“And people can’t do what our friends just did.” He let go of me and squared up to the rocks. “Reality is broken, my man, and we just watched it happen.”
In a weird way, he was kind of right. Something was wildly wrong up here. There was no denying that the second both of my friends stepped over those rocks they were no longer present.
“Come on.” Zalman held out his hand to me.
I shook my head. “I can’t just?—”
“Yes, youcan.” He waved his hand impatiently. “Wallace MichaelFrustrationCrowne, we are going into that fairy ring to help our brothers.”
I gulped, heart pounding and breath coming too fast. I nodded, knowing he was right. Whatever the fuck this was, we couldn’t let them go through it alone. We’d made a pact at twelveyears old to always be there for whoever needed us. This was one of those moments.
“Fucking fuck,” Zalman said as he grabbed my hand and pulled.
I stumbled and in trying to regain my footing, I went headfirst into the ring. It was like being sucked under by a riptide, and then Zalman’s hand was torn away from me. I felt his fingernails scrape my wrist before he was gone.
And suddenly, I was falling through the sky, face up and staring at the sun. The wind was whistling in my ears, and I knew right then that I was about to die.
Without warning, I hit something and tumbled end over end. No, not something, someone. A man with pale skin, long golden hair, and huge blue eyes. I clung to him as I realized he had large butterfly-looking wings on his back. That wasn’t a parachute, but maybe they would stop us from crashing to the ground?
Well, they might’ve slowed us down, but we still hit. Hard.
I landed on top of him, my face smashing into his groin, and his into mine. He yelled and kicked out with both feet. I rolled off him, cupping myself and gasping for breath as pain radiated out from my balls and my nose. Through the tears in my eyes, I could see him doing about the same.
At least we weren’t dead, right?
The pain was lessening, and now I realized I had blood in my mouth. I spat onto the grass and found a cut on the inside of my upper lip. Considering he’d just gagged like he was trying not to throw up, I might’ve hit his nuts with my face harder than my groin hit his face. My knees were definitely protesting, like they’d taken the brunt of my landing.
Had I seriously fallen from the sky in a sixty-nine position with some ill-equipped skydiver?
But now I had to look around and wonder where the hell I was and how I’d been up in the air like that. Because I waskneeling in a summer-baked field of dry grass without a single goddamned pine tree or mountain anywhere.
I’d gone into that ring of stones and fallen from the sky? I looked up. Justpoof!and I was involuntarily skydiving? Had that fucking fairy ring tried to kill me?
And where the hell was Zalman? I looked down at my wrist and saw fresh scratches.
“What thefuck?” the dude I’d landed on screamed.
“Same, dude. Same.”
“What?”
“What what?”
I glanced over at him with confusion only to recoil a bit at the look of impending homicide on his face. He was literally turning red. But then I saw that he had blond hair like Bowie inLabyrinthbut that couldn’t hide his pointed ears. Or the wings. Well, wing and a half. The one of his left looked broken.
“I think your wing’s broken there,” I said and pointed as I sat back on my heels.
He looked over his shoulder before letting loose a freakishly high-pitched scream. The wings fluttered fast like a hummingbird’s for a moment before they stopped. He leaned to the side and gagged again.
Pointy ears and wings.
I’d landed on a fucking fairy.
Smacking a hand on the brittle grass as a wave of vertigo hit me, I closed my eyes and tried to take deep breaths. I wasn’t dead. I wasn’t hurt. Er, not hurt badly. I wasn’t alone. Granted the company could’ve been less hostile, but I understood why he wasn’t happy with me. I opened my eyes to see him looking like he was doing some deep-breathing, too. If that had been a fairy ring and this was a fairy, maybe he knew how to send me back. I just had to make nice.
“Hey,” I said gently, “I’ve got a first aid kit in my pack. How about we get your wing stabilized so it can start to heal properly, hmm?”
Blue eyes stared at me as he gulped convulsively for a few seconds. Maybe his wing hurt more than getting smacked in the face and the balls did. I felt bad for landing on him.
