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Radu cleared his throat. “There is, well, one thing,” he said, diffidently.
Mircea looked at him.
“I…have never met Dorina. She does not know me, doesn’t have any reason to trust me. And without trust, an anchor is useless.”
Louis-Cesare looked at me. “I will go,” he said simply. “I will be your anchor, if you will permit it.”
And then everyone looked at me.
Again.
Chapter Thirty-three
I stayed in the chair. Mircea settled back on the hassock, facing me. I don’t know quite what I’d been expecting; probably something like last time, just falling off the world with no warning and no transition. But it didn’t work quite like that. I pulled my feet back to give him room, and then looked up.
And found his normally dark brown eyes blown completely black.
It threw me for a second, because the usual color change that comes with his power goes in the opposite direction—to bright, light-filled amber. But now it was more like looking into two inky pools. Except even ink reflects some light off the surface and his eyes weren’t doing that. It looked disturbingly as if they weren’t even there anymore, just dark, dark nothingness behind his lashes, like the fog boiling over the memory cliff in my mind.
And then all up around me, as if the room had caught fire.
And then closing over my head as he caught my wrists, to keep me from standing up in alarm.
And then gushing out in front of me as I walked through it and out the other side.
I stumbled slightly, having to adjust to suddenly finding myself standing instead of sitting, and to being on a dark wharf instead of in a cozy library. But it only took a second, and then I was looking at the same scene as before. Except for the fog.
Instead of evaporating, it ruffled out over the ground, swirling around me and then surging outward, until the whole scene was covered with it, waist-high. Tendrils reached even higher, as if grasping at the dark, cloud-filled sky, the intermittant stars, and the yachts bobbing at anchor. Or at the pier, sitting quiet and blood-free.
Obviously, the fun hadn’t started yet.
“Looks like we’re early,” I said—to nobody. Because when I turned around, Louis-Cesare wasn’t there.
But something else was.
I blinked stupidly at it. And okay. Maybe I’d been a little hasty with that same-scene comment.
Because that? Wasn’t the same at all.
I was looking at a huge expanse of gray stone, smooth in places as if wind and rain had scoured the corners, and sharp in others where centuries-old chisel marks remained visible. It looked like a thousand walls I’d seen, edging roads or circling towns or doing wall-type things all over Europe. None of which had included slicing through the middle of an SUV on one end and a yacht on the other.
But that’s what this one was doing, bisecting the harbor from parking lot to waterline and beyond. I stared upward, feeling dizzy because the top stones were maybe fifty feet high. I separated you, Mircea had said.
Yeah. That was one way of putting it.
Goddamn, no wonder I was crazy.
But amazingly enough, the size wasn’t the strangest thing about the wall-that-shouldn’t-be-there. Neither was the gaping gully in the middle that looked like someone had driven a giant-sized bus through it. Or the jagged bits that had burst out ahead of the explosion, the interiors of which failed entirely to be gray and rocky and stone-like, opting instead for pink and pulsing and…alive.
No, what had my skin tightening all over my body was the strands of something viscous and gooey and glistening that had burst outward with the wall, leaving a forest of vine-like pinkish filaments behind. Some were lying warped and twisted in the rubble, impossibly damaged. Others had looped back onto the nearest stone, attaching themselves to it and then sinking inside, only to jumble up underneath with nowhere to go, like varicose veins.
Except for a few. They had neither died nor found a new foothold, but they were also unable to bridge the large gap in the wall. As a result, they were just waving about in the air like horrible seaweed in a nonexistent current.
Or like clutching hands, I
thought, stumbling back a step.
And straight into someone’s arms.
