Gio looked just like a stone sculpture of a lion. There was a tremendous sense of heaviness and mass to him, but when he stretched, he moved with the same fluid grace as the true animal. His tail swished around his stone flanks.
Max walked toward him slowly, but before she could get there, he slipped into the stone beneath him and was gone.
"Gio!" she cried aloud.
She ran forward and crouched to touch the patch of stone with her fingertips. It was warm from the sun, but looked no different than the stone around it.
Then Gio erupted out of the rock, so near to her that she leaped back and almost fell. He came up gasping, half transformed, like a bizarre man/lion hybrid. As soon as he was completely out, he fell to his knees and shuddered through the reverse of what she had seen earlier, until he was all man again. His chest was heaving as if he had just run a marathon, and there was a look of panic in his eyes.
Max reacted on pure instinct. She closed with him, knelt and put her arms around him.
Gio was tense and trembling, but he didn't pull away. Slowly he began to relax, his deep, heaving breathing easing. As he settled against her, she leaned into it for a soft instant, and then abruptly realized what she was doing and pulled quickly out of his arms.
Gio blinked and steadied himself. "Thanks," he said quietly.
Max nodded, not trusting herself to speak for a moment. Then she said, "What happened?"
"My fault." Gio managed a shaky smile. He was pale under his Mediterranean tan. "I didn't decide on a destination beforehand. Then I got disoriented underground. Lost, I guess you'd call it. I couldn't figure out which way was up or how to get back."
"But you did," Max pointed out. "You were only gone for a moment."
"Really? It felt a lot longer. Time's strange when you're stonewalking."
"Is that what you call it? Stonewalking?"
Gio nodded. "That's what my friend calls it. Mace—I guess I may as well just talk about him, since it seems like it's impossible to explain any of this without bringing him into it. I wish I dared spend time with him so he could teach me more about it, but with the cult on my trail, I don't want to bring danger to him."
"That'd be your friend who is also a magician."
Gio smiled wryly. "I know all this is hard to believe."
"Just give me a minute." Max tapped the rock with her knuckles. "It seems perfectly solid."
"It is," Gio said. "You can see why I'm nervous about taking someone with me. Theoretically it should work. Mace can do it; he's even done it with me. You sink into the ground and come out somewhere hundreds or thousands of miles away. But my control is so poor that I can't even be sure I can get myself back out again, let alone me and someone else."
"No time like the present," Max said briskly before she could lose her nerve.
Gio moved back. "Max, no. You saw what just happened. What if I'd taken you and let go of you down there?"
"Take something else with you, then." She unslung the tranq rifle and held it out to him.
He started to accept it, then shook his head. "No, that would prove nothing. I need to take something alive with me and bring it back. Only then will I risk you."
Max chafed at the delay, but it was true that she was in no hurry to participate in what she had just seen. "Maybe a flower? A plant?"
"Ah," Gio murmured.
He took a few quick steps and bent down to close his hands over a butterfly that had alighted on a rock. Standing up again, he held his hands gently cupped in front of him.
"All right." He gave her a nod. "For my destination, where is this other place you wanted to go? Somewhere near here? What direction?"
Max got out her phone. There was no cell service here, but she had a map app downloaded. She pointed out the location and brought up a photo.
Gio examined it. "What is this, an old gas station?"
"Yes, it's on an abandoned road at the edge of a national park, about a hundred klicks from here. There used to be a mining town out there. Like this place, no one ever goes there."
Gio stared intently at the photo and the map for a moment longer, then nodded. "All right. Wish me luck."
