Sure enough, as soon as my feet crossed high above, the surface of the water broke, filling with hissing faces.
I landed beside Litarian, who goggled at me. “What did you do to them?” he asked.
“It’s not worth getting into,” I said briskly. “Let’s go.”
Litarian didn’t press. That wasn’t his way. I’d figured that out pretty quickly. I was again strongly reminded of Gabriel. Gabriel was never one to press, either. He just waited, with his infinite store of patience.
I swiped at the tears that had risen to the surface, the unwanted proof of a grief that seemed to creep up on me more frequently since my arrival here. I was glad Litarian walked in front of me. He wouldn’t press, but I didn’t want to feel obligated to explain anything to him. Gabriel belonged to me. He had nothing to do with this place.
Litarian suddenly held up a hand to halt me. “What is it?” I whispered.
“The dragon approaches,” he said, very still.
I didn’t see or hear anything. “How do you know?” I asked, moving up to his side. His eyes were closed.
“Can you not feel him?” Litarian said, and his voice didn’t sound like his own.
I looked at him sharply. For a moment, I thought I’d heard . . .
But the thought faded as the presence of the dragon filled my mind. Litarian was right. I could feel him approaching, like a flame-lit shadow that covered the night.
“I know you,” I said into the darkness. I felt that inexorable pull that I had experienced in the dragon’s presence before, felt something buried deep in my blood that drew me toward the creature. I took a step forward.
6
LITARIAN GRABBED MY ARM, HIS VOICE ANGRY. “WHAT are you doing? Do not draw it to us. I told you to halt so that we would not attract its attention.”
“It won’t hurt me,” I murmured, my head full of fire and darkness.
I yearned for something, something elemental and just out of reach.
Litarian came around to grab both my shoulders, to shake me. The jolt snapped the connection between the dragon and me. Litarian and I stared at each other. Something shifted behind his eyes, and just for a moment I thought the color of the iris changed.
It must have been a trick of the light. Then he was speaking, more harshly than I had heard him speak before.
“Are you mad?” he asked through his teeth. “That creature would destroy both of us in an instant. What were you thinking?”
He punctuated this with another little shake, which made me angry. I slapped his hands away from my shoulders.
A headache was brewing behind my eyes as the darkness in my mind retreated. It felt like this when I was first coming into my power, my legacy from Lucifer. There had been the same sense of a door opening just a crack before it slammed shut again. And because the door hadn’t opened all the way, pain streamed in its wake.
There was a mystery here to be solved, something else I needed to discover before I left this place. And Litarian was keeping me from that discovery. He was preventing me from finding the source of fire deep inside me.
“I told you, he wouldn’t hurt me,” I said.
“But he would hurt me,” Litarian said. “He despises all of us.”
“He wouldn’t if I asked him not to,” I said, still angry, still longing for the thing that was just out of reach.
“Can you communicate with the dragon?” Litarian asked suspiciously. “I thought you said you had not been here before.”
“I haven’t,” I said, now feeling defensive. “It’s just . . . a feeling I have when I see him.”
“A feeling,” Litarian said flatly.
“Look, I don’t have to explain to you,” I said, pushing past him.
“I think you do,” Litarian said, following me. “I have a right to know if you’re going to draw the dragon down on my head.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Look, just forget it, okay? The dragon isn’t coming anywhere near us right now. Let’s just focus on the Cimice.”
He wanted to pursue it. There was a quality of expectation in his silence. But he didn’t. Maybe he’d decided to trust me. Maybe he’d decided not to pursue the issue so long as he wasn’t in immediate danger. All I know is that we did not speak another word to each other for all of that long night.
The fae from the village did not pursue us; nor did we encounter any animals in the wood.
I don’t know what was in Litarian’s head, but I was brooding on my seeming connection to the dragon. Had the dragon been left here by Lucifer, created by Lucifer’s magic long ago? Was that why I was drawn to him, and him to me?
As the moonlight began to fade and the first rays of sunlight showed pink in the sky, I noticed the forest had changed. We were no longer surrounded by lush vegetation. Everywhere I looked the trees were stripped of their leaves, the underbrush similarly denuded. The back of my neck itched. I felt exposed.
“I suppose we’re getting closer to the colony,” I said.
“Yes, we are very near now,” replied Litarian. “We must proceed with caution.”
“Let’s get under a veil,” I suggested. “We’re too easy to see here.”
Litarian hesitated, like he wasn’t certain he wanted to be that close to me.
“I won’t attract the dragon while we’re under a veil,” I said impatiently. “That doesn’t even make any sense.”
He stepped closer, his expression embarrassed. I summoned my magic, settled the veil over us.
“Stay close to me,” I warned.
“I remember,” Litarian said.
We moved forward again, proceeding more cautiously. Neither of us wanted to be surprised by the Cimice. The landscape grew bleaker, more barren, as we walked.
“They’ve completely destroyed this part of the forest,” I said. “I wonder if it will ever even grow back.”
“We cannot allow them to encroach any further on our village,” Litarian said.
I agreed, but I wasn’t thinking of the fae. I was thinking of Chicago, and what would happen if these creatures appeared in my city. They would destroy every thing, every person in their path. And when they were done they would move on to the next city, and the next. All the while they would breed, until their numbers were impossible to comprehend.
Once they had wiped every last trace of life from Earth, they would move to another world, presumably through the power of whatever architect had brought them here in the first place.
I gradually became aware of a buzzing sound that filled the air. It was like the persistent hum of cicadas, only a lot louder and after a while a
And my head hurt. And that sound was so pervasive, so damned annoying. It wasn’t just in my ears. It was in my teeth, and the sockets of my eyes. It vibrated up and down my spine, crawled over my nerve endings, made me madder and madder until I felt like I would explode.
“Stop,” Litarian said, his hand going around my upper arm.
“Quit manhandling me!” I shouted.
The veil had fallen away at some point. I’d lost track of the magic, become preoccupied with the noise.
“You need to stop. You need to breathe,” Litarian said soothingly, the kind of tone that you use on a child
