“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“If Heaven didn’t know I’d defected before, they certainly do now.”
I nearly choked on panic as it lanced me through the chest. “Az! Would they have—”
“I’m sure of two things. The first is that he got the hell out of there the moment we jumped. The second is that my brothers ran back to report what went down.”
With a nervous chuckle, I said, “I grew up thinking God saw me masturbate. Now I’m finding out it takes a PR disaster with seventy thousand witnesses before something is worthy of his attention.”
The corner of his lip twitched, but there was no humor in it. “Angels aren’t omnipresent. We have to prioritize where we go and what we do. But Marlow, you’ve got to go. Jump back to Earth. I can’t go with you.”
I looked around the park-like village. “This isn’t on Earth?”
He buried his face in his hands, rubbing his temples with his thumbs as he did so.
I leaned away to look at him fully. The idea of being separated squeezed the air from my lungs. Abandonment colored my words as I asked, “You’re going to leave me alone? Isn’t that exactly what everyone has been trying to avoid?”
“Yes, because of Heaven. If they can control me—”
“But they could have done that to anyone. Their little freezing can’t mean you haven’t fully defected. They could have frozen Az, or me, or Vexa. Right? You’re making it seem like they flipped a switch in your angel brain to keep you from acting out!”
“It’s not that simple.”
“This was your prophecy,” I seethed. “Did you fulfill it and defect, or didn’t you?”
His eyes burned into mine. He clamped a hand on my shoulder, squeezing it as he said, “I can’t put you at risk until I know what happened, or this was all for nothing. You have to go.”
My fingers clenched the air in front of me. “Go where!”
He looked left and right as if taking stock of his surroundings for the first time. “Ah, shit. Yeah, you need to get out of here. We’re in a dryad forest, and I’m not prepared to deal with these fuckers right now.”
The entire exchange was a fever dream. My head ached from the whiplash.
“Dryads have cars?” I muttered as I looked up and down the road, noticing a vine growing toward us between the cobblestones that I was pretty sure hadn’t been there before.
I watched the encroaching green rope as Silas said, “I’m sure Az will meet you back at your place.” He looked over his shoulder in time to see the way the branches bowed toward us. “I know your warding allowed him to come and go, so he’ll be safe there. You’re out of venom and down an ally. Don’t let Az out of your sight.”
“What do you mean, ‘down an ally’?” My fingertips fluttered to the broach digging into my skin. “Wait, Silas, Idon’t know how to jump on my own.”
He sighed. “I’ll come find you as soon as I know it’s safe, okay? For now, Dorothy: Think of home.”
And without giving me time to react to that, he pushed me through time and space.
***
Sickening, melting, whirling, colorful blackness.
The light winked out all around me.
It took two hands to count how many times I’d jumped realms, and that was before tallying the leaps on mortal land. I’d expected it to start getting easier. Moss and emerald and stone melted into a swirl of colors as strong hands shoved me backward, spinning my stomach and throwing me off my feet. The weight of his hands disappeared as I shot through time and space. My head spun as I skidded across the floor. I scrunched my eyes against the merry-go-round, moaning as I planted a stabilizing hand on the cool surface.
I frowned against the texture and opened my eyes, looking down at my palm.
White. At least, white filtered through the dim, overcast lighting of either sunup or sundown. We’d only been with the dryads for a few minutes, but I knew time had no correlation between realms.
Still, this wasn’t right. My floor wasn’t white.
I should have landed on sparkling, black marble.
