“I will stand watch until Lucas returns,” he said. The only sign that I’d affected him at all was the hoarseness in his voice.
My track record couldn’t be worse—why were all the men in my life such assholes? I thought Rafael would be different.
My body chose that moment to stop sweating, and start shivering. I lay down, yanking the covers up to my chin.
And shook.
If this was withdrawal, bring on the dust.
23
Havoc
The Watcherbitch took us through enough gateways that my head started to spin. Which, I guess, was the whole fucking idea.
We ended up in a forest so humid that condensation formed on the surrounding leaves. The ground was sloped, and behind us, cliffs appeared through the dense foliage.
“Nice place.” My voice dripped sarcasm as I shook water off my scales.
“This is among one of the few wild gates in this realm,” Cara replied, unfazed. “But not our final stop. They might think to look for us here.”
Wild gate? I looked around. None of the usual crap that came with a gate—this one sat in the middle of a forest. I’d heard that if the lodestones were strong enough, gates sometimes spontaneously appeared. “Looks like the end of the fucking world,” I noted. “Who’s going to look here?”
“This is very close to Tyrez’s home,” she explained. “Nikolai and I have been working on a little project out here in secret. Think that will work nicely.”
“Kinda stands out right now,” the big Bellati said. His voice suited him well. He and I could have bass singing contests.
Or we could, if I ever fucking sang.
“We will need to disguise it better,” Cara said.
“It’s beautiful here.” Marcus stepped in a puddle. “Just a little—damp.”
Well, at least he and I agreed on something.
Cara moved to the end of the ledge we stood upon, and raised her arms. Nikolai moved up behind her, set the skull down, and put a hand on her shoulder. The air before them glowed and swirled. Then snapped into a gate.
Vali held her hand out to me, and I glared at her.
“One more time,” she said.
I doubted that. But Fang did her tickle thing—did the damned Webspinner really think that calmed me?—and I took it, Nikolai picked up the skull again, and Cara guided us through.
To more fucking wet forest.
This time, though, my mouth dropped open. Because standing amid the others were three massive trees. So huge that at first, I thought they were cliffs, not something alive. Their buttressed roots spread out for more than a hundred feet in each direction from trunks that couldn’t be spanned by several Dragons standing nose to tail.
Fang emerged from beneath my hair to sit on my shoulder. Even her beady little eyes blinked repeatedly.
“My retirement home.” Cara smiled. “Not that I’d intended to use it quite so soon. But we need to cloak it better than this.”
She nodded to Nikolai. He’d picked the skull up again, and set it down before moving to stand beside her. His tremendous height made her look like a child.
He raised his hands. Fang darted back into her hidey-hole and vibrated against my neck, before my hair started to rise into the air.
I wasn’t alone. Everyone was in the same boat. Nikolai’s long hair writhed as though it had come to life, and from deep below us, I felt something stir.
Fucking hell. A rising, seething maelstrom of chaos. The violence in it spoke to me, but it was far too powerful to be at anyone’s beck and call. Yet Nikolai took it, and twisted it to do a task for which it wasn’t suited.
