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“Another fish it is.” He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t wander off.”
I gazed after him, wondering if that had been a joke.
Ray sloshed back into the stream, but the area nearby was rocky and the water turbulent. He eventually ventured further away, where a bend in the river and some trees mostly hid him from sight. I would have been more concerned about that, but he was a master vampire. He could take care of himself as well as hear me if I called out.
And I could hear him curs
ing in between dives, which made me smile.
After a while, I started looking through the waterlogged blanket of items that I had taken out of the capsule. I opened up the soggy knots and spread the fabric out to dry. I put the contents on the other side of me and took stock.
There were the four blood bags, which had surprisingly remained intact. There was the mirror, which had not, but I had the flint and striker so that did not matter. There was a small bundle of kindling, which seemed odd with how heavily forested this area was—until I remembered Ray’s comment about the trees.
I gazed at the ones across the river, but they were so thick that I could not tell if anyone, or anything, gazed back. They had huge, old, wizened trunks, like the last stretch of woodland I’d seen, most of them topped by massive canopies of dark green leaves. There was a scattering of yellow tops among the group as well, one that was violently red, and another that was vividly purple.
The more colorful ones explained the varicolored leaves that floated gently downstream, and had collected near the waterline. They were all different sizes and shapes, some spotted and speckled with age, others still bright and vibrant. I couldn’t name all of the species, but some were oak and a few looked like maple.
If there was anything odd about the trees, other than their size, I couldn’t tell. Although occasionally one would shiver slightly as if in a breeze, while the surrounding forest stayed still. I slowly laid the sticks out to dry, still watching them, and wondered if it would be taken as an offense if we actually built a fire.
And then wondered at finding myself in a place where that was a reasonable question to have.
I went back to exploring our cache.
There was the small bag of emergency food, which was nuts and some odd, orange colored, dried fruit. There was the canteen-like container of something that was definitely not water, as I had first assumed. I sniffed it, and then tried a minute drop on the end of my tongue.
Fey wine.
And it was fresh. Like everything else in the cache, it had been put there relatively recently. As if someone else had discovered the capsule and did their best to hide it, but also used it on occasion, for what I did not know.
But I did not think that it had been the Svarestri, who had seemed as surprised by it as we were.
I put the canteen aside.
There was also the knife that I had managed to hang onto somehow, although Ray had taken it “fishing.” And a few strips of the first blanket, which he had ripped up for bandages. And that was all. That was everything we had to help us survive in the hostile environment of an alien world.
Fifty-fifty, I thought.
I put the blanket aside and started massaging my legs, trying to get them working again, but had to stop when the pressure opened one of the wounds. I frowned at myself—I should have expected that—and rebandaged it with some more blanket strips. The wounds were deep, as if the fey had been attempting to hamstring me, but not dangerous, and they did not impede my movement as my legs were nonfunctioning anyway. But it felt strange, not being able to feel my fingers moving over my flesh.
There was no pain, even when I washed the seeping wound in fey wine to disinfect it. Dhampirs do not suffer from infections, but that was on Earth. Who knew how it worked here?
I thought about that, then unwrapped the other wound and disinfected it, too, just to be safe. Again, there was no discomfort. It was almost as if my legs were not there at all, which was . . . disturbing.
I tried telling myself that it would be fine, that I would return to Earth, reunite with Dory, and that our body would be whole again. Only, what if this was our body? I had assumed that the original had stayed with her, simply because I was used to thinking about it as hers more than mine. But what if she had the duplicate?
What if I returned to her, and paralyzed us both?
I pushed that thought away—hard—because it made the cold water beading my skin feel like it reached all the way to my heart. I shivered anyway, probably because my tunic was wet. I pulled it off and laid it in the sun, and even found a small patch of warmth for myself while it dried.
The rocks overhead looked a bit like an open hand, I decided, with four fingers of stone sticking out, and the thumb being the stony protrusion behind me. It showed me the sky in pieces, but provided a little shelter in case it rained. Assuming that it did that here.
I didn’t know because I didn’t know the rules of this place. Not any of them. It made me uneasy, like the thought that I might not be able to fight off an attack if it came.
But there was nothing obviously threatening at the moment, and I had started to relax by the time Ray returned, with four large fish, a crab-like creature, and a sliced-up nose. And a slightly horrified expression when he caught sight of me. “Oh, hey! Hey, yeah. Um—”
“Is something wrong?” I asked, because he’d looked away. And then almost turned his back on me.
“No, no, hell no. Not a thing. It’s just . . . it gets cold here, at night. You, uh, should probably put that tunic back on.”
