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“Both of you?” I flush. My shock at his statement has me jerking my attention away from the portal.
“Admit it. I’ve got you thinking more about the possibility of choosing mates than worrying about portal travel.” He grins, and I suspect it’s because now he has embarrassed me and his brother. Smoothing a hair from where it blew to tangle in my lashes, he brushes my cheek with his thumb, and the simple touch ignites something within me. I’m warm everywhere—my face, my chest, between my thighs.
Heavens save me from arrogant, roguish men.
I tuck Huey tight and follow Atticus through the rainbow. I’ve flown with gargoyles who believe a demon gave me to them so I can be their queen. I’m going through a portal between realms while carrying Lala’s pet owl who’s also whatever a soul guardian might be. Why wouldn’t I have multiple lovers? This day has been the freakiest.
Walking through the colors begins easily enough. They wrap around me in a thick haze, a sticky mist coating my skin. Dizziness sends my head spinning, and nausea rips through me. It’s worse than any fever or vertigo I’ve ever experienced. Stumbling through the passage, I almost fall.
Huey squawks. Bright light and the colors blind me, and bitter cold nips at my skin, but the owl stays with me.
“Easy.” Jace’s deep voice comes from behind. He wraps his arms around me. “You all right with me carrying you again?” The hesitation and halting in his question hit me hard. At the house, he swooped me up without asking. But now, he doesn’t make assumptions about whether or not I need to do this on my own. Or whether I would want him near.
“Please,” he says. “Let me do this for you. For us.”
His sweetness undoes me. I nod, and he bundles me into his arms. The sweep of his hands over my curves teases as much as soothes. His heat has me huddling closer, tucking my nose against his neck.
“Almost there.” His voice rumbles through me. He smells nice, and I inhale deeply, taking in scents of earth, leather, and spice to calm the sickness. His pace quickens as if he’s racing to get me to shelter. Would he always put my safety first like he said? Will I stick around long enough to find out? Two weeks and I can come back home a queen having talked to Lala.
Two weeks.
I can survive a new world for that long.
Jace steps through the rainbow tunnel, and we walk into the courtyard of a ginormous castle—the military, made to withstand catapults kind. It’s practical and fortified instead of enchanting or fanciful.
High stone walls surround us, and gargoyles spar in the center as though training for battle. Stalls that could be out of a supernatural flea market line the dirt and stone lot where we stand.
Strange creatures wander near the far wall, including a headless horseman and a woman wearing rags who floats a few inches off the ground. Huey bobs close, the tiny owl the only normal creature in this place.
Two moons shine in the sky. The biggest looms a haunting red in the creepiest blood moon I’ve ever witnessed. The smaller glints golden.
“Where are we?” I ask Jace.
“We’re in the Borderlands,” he says. “This part’s the gargoyles’ keep.” He nods to the enormous wall that stands higher than the curving buildings around us. “That wall separates the Borderlands from the After Worlds. The really scary things lurk over there across the river.”
“As opposed to your kindly neighborhood headless horseman…or uh, horseperson?” Sitting astride a black terror with glowing red eyes, the rider wears a dark cloak pulled high around the gaping lack of a face.
“Oh, that’s the Dullahan. His horse is Howard. They’re mostly harmless,” Jace says.
I stare at Huey to see if the owl’s buying this line of bullshit. He flaps his wings. “I won’t let them touch you,” I promise in a whisper. “Where’s the music coming from?”
Jace stares at me as if I’ve said something preposterous.
Maybe traveling between realms messed with my ears as much as it did the rest of me. I need a ginger ale and some ibuprofen stat.
“What do you hear?” he asks.
If my stomach wasn’t threatening to revolt and revisit the nachos I shared with my friends earlier, I would gently remind him how it’s not nice to gaslight people into thinking they’re crazy. True, I questioned my sanity earlier today, but I can’t be blamed for logic flaws so soon after landing in upside down world. “It’s like a whole chorus of humming, but more melodic.”
“You can hear the Bridge of Souls,” he says softly, reverently. “Atticus must’ve been right about you being the future queen. Some say she sings to those who she likes.”
“She?”
“The Bridge is the manifestation of a goddess who walks between the worlds of the living and the dead. Or walked, I should say, since she has slept in the Valley of the Gods for thousands of years.”
I wrinkle my nose. The Bridge looks on the verge of collapse. It’s chipped and crumbling in places. A few gargoyles—the stone kind, unlike the living one carrying me—stand on the Bridge’s edge. The rickety thing doesn’t seem solid enough to hold their weight. “You’re saying that’s a goddess?” I fight to keep the shock and disappointment off my face—not to mention the nausea and pain.
“The Bridge needs a new queen to be restored to its former glory,” he says as if that explains everything. It doesn’t. Not at all.
