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“What the—where are we?” Louis-Cesare asked, his voice strained.
I flipped the light switch, showing the bare cement blocks and shiny weapons of my armory. He stared around for a second, his eyes wide, a pulse pounding madly in his throat. As if he’d expected a very different view, like maybe of the afterlife.
Finally, he looked at me. “You brought us back here?”
“Was there a choice?”
I sat down in the chair, feeling a little dizzy. The squashy old thing had come from a thrift shop, bought because it was the right size and shape to fit the space I had left, and because it was comfortable. I hadn’t actually noticed until this moment that it had a print on it, composed mainly of pastel yellow pineapples on a faded pink background. I looked away.
I did not want my last glimpse of the world to be polyester kitsch.
Unfortunately, that left me looking at my captives, some of whom were awake and unhappy. They were going to be a lot unhappier if this didn’t work. Or possibly even if it did, since we’d been over the dead zones when we fell.
But I didn’t have to think up a speech, because Louis-Cesare grabbed me. “We are falling to our deaths!”
And, okay, if I’d wanted a phrase to get everyone’s attention, I couldn’t have done any better. Eyes widened, breaths caught, and yet nobody spoke. They just looked at me.
&nb
sp; I didn’t respond or explain, because I didn’t know what you said to that. And because it didn’t matter anymore. I just pulled my husband’s face close and kissed him, because that was what I wanted my last sight to be.
For a moment, it was perfect: the slight scrape of bristles along his jaw, the warm fullness of his lips, the silk of his hair falling all around us, and the hardness of the chest under my hand—
Until he pulled back and shook me, which, yeah.
Not really part of the fantasy.
“Did you hear me?” His face was wild and his hair was everywhere, probably because I’d forgotten to put the clip back in place earlier. I absently looked around for it, and the shaking recommenced. “Dory!”
“I heard you. But it’s kind of taking a long time, don’t you think?”
Louis-Cesare stared at me some more. Then he did exactly what I should have expected from my impetuous husband and threw open the door, poking his head out of the portal. That wasn’t exactly recommended operating procedure, and on a regular portal would have had the effect of sending his head somewhere very far from the rest of his body, while spaghettifying his neck.
However, this was a fixed portal, so he came back in after a moment, looking shaken and deathly pale, but otherwise fine.
“Is there a problem?” I asked.
He nodded.
Together, we looked back outside, which . . . yeah. Still not recommended, I thought, as it left us sticking out of the top of my wide-mouthed purse like two disembodied heads. That was bad, but charging down a foggy street at about fifty miles an hour was worse. Not as worse as it could have been, but still . . .
I didn’t understand what had happened until I looked up. And then I still didn’t, although there was a large, golden horn sticking through the purse’s handles. We’d obviously gotten snagged on something when we fell, but what, I wasn’t sure.
Then the bag shifted a little as we skidded around a corner, showing me a brief glimpse of a wall eye, a large rump and a sparkly mane. There were cartoon flowers in the mane, and also on the body that I saw when I turned around. It looked like Rambo’s daughter had designed a unicorn: white body, pink flowers, golden hooves, and big, butch muscles.
For a long moment, neither of us said anything.
“Did you know this would happen?” Louis-Cesare asked.
“This exact scenario?”
He looked at me.
“The room isn’t inside the purse,” I reminded him, as the breeze blew what hair I had around. “In fact, nothing is inside the purse, as the purse isn’t a purse, it’s a portal entrance. So, as long as it maintains integrity—”
“We can still get in and out.”
I nodded.
