Me:Sure.
Darcy mutters something under his breath and snaps his fingers, and about three minutes later Bellamy appears on a very truncated version of an array.
He greets us with a nod, stepping off the array, and cocks his head at the corpse as the array sort of folds up and sinks through his pant leg on his thigh.
“Is that a permanent array?”
Bellamy points to Stalker Steve. “That’s unusual.”
Darcy answers my question first. “I put an array on him so I could bring him to me if there was a need.”
“Nice.” I might want one of those later.
“Are you going to break the spell?” Bellamy asks, getting us back on track.
Darcy grunts. “It’s the only way to get a taste of the person who cast it. It’s gonna stink when I do, though.”
Bellamy grunts back. They’re kind of cute together.
“I’m getting best friend vibes.”
Bellamy glances at me, then back to Darcy, and he smiles softly. “Yeah, that’s about right.”
Darcy grabs his shoulder and squeezes it. “I wouldn’t have said that until the day we found you in Arktis.”
Bellamy rolls his eyes, shaking his head. “You’re just so fuckin’ stubborn.”
Darcy chuckles. “I’ve earned the right to be stubborn.”
Bellamy nods once and points to the corpse. “Go on. Let’s see how long he’s been like this and who did it.”
Darcy lets him go and steps up to the body. He cuts his finger and touches the body dead center. The air pressure changes like a door just opened, and suddenly all the internal organs become external organs. They don’t all fall out, because people’s organsare attached to their insides, but they sag and the intestines start falling out. It immediately stinks like death and feces, but I grew up on a farm, and those smells were part of daily life there. Well, not the death smell, but even that happens on the farm.
Darcy steps away from the body and starts yanking spell components from his pouches, throwing them at the body instead of using his bowl to mix them first. He mutters the entire time, then he pauses and looks back at us. “Grab me. I’m dragging us through a teleport the hard way.”
Bellamy grimaces but puts a hand on his shoulder, so I follow suit and thread my fingers through the digits on Darcy’s free hand.
“Try not to think about anything,” Darcy warns us before he throws one last powder—the glittery one—and it feels like my entire body explodes into atoms that are sucked through a tiny hole in the universe.
An instant later, I’m back in one piece in a different place. Bellamy tosses his lunch, every pain receptor in my body is alight with fire for long enough for me to cut off a scream, and then it’s all over.
Bellamy straightens, wiping his mouth. “I hate teleporting like that,” he complains, pulling a sword from a sheath I didn’t even know he was carrying.
I glance around where we’ve ended up. We’re above the clouds on a mountain top, on a lush green field of clover full of bees of all kinds. A gazebo at the center of the field catches my attention. Three people sit around a banquet table in the middle of it, laughing and chatting, and I get the feeling that I shouldn’t be here.
I don’t know why, but there’s something inside me that demands I leave as soon as possible. My instincts are going haywire with the need to flee.
One of the people in the gazebo turns, and I take a step forward, ignoring my run-away instincts with the pleasant surprise of recognition. “Loki?” I call, waving to the guy I went on a couple of dates with a few years ago.
Loki smiles widely, shooting up from his chair and running down the steps of the gazebo to greet me.
Darcy growls, and it rumbles the entire mountain top, stopping Loki in his tracks. “Avatar!” he calls with delight, like he didn’t realize Darcy was here until he growled.
“What the fuck?” Darcy demands, stepping in front of me. “How do you know my mate?”
Loki shoots me a wink. “I know him in the biblical sense.”
I laugh, resting my hands on Darcy’s shoulders. “No, you don’t. Stop teasing Darcy. Loki and I went on two dates, and we never even kissed. He was a fun date, though. What’re you doing here?”
