Page 39 of Last Flame
He’s still got that look. Closer now, I can see he’s not sick. I don’t know what it is, but it’s aimed entirely at me, and my heart is doing the racing thing again.
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Fine,” he says. “Completely fine.”
One second he’s sitting at the edge of the pull-out, a careful foot of space between us.
The next his hand finds my ribs — the exact spot, the high curve of my side, the place that’s been warm since his apartment, the place his finger already knows — and presses in.
I shriek.
Chapter 14
Rayner
Something has me before my second foot clears the crossing.
There’s a pull, low in the chest, steady, aimed past the trees toward the glow of the city. Like a hand closed around something behind my ribs the moment we landed and started, gently, to reel.
Huh.
I don’t know what that is, and I don’t fight it. I’ve never been any good at fighting the things I feel first, and I stopped trying a long time ago.
They’re usually right.
The clearing is wrong, though. That part gets my attention too. We come through hot, all four of us low and spread. Ready for whatever the Vestry couldn’t name to be standing here waiting. But there’s nothing standing here.
We’ve crossed through here more times than I can count in my four hundred years and I’ve never once seen the ground like this. It’s always been green, alive — a place like any other in this realm. Butnow? The grass around the stone has gone black and dead in a wide circle. The tree line’s pulled back, every trunk leaning away.
Nothing grows here anymore.
It doesn’t look like it has for a very long time.
Gunnar swears under his breath. Nobody argues with him.
I take it in, and it should have all of my attention. It doesn’t, and I know why, and I’m not saying why. Whatever’s wrong with this ground, it isn’t the thing pulling on me. Whatever this pull is doesn’t care about the dead grass. It’s already past it, out toward the lights, patient and certain.
Something moves in the tree line, and all four of us are on it at once, predator instincts snapping to the same patch of dark —
A deer.
It steps half out of the trees and stops at the edge of the black grass. Puts a foot toward it, pulls the foot back. It won’t come onto the dead ground, so it stands there with its ears up, looking at the four of us like we’re the wrong thing in the woods, then turns and goes.
“I almost killed a deer,” Gunnar says.
“We all almost killed a deer,” Brock says.
“You made a noise.”
“Everyone made a noise.”
They didn’t all make a noise. Gunnar made the noise, and I don’t say so, because it’s the first easy thing since we crossed and I let it be easy.
“I think it’s called hunting,” Gunnar grins.
I love these idiots.
“I’ll walk it,” Brock says, already moving, low toward the tree line. Nobody moves to stop him because one of us should. Just because the space feels dead and empty, doesn’t mean it is.
