A soldier pushes her, impatient with her slight delay, and her feet step quickly as she tries to catch herself before she falls palms-first towards the ground. She disappears before her hands can hit the dirt.
Zero.
I turn a glare at the impatient soldier. He folds his arms across his chest and sneers at me, as if begging for me to try to make a run for it. Instead, I blow him a kiss with my middle finger and step towards the boiling, hungry pool. I can’t help but take a breath and hold it before I take the final step into its depths. My skin prickles and, impossibly, I feel boiling hot and freezing cold at the same time. My every hair stands on end, including my eyebrows, which is an awfully peculiar feeling. With mynext step, my vision turns white, and there is nothing and everything all at once.
Chapter Six
The first thing I notice as I step into Faerie is how sweet the air is. It’s rich and heavy and full of life. I fill my lungs in a long and slow inhale, though I stop short with a sputtering cough when I feel as if my lungs have filled with moisture. That was going to need some getting used to. I take another breath, slower this time, and find I don’t need to inhale as much as I would on Earth for my lungs to be filled. This seems to prevent the thick feeling of moisture from entering my airways as well.
The second thing I notice is the earthy scent in the air. It’s refreshing and calming.
Third, I hear them: the cheers and jeers and spits of disgust.
I blink to clear my gaze, and there they are. Hundreds, if not thousands, of fae crowd the clearing I have appeared in. They line the edge of the forest beyond, and I even spy some sitting in the trees that tower like gnarled, thousand-year-old oaks from our world, only some are taller than skyscrapers. I squint as my head drops back to see the tip of the tallest one. I can’t.
“Move it, human,” a scathing and feminine voice commands from behind me. I jump as if I have awakened suddenly from a dream, having completely forgotten about the why when the where was so surreal. My neck cracks as I swing it to look at the female standing by the exit of the portal.
She is slim and elegant and at least a head and a half taller than I, and I’m considered tall for a woman. Her features are sharp and cruel and, damn it all to hell, fuckingbeautiful. I almost groan at the gnawing pit of envy that bubbles in my belly.
Her skin is Egyptian-like in its dark and golden tones, and her long hair is blacker than midnight. I’ve never looked into such a depthless tone of black before. It’s oddly terrifying. Her eyes are golden with flecks of caramel, eyes that squint at me in frustration as a single, perfectly trimmed eyebrow raises at my blatant stare. The expression said straight up that I wasn’t the first of the Chosen to have unabashedly checked her out.
My cheeks heat, and I feel my shoulders hunching before I can stop them.
“Sorry,” I say, then turn and hurry after the girl who had been ahead of me on the other side.
The line seems to have been reformed on this side of the portal, though it’s woven in a snake-like pattern like those you would find yourself in when waiting to enter a Taylor Swift concert. If only that were what we were being lined up for. I join the end of the queue, ignoring the fae that stand nearby, laughing and chattering amongst themselves as they look over every one of us. I scan the row of women ahead and to my side, searching for the petite form of Akari. I spy her only two rows across, looking nervous enough to pee her panties.
“Akari!”
Akari’s head shoots in my direction, and she breaks into a grin of relief. I duck beneath the first rope between us, ignoring the scoffs as I cut the line. They should fucking thank me for giving them the tiniest bit of extratime before we meet our fate. I slip past a few more women before ducking below the next rope, and Akari meets me there. She holds me in a rib-crushing hug that I reciprocate, though I try to gentle my hold a little. I am a lot stronger than she, her body so slight in comparison.
“Oh, Delta! I am so glad to see you!”
I pull back and gently clasp Akari’s cheeks in the palms of my hands, holding her steady so we can have this moment to justbewith one another.
“There is no place I’d rather be than by your side,” I tell her, pulling her close and planting a chaste kiss on her forehead. Akari blushes beautifully.
“I have to thank you, too,” she says, looking away from me in a sudden timidness as I let her face go. “For what you did when I made the Crossing. I don’t think I could have done it without you. I definitely would have had a panic attack had I come through the nervous wreck I had been before that. This air is… so unnatural. One girl after me had an attack just after she Crossed, and rumor is someone earlier had fainted.”
I almost snort. Typical for the rumor mill to have begun so soon.
I hold Akari’s hand as I join her in her part of the line, my eyes darting back to the hundreds of fae celebrating our arrival.
“It’s certainly going to take some getting used to,” I say, forcing myself to take half a breath less than usual. “Have you seen the others yet? Jabira and Jasmin?”
Akari shakes her head. “Not since last night.”
I nod and drop the subject. Jabira would be fine. She was a strong woman. Jasmin, though… I worried for her. She was such a nervous little thing; I could see her as being the one to have fainted earlier. And if that hadn’t been, I wouldn’t put it past her to be another fainter, anyway.
“What are we lining up for?” I ask after a moment of silence. We have moved a dozen steps forward, but the line is drifting in small and slow shuffles. I justknewmy impatient ass was going to chaff soon just to get a damn move on.
“I don’t know,” Akari replies. I almost laugh when she stands on her tippy toes to see over the heads of the girls in the rows beside us. Her eyeline still barely reaches my chin. She flushes when she realizes how ridiculous it was and quickly drops her heels back down. “I suppose you’d tell me if you saw anything, what with your supermodel height and all.”
I smirk. “And yet the fae are still so much taller than I. Did you see that female by the portal? Her hair wasintense!”
“Completely unearthly,” she agrees, her cheeks reddening as her eyes dart away from mine. “She was very…” She trails off as she struggles to explain the beauty of the fae.
“Striking?” I ask. “The most beautiful being in all of existence?”
