have lived for thousands of years, and for most of that time, I recklessly indulged my baser instincts."
"In other words," I said, "you've boinked thousands, maybe millions, of women. Lovely."
He dropped his hand from his forehead, clenching it into a fist. "I make no excuses for my behavior, but never once have I forced a female into my bed. They came to me willingly. Tris's sister pursued me, in fact."
I tore my hand out of his and stomped toward the clearing, ducking under a low-hanging branch. Tendrils of mossy stuff drooped down from it. A clump of the gunk lodged i
n my hair and I batted it away. "I was right, wasn't I? You are a woodland lothario."
He growled in frustration, punched his fist into a tree, and shook his hand as if the motion could quell his temper. He breathed in and out, in and out, until the dark tension in him ebbed. "All you need know is that for the past century I have been celibate."
"A century?" I looked straight into his eyes, one part of me unable to accept his statement, another part wishing it were true. He hadn't lied to me so far — that I knew of — and I couldn't believe he would lie about this. Being a thirty-two-year-old virgin didn't sound so bad compared to a century of celibacy.
Nevan gave a curt nod.
"Okay then." I swung my arms at my sides, slapping my palms together each time they met in front of me. "I have no idea what to say to that."
"Say nothing. For once." He moved closer, taking my hands in his, and fixed an earnest gaze on me. "Listen to me, Lindsey. On this side of the falls, you cannot trust anyone."
"I trust you." No clue why, but I did.
"Don't." He leaned in, his voice infused with a quiet intensity. "Anyone you meet may try to trick you into a bargain. Do not speak the words 'please' or 'thank you' in this realm and never — never — agree to anything. Do you understand?"
"Not really." My throat constricted at the pain in his eyes. "But I'll do what you want. I prom — Is it okay to say 'promise'?"
"I'd prefer you didn't risk it." He freed my hands. "I know you will do as you say. There's no need for promises."
"How about if I pinky swear?"
Nevan's lips twitched. "Also not necessary, but not dangerous either."
He gestured for me to head for the clearing and walked alongside me as we entered the open area. Nevan slowed his pace, lagging by a couple paces. When I halted, he stayed behind me.
In the clearing's center, seated atop a flat boulder about two feet tall, hunched a rangy teenager. His brown hair, clipped into a buzz cut, matched the freckles dotting his peaches-and-cream skin. The clomping of my footsteps stirred him from his contemplation of a rock he gripped in one hand. His bright green eyes locked onto me briefly, but then his attention zipped straight past my shoulder. His lips contorted in annoyance.