“If Ferion’s got Elven guards on the Numenlaurian passageway, then our assignment is little more than in name only,” Aryal said. She blew out a sigh. “Well, the main part the assignment isn’t. More than half the reason Dragos sent us here was to get rid of us.”
Quentin angled out his jaw. He couldn’t deny it. He looked sideways at the same moment Aryal did. He was immensely surprised when they both burst out laughing at the same time.
It felt strange, almost good, like they shared a moment of camaraderie. His laughter faded and he scowled at the thought. “We may not be doing any of this for Ferion, but he’s glad we’re going to check on the passageway. He asked me to give him an update when we get back. There’s no cell phone reception in the forest, and he hasn’t heard anything from the guards since they went in.”
Her eyebrows rose. “How long ago was that?”
“He didn’t say exactly, but from the gist of the conversation, I think it had to have been at least three weeks ago.” Quentin tried to straighten his legs as much as he could. His muscles were protesting sitting for so long in such confined spaces.
“And he hasn’t heard from them since?” She shook her head. “Sloppy. They should have sent someone out with an update by now.”
He sighed. “Yes, an update would have been good, but you don’t know that it was sloppy. They might have found some need to cross over to Numenlaur. If that happened, then you’ve got to factor in time slippage from the Other land. Ferion didn’t sound too worried. He’ll just be glad to hear how things are going.”
After that they fell silent again, as if talking with some kind of civility had been enough of a strain that they couldn’t sustain it any longer. Just over an hour into the journey, a bit south of Plze, they switched highways to continue in a more southern direction that would take them to the northern edge of the Forest. After passing through another urban cluster, they passed quickly into countryside again.
The Forest was growing in popularity as a vacation destination, and it had several camping grounds along with ski resorts. They would be able to drive in a fair distance before they would have to park and hike.
Still, Aryal had to slow the Peugeot as the roads grew narrow and winding. The amount of traffic dropped to almost nonexistent. Even though the low surrounding mountains were streaked with patches of white, probably both ski resorts and campgrounds were all but deserted. The weather was too warm for satisfactory snow cover for skiing, but too cold and damp for all but the hardiest of campers.
Aryal spoke, disrupting the long silence. “If I was on my own, I would have taken to the air by now, and I would scout for the passageways by feeling for land magic.”
Quentin rubbed his face. “It might still be useful if you did that when we got closer.” He looked at her over his hand. “I just realized you’re old enough to remember the time before Numenlaur closed itself off from the world.”
It was sometimes easy to forget how much older the other sentinels were than Quentin, including Alex, who had made passing references before to ancient Grecian wars as if he had lived through them—and no doubt he had. Wyr tended to live very much in the present, more so than almost all the other Elder Races. Quentin had thought before that it must have something to do with their animal natures.
“Sure, I’m old enough,” she said. “But the world is a very big place, and I had no interest in what Elves were up to. I’ve never been near the passageways here.”
He almost asked her what she had been interested in, all that long ago, before he remembered he could hardly stand to hear the sound of her voice and caught himself.
Instead, he said, “Ferion confirmed that the Numenlaur passageway is very near where the stories say it is. That means I’ve been through that area before. We’ll have to park at one of the camping sites and hike in.”
“All right.” She paused. “I suppose we’ve passed the point where we might be able to stop at a farmhouse and rent rooms.”
Quentin rubbed his face. “Yes. We’ve got two options for tonight. There’s a turnoff soon for a ski resort. It might be open, if you want to try there. Or we can rough it.”
Amusement flashed over her face, keen and bright like a blade. “I like roughing it.”
Pow, the banked sexuality that smoldered between them came roaring back to the surface. It filled the interior of the car. He listened to the tiny sound of her breathing, the subtle friction of air as she shifted in her seat.
She was squirming.
He knew exactly what he would have done if they hadn’t been in a moving vehicle. He would have advanced on her, pushed her back against some kind of surface. He would have taken her chin, tilted her head back and bitten her throat.
He just didn’t know whether he would have done it before or after he kissed her.
“Hate sex,” he hissed.
Her eyes flashed to him. She looked furious, or agonized.
He ran his hands through his short hair and stretched, deliberately arching his back. Her hands clenched on the steering wheel so that the knuckles showed white.
He laughed, low and soft. She started it. By damn, it was good to know he got under the harpy’s skin just as much as she got under his.
She was good at shock value, he would give her that. The things that fell out of her mouth were sometimes as raw as the punch she had thrown at him earlier.
Maybe the idea was growing in its appeal now that it had been with him for a few hours. If he wouldn’t let himself kill her, he could at least screw her until they were both senseless.
Then maybe he would get rid of whatever poison she had injected into his system.
His hands fisted as he remembered the feel of that taut, tight body of hers pinning him against the warehouse door. Nobody had ever pinned him, aroused him, and then laughed in his face before. He owed her for that. Hard and raw.
Her life was one eternal rampage. Maybe it was time someone turned the tables on her and went after her with the same kind of relentlessness with which she went after the entire world.
And maybe it was past time that someone took that harpy down a peg or two, and showed her who was boss.
SEVEN
By the time Aryal finally parked the car in a gravel parking lot at a deserted campsite, it was late afternoon and clouds obscured the nearby mountain peaks. Tantalizing hints of land magic had begun to tickle at her senses for the last half hour or so of the drive. She longed to take flight and hunt for the elusive feeling, soar over the mountain range and kick her feet in the thick clouds.
The day had warmed enough to melt the patchy snow at the lower altitudes, but sunset came early in March in the Czech Republic, and the temperature was already falling again. When she opened the car door, the damp chill air was like a cold, wet washcloth slapping her in the face. The fresh air smelled wonderful, and it felt good and bracing, but it wasn’t enough to cool the heat pouring through her body.
Grateful to be out of the confinement of the car at last, she stretched her aching back. Instantly an image of Quentin stretching in the car flashed in her mind. He looked like a great, lazy cat as he did it, his blue eyes vivid in his tanned face. He smelled like virility and feline Wyr. The scent got up her nose and made her crazy. Her Wyr side wanted to claw at him. Hell, her human side wanted to claw at him too.
Gods, this had turned into a long trip already, and they were only on the first day. And she had lost her only comfort, the conviction that everybody would be better off if she just committed a quiet, itsy-bitsy little murder.
Aryal flew by her instincts, and every instinct had screamed for so long that Quentin was a dangerous man. And he was dangerous. Not many creatures could get her down on the ground with their hands around her throat.
Had she let that skew her perspective? Is that why she had pursued him so relentlessly? After all, a dangerous man would make an exceedingly dangerous criminal.
But he had been telling the truth earlier, and so had she—she really didn’t care about the smuggling he had done. If she pushed it and continued to squander her time digging into his past, maybe she could get enough evidence to kick him out of his sentinel position, but what would it cost her?
He was already well liked, and he was Pia’s special friend. And Aryal had taken sober note of not only Dragos’s words, but of Grym’s as well, along with the cold assessing way that Graydon had looked at her when she had gone to talk to him in the cafeteria. She had already used up all of her considerable free rein with not only Dragos, but with almost everybody else too. She was riding high on everyone’s annoyance radar and low on tolerance. Nobody’s first impulse was going to be to give her any slack.
So she spent the drive doing something she rarely did, which was considering the possible consequences of her actions. The exercise hurt her brain and offended her nature. But the bottom line was, all that effort and upheaval would be to pin him for crimes that she didn’t give a shit about anyway. Gah, if only he had been a spy, or involved in some super secret assassination plot against Dragos or somebody else she loved!
At least she didn’t have to give up her hate on him. She just had to give up the whole “hunting for an act of God to squash him like a bug so she could innocently present his crushed and lifeless body to Dragos” plan.
She had to admit, that did make life a lot simpler.
And besides, giving up on the plan was one thing. She could still hurt him a whole lot if he gave her any reason to. She cheered at the thought.
They were going to have to leave the car, maybe for some time, so she had parked in an unobtrusive spot underneath some trees for whatever shelter that might offer from the elements. As she looked around, she noted that the campsite had permanent metal grills for cooking. Probably small animals had built nests in half of them. She preferred setting up her own fire ring.
It was early to stop for the day, but there was also no reason to wreck themselves. This land was beautiful, but it would not be friendly terrain in mid-March, and it was not like they could push hard, finish their assignment and go home early. And Dragos had already said they couldn’t show up again in New York before two weeks were up.
They’d already had a sleepless night and a transcontinental flight, and Aryal had eaten only one full meal since yesterday. Granted it was a big meal, but her body was telling her that it was ready for another one.
Quentin had exited the car too. He studied the scene with one arm resting on the car roof. Lifting his head, he scented the breeze. He said, “There are wolves in these mountains.”
Sentinel or no, a large enough pack of any kind of predator could bring one of them down, but the wolves weren’t really a threat to either her or Quentin. Any wolves would sense that they were the more dangerous predators and normally give them a wide berth. A wild pack would have to have an overriding reason to attack them.
She could also take to the air and leave behind any confrontation, and if Quentin couldn’t outrun them, he could go to high ground, maybe climb a tree, and wait them out. The weather wasn’t bitter enough to turn any wild pack desperate enough to tree him for days until he became desperate enough to take them on.
But wolves could become a nuisance, especially when they cooked food, so they would still need to stay wary. She said briskly, “We should set up camp.”
He tilted his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles. “All right. I did the bulk of the work this morning, so I’m going to take off and see if I can hunt down some fresh game for supper. You can set up camp.”
“Hey!” she exclaimed. Hunting was the fun chore.
He didn’t stay to argue with her. Instead he shapeshifted into a massive black panther and after one expressive glance at her, he glided away. She made a face, looked around at the deepening dusk and set to work.
She was tempted to erect just one tent and claim it, but if he came back with fresh meat, she wanted some, so she set up a proper camp with a tarp strung between two trees in case of rain or snow, and the two dome tents set on more tarps on opposite sides of a ringed campfire. Modern materials made camping a breeze. The dome tents were light, portable, and erected within five minutes.
Not only had Quentin bought sleeping bags, but he also had picked up thin insulating pads that would protect them from the bitter chill of the ground. They weren’t as comfortable as air mattresses, but they weren’t as heavy and bulky either. Everything he had bought was top of the line and lightweight for serious, long-distance hiking.
The most time-intensive thing was gathering wood for a campfire. She worked on that quickly, and after she had gathered deadwood from the immediate area, she jogged around the larger campsite to see if anybody had left wood behind from the previous season.
She was in luck and found a couple of armloads. She hauled them back to camp, started the fire, and opened the bottle of twenty-six-year-old scotch she had found in one of the bags in the car. As she took her first pull from the bottle, the black panther slipped out of the gathering darkness, two winter hares in his mouth.
Reflected light from the new flames flickered in the panther’s strange, brilliant blue eyes and gleamed along his glossy black pelt. He was an oddity in that his Wyr form was so black, yet in his human form, his hair was a dark blond. It was probably a product of his mixed-race heritage. As he padded toward her, his heavy, graceful muscles flowed underneath his skin, causing the light to ripple along his long, powerful body.
The skin at the back of her nape prickled. This was why she was so convinced he was dangerous. If she dove at him as a harpy, he had the speed, power and size to snatch her out of the air.
She refused to let her reaction show, so she sniffed, took another swig from the bottle and told the panther, “You’re the one who wanted to hunt. You’d better not be bringing those to me to clean. The fire’s going to be ready in a few minutes. Hop to it.” The panther stared at the bottle of scotch then up at her with an unblinking gaze. She shooed him with one hand. “Go on, you stinky cat.”
Quentin angled out his jaw. He couldn’t deny it. He looked sideways at the same moment Aryal did. He was immensely surprised when they both burst out laughing at the same time.
It felt strange, almost good, like they shared a moment of camaraderie. His laughter faded and he scowled at the thought. “We may not be doing any of this for Ferion, but he’s glad we’re going to check on the passageway. He asked me to give him an update when we get back. There’s no cell phone reception in the forest, and he hasn’t heard anything from the guards since they went in.”
Her eyebrows rose. “How long ago was that?”
“He didn’t say exactly, but from the gist of the conversation, I think it had to have been at least three weeks ago.” Quentin tried to straighten his legs as much as he could. His muscles were protesting sitting for so long in such confined spaces.
“And he hasn’t heard from them since?” She shook her head. “Sloppy. They should have sent someone out with an update by now.”
He sighed. “Yes, an update would have been good, but you don’t know that it was sloppy. They might have found some need to cross over to Numenlaur. If that happened, then you’ve got to factor in time slippage from the Other land. Ferion didn’t sound too worried. He’ll just be glad to hear how things are going.”
After that they fell silent again, as if talking with some kind of civility had been enough of a strain that they couldn’t sustain it any longer. Just over an hour into the journey, a bit south of Plze, they switched highways to continue in a more southern direction that would take them to the northern edge of the Forest. After passing through another urban cluster, they passed quickly into countryside again.
The Forest was growing in popularity as a vacation destination, and it had several camping grounds along with ski resorts. They would be able to drive in a fair distance before they would have to park and hike.
Still, Aryal had to slow the Peugeot as the roads grew narrow and winding. The amount of traffic dropped to almost nonexistent. Even though the low surrounding mountains were streaked with patches of white, probably both ski resorts and campgrounds were all but deserted. The weather was too warm for satisfactory snow cover for skiing, but too cold and damp for all but the hardiest of campers.
Aryal spoke, disrupting the long silence. “If I was on my own, I would have taken to the air by now, and I would scout for the passageways by feeling for land magic.”
Quentin rubbed his face. “It might still be useful if you did that when we got closer.” He looked at her over his hand. “I just realized you’re old enough to remember the time before Numenlaur closed itself off from the world.”
It was sometimes easy to forget how much older the other sentinels were than Quentin, including Alex, who had made passing references before to ancient Grecian wars as if he had lived through them—and no doubt he had. Wyr tended to live very much in the present, more so than almost all the other Elder Races. Quentin had thought before that it must have something to do with their animal natures.
“Sure, I’m old enough,” she said. “But the world is a very big place, and I had no interest in what Elves were up to. I’ve never been near the passageways here.”
He almost asked her what she had been interested in, all that long ago, before he remembered he could hardly stand to hear the sound of her voice and caught himself.
Instead, he said, “Ferion confirmed that the Numenlaur passageway is very near where the stories say it is. That means I’ve been through that area before. We’ll have to park at one of the camping sites and hike in.”
“All right.” She paused. “I suppose we’ve passed the point where we might be able to stop at a farmhouse and rent rooms.”
Quentin rubbed his face. “Yes. We’ve got two options for tonight. There’s a turnoff soon for a ski resort. It might be open, if you want to try there. Or we can rough it.”
Amusement flashed over her face, keen and bright like a blade. “I like roughing it.”
Pow, the banked sexuality that smoldered between them came roaring back to the surface. It filled the interior of the car. He listened to the tiny sound of her breathing, the subtle friction of air as she shifted in her seat.
She was squirming.
He knew exactly what he would have done if they hadn’t been in a moving vehicle. He would have advanced on her, pushed her back against some kind of surface. He would have taken her chin, tilted her head back and bitten her throat.
He just didn’t know whether he would have done it before or after he kissed her.
“Hate sex,” he hissed.
Her eyes flashed to him. She looked furious, or agonized.
He ran his hands through his short hair and stretched, deliberately arching his back. Her hands clenched on the steering wheel so that the knuckles showed white.
He laughed, low and soft. She started it. By damn, it was good to know he got under the harpy’s skin just as much as she got under his.
She was good at shock value, he would give her that. The things that fell out of her mouth were sometimes as raw as the punch she had thrown at him earlier.
Maybe the idea was growing in its appeal now that it had been with him for a few hours. If he wouldn’t let himself kill her, he could at least screw her until they were both senseless.
Then maybe he would get rid of whatever poison she had injected into his system.
His hands fisted as he remembered the feel of that taut, tight body of hers pinning him against the warehouse door. Nobody had ever pinned him, aroused him, and then laughed in his face before. He owed her for that. Hard and raw.
Her life was one eternal rampage. Maybe it was time someone turned the tables on her and went after her with the same kind of relentlessness with which she went after the entire world.
And maybe it was past time that someone took that harpy down a peg or two, and showed her who was boss.
SEVEN
By the time Aryal finally parked the car in a gravel parking lot at a deserted campsite, it was late afternoon and clouds obscured the nearby mountain peaks. Tantalizing hints of land magic had begun to tickle at her senses for the last half hour or so of the drive. She longed to take flight and hunt for the elusive feeling, soar over the mountain range and kick her feet in the thick clouds.
The day had warmed enough to melt the patchy snow at the lower altitudes, but sunset came early in March in the Czech Republic, and the temperature was already falling again. When she opened the car door, the damp chill air was like a cold, wet washcloth slapping her in the face. The fresh air smelled wonderful, and it felt good and bracing, but it wasn’t enough to cool the heat pouring through her body.
Grateful to be out of the confinement of the car at last, she stretched her aching back. Instantly an image of Quentin stretching in the car flashed in her mind. He looked like a great, lazy cat as he did it, his blue eyes vivid in his tanned face. He smelled like virility and feline Wyr. The scent got up her nose and made her crazy. Her Wyr side wanted to claw at him. Hell, her human side wanted to claw at him too.
Gods, this had turned into a long trip already, and they were only on the first day. And she had lost her only comfort, the conviction that everybody would be better off if she just committed a quiet, itsy-bitsy little murder.
Aryal flew by her instincts, and every instinct had screamed for so long that Quentin was a dangerous man. And he was dangerous. Not many creatures could get her down on the ground with their hands around her throat.
Had she let that skew her perspective? Is that why she had pursued him so relentlessly? After all, a dangerous man would make an exceedingly dangerous criminal.
But he had been telling the truth earlier, and so had she—she really didn’t care about the smuggling he had done. If she pushed it and continued to squander her time digging into his past, maybe she could get enough evidence to kick him out of his sentinel position, but what would it cost her?
He was already well liked, and he was Pia’s special friend. And Aryal had taken sober note of not only Dragos’s words, but of Grym’s as well, along with the cold assessing way that Graydon had looked at her when she had gone to talk to him in the cafeteria. She had already used up all of her considerable free rein with not only Dragos, but with almost everybody else too. She was riding high on everyone’s annoyance radar and low on tolerance. Nobody’s first impulse was going to be to give her any slack.
So she spent the drive doing something she rarely did, which was considering the possible consequences of her actions. The exercise hurt her brain and offended her nature. But the bottom line was, all that effort and upheaval would be to pin him for crimes that she didn’t give a shit about anyway. Gah, if only he had been a spy, or involved in some super secret assassination plot against Dragos or somebody else she loved!
At least she didn’t have to give up her hate on him. She just had to give up the whole “hunting for an act of God to squash him like a bug so she could innocently present his crushed and lifeless body to Dragos” plan.
She had to admit, that did make life a lot simpler.
And besides, giving up on the plan was one thing. She could still hurt him a whole lot if he gave her any reason to. She cheered at the thought.
They were going to have to leave the car, maybe for some time, so she had parked in an unobtrusive spot underneath some trees for whatever shelter that might offer from the elements. As she looked around, she noted that the campsite had permanent metal grills for cooking. Probably small animals had built nests in half of them. She preferred setting up her own fire ring.
It was early to stop for the day, but there was also no reason to wreck themselves. This land was beautiful, but it would not be friendly terrain in mid-March, and it was not like they could push hard, finish their assignment and go home early. And Dragos had already said they couldn’t show up again in New York before two weeks were up.
They’d already had a sleepless night and a transcontinental flight, and Aryal had eaten only one full meal since yesterday. Granted it was a big meal, but her body was telling her that it was ready for another one.
Quentin had exited the car too. He studied the scene with one arm resting on the car roof. Lifting his head, he scented the breeze. He said, “There are wolves in these mountains.”
Sentinel or no, a large enough pack of any kind of predator could bring one of them down, but the wolves weren’t really a threat to either her or Quentin. Any wolves would sense that they were the more dangerous predators and normally give them a wide berth. A wild pack would have to have an overriding reason to attack them.
She could also take to the air and leave behind any confrontation, and if Quentin couldn’t outrun them, he could go to high ground, maybe climb a tree, and wait them out. The weather wasn’t bitter enough to turn any wild pack desperate enough to tree him for days until he became desperate enough to take them on.
But wolves could become a nuisance, especially when they cooked food, so they would still need to stay wary. She said briskly, “We should set up camp.”
He tilted his head from side to side, stretching his neck muscles. “All right. I did the bulk of the work this morning, so I’m going to take off and see if I can hunt down some fresh game for supper. You can set up camp.”
“Hey!” she exclaimed. Hunting was the fun chore.
He didn’t stay to argue with her. Instead he shapeshifted into a massive black panther and after one expressive glance at her, he glided away. She made a face, looked around at the deepening dusk and set to work.
She was tempted to erect just one tent and claim it, but if he came back with fresh meat, she wanted some, so she set up a proper camp with a tarp strung between two trees in case of rain or snow, and the two dome tents set on more tarps on opposite sides of a ringed campfire. Modern materials made camping a breeze. The dome tents were light, portable, and erected within five minutes.
Not only had Quentin bought sleeping bags, but he also had picked up thin insulating pads that would protect them from the bitter chill of the ground. They weren’t as comfortable as air mattresses, but they weren’t as heavy and bulky either. Everything he had bought was top of the line and lightweight for serious, long-distance hiking.
The most time-intensive thing was gathering wood for a campfire. She worked on that quickly, and after she had gathered deadwood from the immediate area, she jogged around the larger campsite to see if anybody had left wood behind from the previous season.
She was in luck and found a couple of armloads. She hauled them back to camp, started the fire, and opened the bottle of twenty-six-year-old scotch she had found in one of the bags in the car. As she took her first pull from the bottle, the black panther slipped out of the gathering darkness, two winter hares in his mouth.
Reflected light from the new flames flickered in the panther’s strange, brilliant blue eyes and gleamed along his glossy black pelt. He was an oddity in that his Wyr form was so black, yet in his human form, his hair was a dark blond. It was probably a product of his mixed-race heritage. As he padded toward her, his heavy, graceful muscles flowed underneath his skin, causing the light to ripple along his long, powerful body.
The skin at the back of her nape prickled. This was why she was so convinced he was dangerous. If she dove at him as a harpy, he had the speed, power and size to snatch her out of the air.
She refused to let her reaction show, so she sniffed, took another swig from the bottle and told the panther, “You’re the one who wanted to hunt. You’d better not be bringing those to me to clean. The fire’s going to be ready in a few minutes. Hop to it.” The panther stared at the bottle of scotch then up at her with an unblinking gaze. She shooed him with one hand. “Go on, you stinky cat.”
