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So I did. And then he lit it from his. It flared to life, and must have illuminated my face, but he still didn’t react. And finally, I noticed my reflection in his armor and understood why.
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The hand I had wrapped around the torch was mine—small, stubby-fingered, with the chipped remains of the last manicure I’d given myself glittering under the torchlight. But in the armor . . . in the armor, the hand gripping the wooden torch was slim and long-fingered, and as pale as the hair falling over my shoulder. My suddenly very masculine shoulder, which was encased in shiny black armor that ran with the flames I was now holding.
The fey was still looking at me. I nodded, and the masculine face in his armor looked grave and cold, instead of girly and freaked out. He stepped back.
I glanced to my left, where Pritkin still looked like a soot-covered woodland sprite to me, or Tarzan after a really bad day. But he was listening and nodding and then saying something to the leader of the fey cohort, who said something in reply as another dozen ghostly figures joined us. The translation spell was having real trouble with the language, but I guess Pritkin wasn’t, because the leader started snapping orders, and small groups started breaking off, heading in all directions. And then we were, too, taking our torch and moving off to search for ourselves.
“This way,” Pritkin hissed, still furious, like the fingers biting into my arm hadn’t already told me that.
I didn’t care. I so very much didn’t care that it was all I could do to stop an extremely stupid grin from taking over my face, which probably looked really creepy on a fey and also didn’t make sense because we weren’t out of it yet. But I was biting my lip anyway, and shaking from relief, and ducking my head because inappropriate, Cassie, seriously inappropriate. But some part of me had finally had enough and wasn’t listening.
Fortunately, no one was near enough to us to notice, and I managed to have today’s nervous breakdown quietly.
It didn’t last long anyway, not after I looked up and saw what was ahead.
Pritkin jerked me into the shadow of a stone gateway, which was pretty much all that remained of whatever wall it had been part of. It was dark red and gleamed in the light the torch was shedding, before I half buried the thing in the dirt. And then stayed down on my haunches, burning pitch in my nostrils and the gate of hell staring me in the face.
And that’s exactly what it looked like: a big, red, swirly portal framed by the arch, and maybe half a football field away. And Pritkin had been right—it was guarded by a dozen Svarestri. Or maybe more for all I knew, since I couldn’t see all of it, could only see about a third of it, since there were half walls and tumbled columns and decorative pieces of stone in the way. But no greenery. It was like the forest didn’t like this place, either, because no vines were eating into the stones, and no undergrowth disturbed the flat red clay under our feet.
I glanced behind me, and the soil of the forest was dark, either rich brown or black—I couldn’t tell in the light. But not rusty, not red. This stuff looked like somebody had lifted it straight out of Red Rock Canyon in Vegas.
But I didn’t get an explanation. I didn’t get anything at all, maybe because we were too close to risk talking. Or maybe because of Pritkin’s state of mind, which clearly wasn’t good. He was gripping the staff in one hand, tight enough to turn his hand white, which matched his pale, strained face.
The Pritkin of my day might enjoy this sort of thing, but I didn’t think this one did.
And that was before the damn portal activated, with a sound like nails on a chalkboard, and a line of black-clad warriors started spilling out. And, okay, wherever that portal went, I didn’t want to go. “I thought you said there was a portal to earth,” I whispered.
Pritkin still didn’t say anything, but he nodded. At something I couldn’t see because the side of the arch was in the way. I went to my hands and knees and crawled forward, and sure enough, there was another portal, in a clear, light blue color that would have been soothing.
Except that that was where all those new soldiers were going.
“That goes to earth?” I twisted my head around to ask.
Pritkin nodded grimly and pulled me back.
“But what are the Svarestri doing on—”
“I don’t know. This isn’t supposed to be here.”
“What isn’t?’
“Any of it. Other than the portal—the one to earth. It’s always been here, as far as I know. But the other, this whole thing”—he gestured around at the patch of livid red ruins—“this wasn’t here a few months ago.”
“Then why is it here now?”
I didn’t get a reply. Because the fey soldier Pritkin had been talking to earlier took that moment to burst out of the trees, moving almost too fast to see. But not fast enough to outrun the spear that took him full in the back.
His armor exploded along with it, shattering and all but leaping off his body but leaving him relatively unscathed. Unlike the whirlwind that caught him a second later. He started yelling something, and then screaming it, something I couldn’t understand but didn’t really need to. Because a moment after it picked him up, the wind twisted him in ways a body wasn’t supposed to bend, and then ripped him apart, sending pieces flying in all directions, including ours.
One landed in the dust outside the archway, but I didn’t look at it. I was looking at Pritkin, who was staring at the remains with the shell-shocked look of a guy who hasn’t seen that sort of thing before and would be okay with not seeing it again. And then he was grabbing me and I was tackling him back, because no, no, no, the forest was not where we needed to go.
“The portal,” I gasped, because he wasn’t underestimating me this time, and tired or not, he was stronger.
“We’re never going to get to the portal!” he yelled, not bothering to lower his voice this time, because the wind was already so wild, it didn’t matter anymore.
And then neither did Pritkin’s escape attempt, which was suddenly moot in a major way. The whirlwind that had destroyed the fey had spread out, ripping through the forest as it began circling the old stones like a cyclone and moving inward. It was like being at the eye of a hurricane, or more likely, the center of a noose that was quickly tightening.
