Page 12 of Guardian of Exile

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Where were you?” Morgen asked.

“I don’t know,” she said again. Her plan had been to find the boundary where the pocket of Earth Between met Dead Earth and cross over, where her newly acquired cell phone would be able to get a signal and tell her where she was. Her intense desire to flee this particular pocket of Earth Between had interrupted that plan, and Nyx had no intention of going back.

Trying to puzzle through where she might have been, she said, “I was somewhere on the coast.” That was promising, at least. She was pretty sure it had been the correct coast. “But too far north, I think. Somewhere in Canada, probably.” It had been far too cold for the New York area at this time of year, according to the weather research she’d done in preparation for their visit. She was pretty sure it had been too cold even for the upper United States and southern Canadian coastal areas at this time of year, but then weather was strange and she wasn’t a geography expert.

Some tidbit of history tickled at her memory. Hadn’t the Vikings settled Newfoundland at one point? And where people went, their gods tended to follow. Except that when Nyx had been given Gleipnir, Evra had told her that Asgard was a planet, and the Norse gods of Viking myth had only been people. Yet there was no denying that everything she had just seen lined up very neatly with one particular Norse trickster god.

Just leave it alone, she told herself. Whoever—whatever—she’d just seen, she was certain they were a dangerous thing just left alone. She looked at the glowing portal map on the ground, trying to remember where Newfoundland was in relation to New York. Somewhere above it, obviously, but directly above? Up and to the right? She accepted that she should have just brought a map with her. “Griff, could I have⁠—”

A map appeared on the ground before him, and he flicked it across the Station boundary with one talon.

“Thanks.” She opened it, and going with her gut found Newfoundland. Looking between the dot she’d just portaled to and the map, she drew a line down and to the left, choosing a new dot. The portal yawned open, showing nothing but a wide expanse of water as far as her eyes could see. Not far enough left, then.

She kept the distance she’d gone down and went further left, choosing another location. This time, instead of wilderness or ocean, neon lights greeted her, the sound of loud, lively country music pouring across the portal threshold. A man—decked out so thoroughly in cowboy attire that he had to be a tourist in whatever part of the US south this likely was—walked past. He then stuttered to a stop, whipping his head around to stare at the portal in slack-jawed amazement before his body followed suit, turning to face them.

Oh boy. She…had not expected that any portal opened in the Between would be visible to a Dead Earther, because she hadn’t expected that any of them would be magical enough to notice it. She had a moment to decide whether to snap the portal shut or leave it open. If she left it open, would he try to come through?

He stumbled as he took a step forward, and Nyx recognized all the classic signs of a man drunk off his ass—stumbling, slow, exaggerated movements, confusion, and the rapid blinking of someone who desperately wanted their vision to focus. Nyx left the portal open.

“Griff,” she said quietly, “can you make the Station look more alien?” Behind her, she heard the sprouting of new foliage, and though she didn’t want to turn her back on the portal to look at what he’d changed, a glimpse down showed the grass had turned an aquamarine blue in her peripheral vision.

She removed the Hiding she’d placed on Alihana and Veritas, strapped at her hip and thigh respectively, along with the Hiding on the weapons the others were carrying. She hoped the visibility of the weaponry would make them all look more otherworldly. All though she didn’t know how much it mattered, since there was already a very large griffin and a unicorn-dragon in the background.

She held her hand palm out in a classic request for an advancing party to halt movement, and tried to sound otherworldly and authoritative. “Come no further,” she commanded.

Out of the corner of her eye, Kaden’s eyebrows lifted. Yes, I know sound ridiculous, she thought. But this guy’s too drunk to notice. She’d been trying to channel the authority and control of Galadriel from the Lord of the Rings movies, but it had just come out sounding like herself trying and failing at acting. Oh well. Probably the odder she sounded the better. If he remembered this encounter at all in the morning, he’d end up telling his friends about the aliens he’d met, and of course no one would believe him when he started talking about blue grass and mythical creatures and women with swords. Which was possibly unfair to him, because he was meeting aliens.

Miracle of miracles, he halted at her command, looking vaguely in awe of her. “Who-r-you?” He slurred the words, so they all came out sounding like one.

What would an otherworldly being in a movie say? “We are travelers,” she said, still trying—and likely failing—to replicate the perfect diction and cool radiance of Galadriel. “Where have we arrived?”

Her gaze darted to the right at a sense of movement, which was Morgen shuddering in what was no doubt a heroic effort not to burst out laughing.

“Uh, Earth, miss. I mean, ma’am. Lady?” he asked, sounding a little desperate and helpless.

Nyx wanted to slap her hand to her forehead. She should just drop the playacting and ask him where the hell she was, except that she’d committed to the bit now. Besides which, Morgen was having so much trouble not laughing that she really wanted to make it harder for him. “What I am called is unimportant. Where on this ‘Earth’?”

“The United States of America.” He must have seen the irritation on her face because he hastened to add, “Tennessee. Uh, Nashville.”

Well, that explained the country music and the cowboy outfit. “Thank you. Your information has been most helpful.” She withdrew her magic.

“Uh, hey, wait⁠—”

The portal snapped shut. The second it was closed Morgen doubled over laughing, his hands on his thighs for support. “Little Guardian,” he wheezed out between gasps of laughter, “please don’t ever take up acting.”

She rolled her eyes. “What? I thought he deserved the full alien experience to go with his inebriation.” She actually wasn’t entirely sure why she’d done the whole bit, except that it had been⁠—

Oh. She’d done it because it had been something Seth would have done. Something he would have dragged her into doing with him. The expected pang of hurt slipped through her with the realization, but she did her best not to linger on it. To just…accept it. To accept that things still hurt, and they were going to keep hurting for a long while, and maybe that was okay.

Humans weren’t designed to be in a state of perfect happiness or tranquility all the time. What was that cliche saying she remembered? It’s okay to not feel okay? Things were cliches for a reason. They sounded trite because they’d been said so many times, but they always held a truth that, at some point in a person’s life, they needed to be reminded of.

She accepted that she felt like shit and got back to work. It took popping in and out of several other pockets of Between—many of them no larger than a small apartment and likely on their way to vanishing altogether—before she settled on what she thought was the nearest option.

She crossed the boundary to hug Griff again and reassure Temerex, and then she and her party walked through the portal into—where else?—Salem, Massachusetts. The portal had opened onto a street near several businesses, necessitating she Hide them as they came through. The transition into Dead Earth while actively working magic hit her like a double sucker-punch to the gut, and she almost lost the net covering them all.

The threads from which it was woven were slippery in her magical grip, wanting to curl back inside her, where the protective covering that was Nyx would keep them safe from the deadness that surrounded them. Nyx was accustomed to the pain of having her magic feel as if it were being ripped away when she crossed the boundary to Dead Earth, but she’d never tried to actively work magic while making the crossing. The experience was one she wouldn’t care to repeat. Bitterly, it occurred to her that if her mother hadn’t been living off-world, she would never have managed to maintain the Hiding that had kept Nyx Hidden from everyone—including herself—for so long.