She smiled again. Despite her fear and fury, it had been a deeply satisfying moment to watch him fold over.
“You kicked him in the nuts?” Carter asked.
“Yes, right after you got drugged. Then the guy who drugged you drugged me.”
“Good job. Wish I’d seen it.”
She was unexpectedly gratified by his praise. A silence fell, broken only by the sounds of birds and bugs and frogs.
They looked at each other. Both of them were smeared with mud, and Carter was additionally smeared with blood. Fen remembered his story about getting marooned on a desert island. She still didn’t believe it. But if it had been true, this was what he might have looked like, cut and bruised and dirty and disheveled, his expensive clothes ruined. But based on how he looked now, he wouldn’t have panicked. He’d have been supremely put out.
“I only got these last week,” he sighed, gazing at his shoes. “They’re direct from Ferragamo’s workshop in Florence. Custom-made.”
They were covered in sticky mud and absolutely ruined. Fen glumly eyed her Jimmy Choo stilettos, wondering if they were salvageable. She could at least rinse the mud off them.
She stood up to give it a try, and the heels sank all the way down through the ground.
It was an unsettling feeling, as if the earth itself wasn’t quite solid beneath her feet. She took another cautious step toward the water. Not only did her heels immediately sink again, but she realized that the unsteady feeling hadn’t been an illusion. When she took a step, the ground itself quivered.
“Carter…?” Like the earth she stood on, her voice quavered.
He jumped to his feet, then crouched slightly for balance. “What the hell…?”
Her mind flew from one unlikely possibility to the next. A swarm of tiny earthquakes that coincidentally were timed with their feet. They were standing on quicksand. They were in a virtual reality simulation. It was all a dream. They were on a gigantic float mattress dressed up to look like swampland.
And then she knew what it was. “This is a floating island.”
“What?”
“It has to be. Some swamps have them. They’re giant masses of plant matter stuck together with more plants growing on top of them, thick enough to support the weight of a person. You can only tell what they are because they quiver when you walk on them.”
“Huh.” Carter prodded the ground suspiciously with the toe of his muddy shoe. “Did you grow up in a swamp?”
“I grew up in Washington, DC. I remember this from…” She gave himthe look,daring him to laugh. “Girl Scouts.”
He didn’t laugh. Instead, he looked excited. “Do you remember what places have floating islands? Could that tell you where we are?”
Regretfully, she shook her head. “No. All I remember is they’re mostly in the south. Florida? Georgia? Mississippi? Somewhere around there.”
It was clear from his expression that the American south was also foreign territory to him. “Well, that’s an improvement on ‘somewhere with a swamp.’ Let’s walk around the island. Maybe we’ll see dry land.”
As they approached the water’s edge, what she had thought were lumps of mud opened bulgy eyes, let out loud shrieks, and leaped into the water.
Fen and Carter both jumped, which was an unnerving thing to do when the ground under your feet wasn’t quite steady.
“What the hell are those?” Carter exclaimed.
Goggle eyes and wide mouths now floated above the surface of the black water.
“Bullfrogs,” said Fen.
“Ugh!” He shuddered. “They’re disgusting. Are you sure you didn’t grow up in a swamp?”
“I read books,” she informed him. “They’re big frogs, that’s all.”
He gazed in horror at the bullfrogs. The bullfrogs gulped and croaked and stared back at him.
“Those are not big frogs,” he said. “Those are small eldritch horrors. They’re all swollen and lumpy and slimy.”
