Show me your injuries,” Mannix said while close enough to me to count the pores on my nose.
“Pardon?”
“If you fell through the ceiling?—”
“There isn’t a hole in the ceiling or anything. It’s more like I appeared just under it and fell from there into the water.”
“Rings can do that,” Hydris said from where he’d skirted around behind me.
“I’m handling it,” Mannix said through a clenched jaw. “You can go.”
I didn’t like the way he was treating Hydris. Of course, I knew that the dynamics of this place were none of my business, but the condescending tone and how this dude was acting like he was in charge just rubbed me wrong.
I squared up to Mannix and felt a little satisfaction in the fact that he twitched back.
“From my perspective,” I said, “I’d been hiking in the mountains of Michigan for about six hours when my friends and I stopped to rest. Milo went to sit down on some rocks, but upand disappeared instead. I rushed to help him.” I cocked my head at Mannix when he slowly slid back a step. “Now what I’d like to know is if he could go through the same ring as me but somehow end up in a different place. Any ideas?”
Yeah, Mannix didn’t like me. He might’ve been thrown off his game when I stepped up to him, but now he narrowed his eyes and his lip curled just enough to notice. Did fae growl? Because I thought maybe he wanted to.
“That’s not possible,” a woman said to my right. “The rings have always been a fixed passage from one point to another.”
I took my time taking my eyes off Mannix to look at the new person. She was blonde, her hair up in some kind of tornado of golden hair, and her blue eyes were anime huge. An accordion-type collar that was maybe only six inches deep circled her neck, making it one of the smaller collars. Her dress, with its giant sleeves and wide hips, looked like the pattern of blue roses on my grandmother’s couch, the one under plastic that I’d never been allowed to sit on.
“Hydris said no one else came through before I did,” I said. “And as much as I wanted to believe Milo had gone over the side of the ledge because I couldn’t believe my eyes, now that I’m here after doing the same thing he did, I think maybe your rings aren’t doing what they normally do.”
The woman looked to the man beside her, who was frowning at me. Not in a Mannix way, but like he was confused, puzzling something out. He was dressed in deep purple with a cream-colored collar that stuck out at least a foot in front of him. How did he not trip over everything when he couldn’t see his feet?
“Please describe what the ring looked like,” he said.
I turned away from Mannix completely and relaxed as I went to stand closer to these two. “Gray stones, sort of rectangular, lots of little holes. They looked more like someone cut them that shape than that they formed naturally.”
“Any flowers?”
“Yeah, little purple and white ones grew in between the stones.”
“Do you recall how many petals the flowers had?”
I shrugged. “Star-shaped maybe? So…five?”
The guy gulped so loud I heard it. Looking to his fellows, he said, “That is incredibly powerful magic. Much more than is necessary for a normal ring.”
Hey, we were getting somewhere! “So who could do that kind of magic?” I couldn’t quite believe that sentence came out of my mouth. “Can we talk to them and see if they can send me back home?”
I looked around for Hydris, wanting to share in this potentially good news, but he was gone. “Where’s the prince?”
The blonde woman said, “He left. He…does that.”
She sounded as disappointed as I felt. I thought he and I had had a thing going there. I’d at least expected him to do more to corroborate my story and maybe stand up for me with these people.Hispeople.
Guess I’d been wrong.
From behind me came Mannix’s voice. “Wecan investigate further.Youcan go earn your keep while we’re forced to accommodate you.”
I spun around. “Excuse me? I didn’t come here voluntarily just to inconvenience you people.”
But now Mannix was doing the one thing that always got under my skin: he was ignoring me. He spoke to one of those armored guards he’d called for earlier, saying, “Take him to Lars. Have him find something for the human to do.”
Okay, now I took offense. “Listen here, champ, I’m not—” Both guards grabbed a forearm each, their grips a hell of a lot stronger than I’d expected. “Woah! Hold on now. We’re not done here.”
