“Aileen?”
My aunt’s eyes were wide as her gaze darted from me to the shadows now creeping across the ground in my direction.
“Stop—it’s dangerous. You don’t know what you’re doing!”
It was far too late for that. They’d already answered the call. The process, once begun, was effortless. Like tipping over a cliff. Once you went past a certain point, there was no way back.
The shadows wrapped around me. Color leached away from the world; Callie’s snakes slowly losing their brilliance. Like an old photograph faded by time.
“Damn it, child.” Callie whirled and slapped a hand against the nearest wall. A word fell from her lips, power cracking the air in a thunderous sound.
The shadows ripped me out of time and space just as the golden net of the cage flared and then disappeared.
Belatedly, I realized there was one crucial piece of the process that I’d forgotten about. That whole envisioning thing.
twenty
My passage into shadowwasn’t nearly as peaceful or controlled as Brin’s. I ripped through the darkness with all the finesse of an angry rhino. In a dizzying rush that left me disoriented and fighting nausea.
In a last ditch, desperate attempt at control, I tried envisioning my bedroom in Vegas. The sensation of cool sheets on my skin. The feel of wood under my feet. The view of the rolling hills and desert landscape outside the window.
Wait a minute. Was it day or night there?
The brief break in my concentration was enough to snap the tenuous connection and send me deeper into the shadows.
I gazed around, belatedly realizing just how badly I’d screwed up. I shouldn’t have tried to jump realms on my first attempt at shadow slipping.
What kind of idiot tried to sprint before they could even crawl?
Two seconds. If Callie had arrived two seconds earlier, I wouldn’t have attempted something so asinine.
No, be honest. You let Book get in your head. Even knowing how dangerous a Fae relic could be, you still listened to him. I might as well call myself a fool.
Frustration and anger weren’t going to save me though. Not from the predicament I’d landed myself in.
Somehow, I knew I’d strayed far from where I needed to be. Into the deepest, coldest parts of darkness. Places no sane being should ever visit.
In the periphery of my vision, leviathans swam through the gloom. Their massive forms terrifying as a few stopped to regard me.
A sound reverberated through the darkness. The whistles and clicks similar in tone and pitch to whale communication.
I shivered in place, watching the rest of the pod turn toward me.
The urge to hyperventilate as I came under their focus was only thwarted by the fact that I couldn’t breathe in this place.
An alien consciousness brushed mine. Its immenseness making me flinch.
It was ancient. Far more than anything I’d ever encountered. Older than Ahrun and Brin. Perhaps even older than my grandfather.
A bark announced Alches’s presence.
His form rippled, the dog falling away until a tentacled monster half the size of the leviathans took his place.
The leviathan’s voice resounded in the darkness, slow and deep.Youuu tressssspasss, reallllmmm guuardiannn.
Alches growled.She belongs to Noctessa and me.
The attention of the great beings narrowed on me.
