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Trevor considered her for a moment and said, “No time to talk.”
He took her hand, and they shifted to the Retreat into a dimly lit room filled with iron bars.
She saw at once that Trevor was almost immediately affected by the potency of the iron. Its effects showed in his eyes. She also was sure that it had no effect on her whatsoever. “Okay, Trev, what do I do?”
“Can you help me move these, like I showed you—when you lifted the bed with your mind? Remember how you went into your mind? Do that now, my love, with me.”
She concentrated and discovered she could help him. The bars lifted as one unit, and she grinned. “Are you doing it too?”
“Yes, but I can feel myself getting weaker. I need your help … the iron … is poisoning me …”
“What?” She lost her concentration, and the iron mass fell with a heavy and resounding thud to the wood flooring.
He touched her shoulder. “No time, and you needn’t worry—it is only temporary. As soon as we are rid of it I’ll be fine.”
She turned on the room full of the iron bars, and with scarcely an effort it went up as one unit and hovered. She turned to Trev and said, “Shift us, baby—shift us now.”
She could see he was in pain and rubbed his arm, wishing she could do something. He was stoic about it, simply patting her hand, and managed to shift them back to the dungeon.
They had shifted into the recesses of one dark corner, hovering near the rafters as they surveyed the bevy of movement and grunts below. Jazz found she could keep the iron bar collection up with very little effort and concentrated on helping Trev stay conscious, for he looked like he was going to pass out.
These monsters, all shapes and sizes and varying degrees of repulsiveness, had Jazz grimacing with disgust. She could never have imagined such horror. It was like being in what she always envisioned the pits of hell would look like. Unseelie creatures shuffled about, bellowing, groaning, grunting—some would throw back their heads now and then and howl like rabid animals.
And then Trevor shifted them to the cold stone floor, laying the pile of iron as a circular wall around them. She could see it had taken a great deal of his determination and strength to fight the affects of the iron to accomplish this.
Trevor was in trouble. She could see it. The iron was a deadly poison to the lower-caste Dark Fae, but apparently it had a debilitating affect on Seelie Fae as well. She knew whatever they were going to do next had to be done immediately.
Unseelie everywhere hung back with sounds of horror and began screaming in bellowing terms.
“We need to get the iron into the mouth of the portal …” Trevor said, but his voice was a weak whisper.
The Dark Princes had surrounded the iron-clad circle, but it appeared all of them, including Pestale, were helpless to get inside, as they couldn’t approach the iron.
The odd thing that Jazz noticed at once was that Pestale and his brothers didn’t seem overly interested in trying to get at them.
Trevor was in no condition to shift the iron into the mouth of the portal, but she could. She hadn’t learned the knack of true shifting yet, but she had learned how to jump shift, and the portal was close enough that she could jump shift to it.
She said softly, “I’ve got this, Trev.”
Even as he reached out to stop her, yelling something about a mistake, even as she mentally lifted and jump shifted right smack dab into the middle of the portal’s black, cavernous mouth, she realized something was wrong.
She felt it as she shifted. How could she not have realized in time? That was her, always impulsive, leaping with that damned faith leading and never looking, ‘just in case’.
The iron went flying in different directions but was sucked up into the gooey walls of the portal. She saw the mouth close, and she heard Pestale laugh just before he said, “Now, my brothers! Now, my Morrigu!”
“Nooo,” she heard Trevor yell, and her heart sank.
Her Fae blood had enlarged her brain all right, but
she hadn’t listened to it in time. A trick, her Fae brain told her now.
This had been a diversion.
This was not the portal to Earth but one to another dimension!
And as the swirling black hole consumed her and sent her flying she heard over and over again what Pestale had told his army: “Now …”
~ Nineteen ~
