Nothing around us but a still, clear night under a nearly full moon, with the barest hint of a breeze.
“Wait!” She pulls the ring off the chain, puts the chain around her neck again, and then, with a deep breath, she slides the ring onto her left ring finger. “Lazgo mandem tanneh cahl. Fozun rostray sephiahl.” She chants it, like a spell, and…
I am not ashamed to admit that while her jubilant screams are of success and celebration, mine are of shock and, yes, fear. My entire body tingles as, around us, the Welsh night shimmers and dissolves, replaced by a thickly wooded clearing that’s just larger than the rock piles outside the stone ring.
“Yes!Yes, motherfuckingyes!” she screams, climbing out of my arms because, frankly, I’m too stunned to do anything but stand there, staring, turning around in a circle.
She darts around the stone ring, cackling in glee, whooping with her success, until a thought finally hits me. I blur to her side, grab her, and clap a hand over her mouth.
“Shh!”
“What?” she mumbles behind my hand.
“Quiet!” I hiss, listening.
A gentle breeze stirs the leaves of the trees in the woods around us. The creaking and chirping of some insects softly overlay that sound, but there are no cars or planes, nothing like that. I see no distant light pollution.
It even…smellsdifferent here.
When I look up, the moon is the same phase, and the stars all look like the constellations I’d expect to see, but every hair on my body is standing nearly on end as I realize we’ve…
Crossed.
Through the stone ring.
This is the stuff of cable TV shows and romance books, not reality.
Right?
Then again, I’m a vampire who’s about to sign a lucrative business deal with a werewolf, whose mate is apparently part psychic fae.
Sooo…yeah.
After a minute, I realize I’m hearing something that fills me with dread—the sound of something large, an animal or a person, moving through the trees some distance away, but heading toward us. I realize she hears it, too, because her eyes widen.
I grab her and blur, moving into the trees on the far side of the ring from where the sounds are coming, and I hold her in my arms, so she doesn’t accidentally shuffle her feet and make a noise. Also, so I can leap to safety, if necessary, and carry her with me. I have the ability to cloak my presence from the average human, but I’ve never tried it before while holding someone.
I try it now and hope it works with my girl in my arms.
“Stay silent,” I whisper, and she nods.
The footsteps approach, closer, until the person making them finally breaks through into the clearing on the other side.
The man stops at the edge of the woods, his nose to the air, hesitating. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say he was scenting us.
Before I can stop her, Eilidh gasps and throws herself out of my arms like a wild little demon badger. “Zuzu!” she screams, running through the trees and toward the stones.
Dammit!I’m already starting after her and attribute my delay in reacting to my shock over the fact that we’re apparently in anotherfuckingdimension.
Except the man’s equally startled cry in reply pulls me up short. “Eilidh?” He screams in joy and drops the canvas satchel he carries slung over his shoulder, engulfing her in his embrace as she slams into him, crying now as hard as she is. “Mazbushka!”
He looks exactly as she’d described him, except this man can’t be older than Eilidh. In fact, he looks like he’s barely in his late twenties, if that.
And it takes my breath away to see how much he also resembles my Robert. That guts me, rendering me unable to do anything except stand there and witness their tearful reunion.
They both collapse to the ground, crying as he rocks her in his embrace and speaks to her in a language that…yeah.
I havenofucking idea what he’s saying, but if I had to guess, it’s the same language she chanted in the stone ring. I mean, there are plenty of languages in the world I do not know, but in this part of the world, there are none that I can’t at least hear a few words of and recognize the language, even if I don’t understand everything being said.
