The desert began to tremble. The tremble became a rumble. The rumble became an earthquake, and, just when I thought we might be shaken to pieces, the ground beneath us sank abruptly, then gave a single gigantic heave and flung us straight up into the air.
As we went soaring into the dark sky, I muttered an apology to Christian. He sort of laughed and muttered back in my ear that he preferred a quick death by falling, with crushed bones and all, to a slow death by dehydration, and at least it was nice and cool finally but maybe, since it seemed the stones had triggered the cataclysmic reaction, I might try covering them back up and see what happened?
I shoved them in the pouch and crammed it down the waistband of my pants.
We fell.
I braced for impact.
We splashed down into icy water.
I plunged deep. Kicking hard, I surfaced and inhaled greedily. I blinked water from my eyes and saw that we’d fallen into a stone quarry. How lucky. That must mean a terrifying monster with razor-sharp teeth was in the water beneath me, about to snap my legs off, because the gods didn’t smile on me—at least not lately or that I was aware of.
And Christian wasn’t as bad off as I’d thought, because he was swimming toward shore.
I narrowed my eyes. Toward shore, leaving me to my own devices that, as far as he knew, might involve drowning.
I checked to make sure the pouch was still in my waistband and kicked into a breaststroke. I’m a strong swimmer, and I pulled myself out of the quarry just a few seconds after he did. He collapsed hard on the grass-covered bank and closed his eyes.
“Thanks for sticking around to make sure I wasn’t drowning.” Then I murmured, “Oh, Christian.” I touched his blistered face, made sure he was breathing, took his pulse. He was unconscious. It had taken the last ounce of energy he possessed to get himself out of the quarry.
First things first: Were we safe here?
I scanned our surroundings. The quarry was large and deep, overflowing here and there into smaller ponds and pools. It occupied a small corner of a huge valley. Miles and miles of grassy plain were surrounded by moderate mountains with ice-capped crowns. The valley was peaceful and calm. At the opposite edge, animals grazed serenely.
It looked like we were safe, at least for now. I heaved a sigh of relief and struggled out of my wet leather coat. I slipped the pouch containing the stones from my waistband and set it aside. There was no doubt about it: Removing the stones from the spelled pouch made dimensions shift for some reason, but while uncovered, they seem to wreak total havoc on the world around them. The next time we used them, I’d flash them quickly, and maybe we’d get to skip the whole violent expulsion motif and glide at a gentle tempo into the next world.
After a brief hesitation, I stripped down to bra and panties, grateful for the moderate climate. Wet leather sucks. I draped my clothing on nearby rocks to dry in the sun, hoping the leather wouldn’t shrink to ridiculous sizes.
Next concern: what to do for Christian. He was breathing shallowly and his pulse was erratic. He’d passed out in the sun, where his burn would deepen. The blisters on his face were crusted and seeping blood. How long had he been in that hellish desert? When had he last eaten? There was no way I could move him. I couldn’t even get him out of his wet clothes. I could cut them off, but he’d need them again. Who knew what we might have to face next? He was more heavily muscled than last I’d seen him and, unconscious, he was deadweight. Had he been fighting his way through dimension after dimension since Halloween? Did time pass the same way where he’d been?
Unless it had fallen out, I had a baby-food jar of Unseelie flesh in my coat. I tripped over my own feet in my haste to get to it and unbuttoned pocket after pocket, searching.
“Ow!” I’d found it wriggling wetly in shards of broken bottle, buttoned in an inner pocket. I extracted the flesh carefully from the jar, which must have shattered in my tumble across the sand. Of the seven strips I’d crammed into the tiny container, there were four left. Three of them had wriggled off somewhere. I held the noxious pieces of gray Rhino-boy flesh, picked out slivers of glass, and considered the rapidly healing cuts on my fingers.
Was I healing so well because of the Unseelie I’d eaten in the past? Did it cause permanent changes, as Rowena claimed? Would it do something terrible to Christian? I had no idea what else to do for him. I had only two protein bars, and I didn’t know if the water around us was drinkable or contaminated by some deadly-to-humans parasite. I’d never been a Girl Scout, couldn’t start a fire with sticks, had no container to boil water in even if I could, and was disgusted to realize I was still, in many ways, remarkably useless.
I hurried back to his side, lay one of the strips on a flat stone, and cut it up into pieces as small as early peas. I pried open his teeth, stuffed the pieces in, and held his mouth and nose closed, hoping the flesh would, in dim-witted Rhino-boy fashion, wriggle toward his stomach, seeking escape.
It did. I wasn’t so useless after all!
He gagged, I released my hold on his nose, and his throat muscles convulsed. He gagged again and swallowed involuntarily. He coughed and made a retching sound. Even when you’re unconscious, Unseelie meat is revolting.
With a groan, he rolled over onto his side.
I diced another strip, stuffed it into his mouth, and held it closed again. This time he resisted, but his body was still too weak to put up much of a fight.
By the time I got the third strip sliced up and in his mouth, he’d rolled over onto his back again, opened his eyes, and was looking at me. I think he was trying to ask what I was doing, but I clamped his teeth together with one hand on the top of his head and the other beneath his chin. He gagged instead and swallowed again.
The effects of Unseelie flesh on an injured human body are instantaneous and miraculous. As I watched, his blisters disappeared and his color returned to normal, leaving him lightly tanned. The gauntness in his face vanished, and the epidermis on his body plumped everywhere, erasing the damage of dehydration, rebuilding him from the inside out.
Unseelie flesh is potent, and addictive. Even though I was cured of my little obsession with it (did he really need that last strip?) I envied what I knew was happening to him: the heady rush of power surging hot through his veins, heightening his hearing, smell, and vision, increasing his strength to Barrons’ levels, filling him with a euphoric sense of invincibility and an exquisitely elevated awareness of his own body in relation to its surroundings.