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Chapter Twenty
Ven
A feeling like fire shoots up my leg where the glowing hex wall has closed around my ankle. Ryder grabs me under the armpits and drags me forward along the forest floor. My leg comes free, and the pain lessens immediately.
“Ven!” Ryder looks at me, eyes wide, stricken. He tugs off my boot and examines the skin there. “Can you hear me? What do you feel right now?”
“It still hurts, but not as much,” I say breathlessly.
Examining the skin around my ankle, it appears to be only slightly pink and puffy, as if I’d gotten into poison ivy or something. It doesn’t appear I’m dying. Not at this exact moment.
“I thought it would be something fatal,” Ryder says, looking back and forth between my face and my ankle. “I wish I knew what those hex runes meant.”
“Me, too! But I’m not going to question it right now. I feel fine.” I prove my point by rising to my feet. I even offer him a hand up. He takes it, an incredulous look on his face. “See?”
“You’re sure you’re fine?”
“As far as I can tell. Let’s not look a gift horse in the mouth, okay? Come on.”
I start walking, feeling relieved to still be alive. I’m not sure how in the hell we’re ever going to get out past that forcefield again, but one thing at a time. Surely there’s some control room or something we can find to deactivate it. That’s how it works in the movies, at any rate.
Ryder keeps shooting me concerned looks as we walk, but I ignore him. Before too long I hear the rushing of a waterfall ahead. The forest is even thicker here, with no discernible path. Ryder takes the lead again, pushing through thick vines, stepping over logs. Occasionally he stops as if to orient himself, and sometimes he slides on the glasses to peer ahead.
“The hell hounds have been this way,” he says at one point.
I shiver. “How can you tell?”
“I can smell the remnants of their magic. And the sulfur.”
I sniff the air, but I can’t pick anything up.
We push past a particularly thick cluster of vegetation, a mass of purple orchids that hang between the trees, and the waterfall is right on the other side. It’s about twenty feet tall, cascading violently down a rock face and pummeling the boulders at its base. Then it continues into a swiftly flowing river that cuts directly in front of us.
“Are we going to cross that thing?” I ask, eyebrows raised.
Ryder smiles. “You just busted through a hex forcefield and a little old river scares you?”
When I cross my arms over my chest, he says, “Come on. I won’t let you get swept away.”
He heads down the bank a short ways so that we’re not right at the base of the falls, and then he starts making his way onto the rocks. I take his hand when he offers it, and he helps me reach the water’s edge. He holds onto me tightly as he steps down into the rushing water. It comes up to just above his waist.
I follow him down into it. The water is shockingly cold and I gasp. Being quite a bit shorter than Ryder, it comes up all the way to my chest. It’s also fast. Fast and strong. I’m sure at any moment we’re going to lose our balance and get swept downstream to be beaten senseless among the rocks.
Ryder moves slowly but surely, picking his footing carefully, and keeping a firm grip on my hand the whole way. When we finally reach the other side, my dress is completely drenched. The thin, wet fabric is doing very little to hide my frozen-hard nipples and the fact that I’m not wearing any underwear. When Ryder pulls me up onto the riverbank, I shiver and rub my palms over my goose-pimply arms to warm up.
We continue on into the jungle. I try not to stare at the way Ryder’s drenched shorts are now hanging low over his hips, revealing the tight bands of muscle there that point the way to his sexy zone. Not that every part of him isn’t a sexy zone.
He catches me looking. “What?”
“Nothing. I—”
“Ven, stop!”
Ryder grabs my wrist and jerks me back, but it’s too late. I feel my boot catch on the wire a moment before the rope net yanks us up into the trees. My spine is jerked like a string puppet, and my head snaps back before being shoved into a tangle of limbs with Ryder, spinning in the air fifteen feet off the ground.
“Fuck me,” I groan.
“You can say that again,” Ryder says. “Apparently they also have non-magical boobytraps.”
