Fever 4 - DreamFever (39 page)

   It was hard to push into, more resistant than the first one, but it proved even more
difficult to get out of. Without Christian, I might not have made it.

  I found myself trapped inside silvery glue that held my limbs nearly immobile. I
kicked and punched and ended up getting so turned around that I had no idea which way
was out. Apparently there was only one direction that would work.

  Then Christian's hand was on my arm (he could stand), and I shoved toward him
with all my strength.

    The college back home where I take classes part-time has a wind tunnel created by
the unique placement of the math building breezeway and the science buildings around
it. On especially windy days, it's almost impossible to cut through it. You have to lean

forward at a precarious angle as you pass the math building, head ducked, forging ahead
with all your might.

   I learned the hard way about break points, where either a design flaw or a joke by
some pissed-off engineer leaves an "eye" in the breezeway, where the wind abruptly
stops. If you're unaware of it and still forging ahead, you fall flat on your face in front
of all the math and science geeks--who know about it and loiter in the general vicinity
on windy days but don't tell freshmen because that would deprive them of the endless
amounts of amusement they get from watching us wipe out, preferably in a short skirt
that ends up around our waist.

  That was this Silver.

   I shoved toward the hand, fighting, pressing with all my might, and abruptly the
resistance gave way--and I went flying out of the glass, into Christian, at such velocity
that we went rolling and tumbling across sand.

  I tried to gasp, but it didn't work. I was in a blast furnace. It was so bright that I
couldn't open my eyes; the air was so hot and dry that I couldn't breathe.

   I struggled to acclimate and finally sucked down a breath that seared my lungs. I
slitted my eyes, got a good look at Christian, and rolled off him.

   He was worse than "bad off." He was in serious danger. With his dark complexion,
he'd tanned, but there was a cruel redness to it, his lips were cracked, and I could tell by
his eyes and skin that he was severely dehydrated. Blisters covered his face.

   I whirled around, hoping to find a mirror hanging in the air behind me through which
I could drag us to safety.

  There wasn't one.

   There were, however, hundreds of man-size cactuses, any one of which might have
been the one he said I'd appeared to be standing in. Was there a mirror camouflaged
inside one of them? It stood to reason that on worlds the Fae wanted to visit unobserved,
they'd have had to conceal the Silver in something if there was no place it didn't appear
utterly incongruous with the terrain. Or had Cruce's mysterious curse screwed things
up?

   I wondered if I should try flinging myself into a few of the nearest cactuses,
employing the same method Dani had used to try to break through wards, hoping for a
two-way portal. The thought held little appeal. She'd gotten nothing but badly bruised
for her efforts. The cactuses sported a protective armor of needle-sharp spines.

  Squinting, I glanced around.

  We were in an ocean of desert.

  It had to be a hundred fifteen degrees. No shade anywhere to be seen. Nothing but
sand.

  I looked up and instantly regretted it. The sky was painfully bright, with four blazing
suns. It was whiter than white. It was radioactive white.

  "You bloody damned fool," Christian managed through split lips. "Now we'll both be
dying here."

  "No, we won't. Which ... uh, cactus did I come through?"

  "I've no bloody idea, and those spines are poisonous, so good luck poking around at
them."

  Damn. Onto plan B, which was basically a wing and a prayer.

   I began to remove the black pouch from my waistband, preparing to uncover the
stones. Would they return us to the Hall, where we could choose the next portal
together? Who knew? Who cared? Anything was better than this. He would die here and
so would I.

  I rolled close to Christian and pressed against him.

  "Och, and now you flirt me up, lass," he said weakly, with a shadow of that killer
smile. "When I canna do a thing about it."

  "Wrap your arms and legs around me, Christian. Don't let go. No matter what
happens, don't let go." Sweat was pouring down my face, dripping from beneath my
MacHalo, into my eyes, pooling between my breasts. I was wearing too many clothes, a
bike helmet, and a leather coat in a desert.

  He didn't question me. Just wrapped his legs around my hips and locked his hands in
the small of my back. I prayed he had enough strength to keep his grip. I had no idea
what was going to happen, but I didn't expect it to be gentle.

  I slid the pouch from between us, loosened the drawstring, and uncovered the tips of
the stones. They flared to life, pulsing with blue-black fire.

  The terrain responded instantly and violently, just as the pink tunnel did.

  The desert began to undulate, and the air was filled with a high-pitched whine that
quickly turned into a metallic-sounding scream. Sand whipped up, stinging my hands
and face.

  "Are you crazy? What the--" The rest of Christian's words were lost in the howling
wind.

  The atomic-white sky darkened to blue-black, in dramatic, quick increments. I looked
up. The suns were being eclipsed, one by one.

  The sand shuddered beneath us. Swells rose, dips formed. Christian and I rolled,
down, down, deep into a sandy valley that was still forming as we tumbled. I felt
brackets snapping off my MacHalo. I was suddenly afraid the desert would swallow us

alive, but the desert didn't want us. That was the whole point, although I didn't know it
then.

   I struggled to keep my grip on the pouch, clutched it tightly to my chest. Christian's
legs were steel around my hips, his hands locked. The temperature dropped sharply.

  The desert began to tremble. The tremble became a rumble. The rumble became an
earthquake, and, just when I thought we might be shaken to pieces, the ground beneath
us sank abruptly, then gave a single gigantic heave and flung us straight up into the air.

   As we went soaring into the dark sky, I muttered an apology to Christian. He sort of
laughed and muttered back in my ear that he preferred a quick death by falling, with
crushed bones and all, to a slow death by dehydration, and at least it was nice and cool
finally but maybe, since it seemed the stones had triggered the cataclysmic reaction, I
might try covering them back up and see what happened?

  I shoved them in the pouch and crammed it down the waistband of my pants.

  We fell.

  I braced for impact.
 

W      e splashed down into icy water.

   I plunged deep. Kicking hard, I surfaced and inhaled greedily. I blinked water from
my eyes and saw that we'd fallen into a stone quarry. How lucky. That must mean a
terrifying monster with razor-sharp teeth was in the water beneath me, about to snap my
legs off, because the gods didn't smile on me--at least not lately or that I was aware of.

  And Christian wasn't as bad off as I'd thought, because he was swimming toward
shore.

  I narrowed my eyes. Toward shore, leaving me to my own devices that, as far as he
knew, might involve drowning.

  I checked to make sure the pouch was still in my waistband and kicked into a
breaststroke. I'm a strong swimmer, and I pulled myself out of the quarry just a few
seconds after he did. He collapsed hard on the grass-covered bank and closed his eyes.

  "Thanks for sticking around to make sure I wasn't drowning." Then I murmured,
"Oh, Christian." I touched his blistered face, made sure he was breathing, took his
pulse. He was unconscious. It had taken the last ounce of energy he possessed to get
himself out of the quarry.

  First things first: Were we safe here?

  I scanned our surroundings. The quarry was large and deep, overflowing here and
there into smaller ponds and pools. It occupied a small corner of a huge valley. Miles
and miles of grassy plain were surrounded by moderate mountains with ice-capped
crowns. The valley was peaceful and calm. At the opposite edge, animals grazed
serenely.

   It looked like we were safe, at least for now. I heaved a sigh of relief and struggled
out of my wet leather coat. I slipped the pouch containing the stones from my waistband
and set it aside. There was no doubt about it: Removing the stones from the spelled
pouch made dimensions shift for some reason, but while uncovered, they seem to wreak
total havoc on the world around them. The next time we used them, I'd flash them
quickly, and maybe we'd get to skip the whole violent expulsion motif and glide at a
gentle tempo into the next world.

   After a brief hesitation, I stripped down to bra and panties, grateful for the moderate
climate. Wet leather sucks. I draped my clothing on nearby rocks to dry in the sun,
hoping the leather wouldn't shrink to ridiculous sizes.

   Next concern: what to do for Christian. He was breathing shallowly and his pulse was
erratic. He'd passed out in the sun, where his burn would deepen. The blisters on his
face were crusted and seeping blood. How long had he been in that hellish desert? When
had he last eaten? There was no way I could move him. I couldn't even get him out of
his wet clothes. I could cut them off, but he'd need them again. Who knew what we
might have to face next? He was more heavily muscled than last I'd seen him and,
unconscious, he was deadweight. Had he been fighting his way through dimension after
dimension since Halloween? Did time pass the same way where he'd been?

  Unless it had fallen out, I had a baby-food jar of Unseelie flesh in my coat. I tripped
over my own feet in my haste to get to it and unbuttoned pocket after pocket, searching.

  "Ow!" I'd found it wriggling wetly in shards of broken bottle, buttoned in an inner
pocket. I extracted the flesh carefully from the jar, which must have shattered in my
tumble across the sand. Of the seven strips I'd crammed into the tiny container, there
were four left. Three of them had wriggled off somewhere. I held the noxious pieces of
gray Rhino-boy flesh, picked out slivers of glass, and considered the rapidly healing
cuts on my fingers.

   Was I healing so well because of the Unseelie I'd eaten in the past? Did it cause
permanent changes, as Rowena claimed? Would it do something terrible to Christian? I
had no idea what else to do for him. I had only two protein bars, and I didn't know if the
water around us was drinkable or contaminated by some deadly-to-humans parasite. I'd
never been a Girl Scout, couldn't start a fire with sticks, had no container to boil water
in even if I could, and was disgusted to realize I was still, in many ways, remarkably
useless.

   I hurried back to his side, lay one of the strips on a flat stone, and cut it up into pieces
as small as early peas. I pried open his teeth, stuffed the pieces in, and held his mouth
and nose closed, hoping the flesh would, in dim-witted Rhino-boy fashion, wriggle
toward his stomach, seeking escape.

  It did. I wasn't so useless after all!

  He gagged, I released my hold on his nose, and his throat muscles convulsed. He
gagged again and swallowed involuntarily. He coughed and made a retching sound.
Even when you're unconscious, Unseelie meat is revolting.

  With a groan, he rolled over onto his side.

   I diced another strip, stuffed it into his mouth, and held it closed again. This time he
resisted, but his body was still too weak to put up much of a fight.

  By the time I got the third strip sliced up and in his mouth, he'd rolled over onto his
back again, opened his eyes, and was looking at me. I think he was trying to ask what I
was doing, but I clamped his teeth together with one hand on the top of his head and the
other beneath his chin. He gagged instead and swallowed again.

   The effects of Unseelie flesh on an injured human body are instantaneous and
miraculous. As I watched, his blisters disappeared and his color returned to normal,
leaving him lightly tanned. The gauntness in his face vanished, and the epidermis on his
body plumped everywhere, erasing the damage of dehydration, rebuilding him from the
inside out.

   Unseelie flesh is potent, and addictive. Even though I was cured of my little
obsession with it (did he really need that last strip?) I envied what I knew was
happening to him: the heady rush of power surging hot through his veins, heightening
his hearing, smell, and vision, increasing his strength to Barrons' levels, filling him with
a euphoric sense of invincibility and an exquisitely elevated awareness of his own body
in relation to its surroundings.

  Yes, he was certainly getting better.

  Tiger eyes were not only open but moving with unabashed appreciation over the skin
bared by my bra and underwear. He pushed my hand off his mouth.

  Quickly--and possibly in large part because I was tempted to eat it myself--I knelt
over him and shoved the last strip between his lips.

  He sat up so fast our heads banged, hard.

  I yelped and he spat.

  Unseelie flesh went flying from his mouth and flopped on the ground between us.

    He looked at the animated piece of meat, then he looked at me, and I'm not sure what
he found more disgusting: the smelly gray flesh with oozing pustules, or me, for putting
it in his mouth in the first place. It pissed me off, because, even on my worst day, I was
preferable to Unseelie flesh. The absence of heat in those amber eyes was downright
chilling.

  "You might try thanking me," I said stiffly.

   He gagged again, cleared his throat, turned, and spat over his shoulder. "What," he
said, turning back to me and pointing, "the bloody hell is that?"

  "Unseelie flesh," I said coolly.