“Shut up. I’m your guide.”
“Just wanted to make sure you hadn’t forgotten.”
He scoffed. “Like you’re not nervous.”
“Not really.” Cheyenne fought back a smile when Maleshi chuckled on the other side of her. Then she pulled the heavy silver cuff from her hoodie pocket, let her drow magic wash over her, and slipped it onto her wrist. She twisted her arm to study the thick bracelet and tried to drop into her human form just to check. Her hand and arm below her pushed-up sleeve remained the same purple-gray as the rest of her, and she reached up reflexively to touch the tip of one pointed ear poking through her stark white hair. Here’s hoping this thing works the way L’zar said. “Right now, I’m just curious. We’ll see what happens.”
Maleshi set a hand on the halfling’s shoulder, removing it when Cheyenne looked into her glowing silver eyes. “You’re in for a hell of a ride, kid. I’m looking forward to hearing all about it.”
“Yeah. We’ll all sit down for story time later.”
With a snort, the nightstalker nodded toward the portal ridge and clasped her hands behind her back.
“Now or never.” Persh’al cocked his head and walked forward like he was about to break into a run, but he didn’t.
Cheyenne caught up to him. “Anything I should know before we do this?”
“Yeah. Keep moving.”
They stepped between the closest pillars of stone and disappeared from the clearing.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Cheyenne’s lungs felt like they’d been set on fire. Two seconds later, she was breathing again, gasping for air.
Beside her, Persh’al doubled over in a fit of coughing and nudged her arm with the back of a hand. “I said, keep moving.”
Blinking with watering eyes, Cheyenne nodded and slowly stepped forward with him.
The last of his coughing fit faded, and the troll thumped his chest. “Whew. I haven’t missed that part a bit. You know what they say, though. Better out than in. We’ll pop out on the other side in no time.”
“Really?” Cheyenne finally cleared her vision enough to focus on their new surroundings. The realm of the in-between was a haze of gray light and black smoke, which wafted up from the ground she couldn’t even see. When she looked up, she couldn’t find the sun or the moon or any source of light, and a thin wind moaned across a nonexistent landscape. “Something tells me it takes a lot less time to get lost in here than to make it to the other side.”
“Oh, it does.” Persh’al cleared his throat. “If you’re trying to find anything. That’s why we’re moving, kid. And moving and moving and, well, eventually we’ll get to where we need to be.”
A mound of cracked gray-washed dirt on their left let out a choking sound and spewed a geyser of black smoke straight into the air. Cheyenne grimaced. “Smells like manure.”
“Yeah?” He gazed slowly around the indiscriminate landscape and shrugged. “I always get patchouli. Can’t stand patchouli.”
“How long is this gonna take?”
Persh’al let out an indecisive hum and waved aside another cloud of black smoke snaking toward them. “Time isn’t a thing here. I mean, it’s not like Earth and Ambar’ogúl run on the same clock anyway, but I’m pretty sure if we could time it from the outside, we’d be stepping out of this thing two seconds after we stepped into it, no matter how long we’re stuck in here.”
“Stuck?”
“I don’t mean stuck-stuck.” He shot her a nervous glance. “I mean walking-stuck. Until we get through.”
“Great.”
The moaning wind kicked up with a loud whistle, buffeting away the smoke and the thick screen of black fog covering the ground. Something skittered toward them in the breeze, and Cheyenne looked down to see dead black leaves rolling across what looked like the surface of a marsh beneath them. But her feet weren’t wet, and the glistening water or whatever it was didn’t move around her when she took another step. One of the dead leaves caught against the inside of her shoe, and she bent down for a closer look.
“Are these bones?”
“Well, don’t touch them.” Persh’al shook his head. “Seriously. I have no idea what those things are, and I don’t care. Let it go.”
She picked up her foot, and the bone-leaf thing fluttered away with the others. When she looked up again, they were heading toward a lone tree growing from the smoky haze, its branches bare and twisted like gnarled claws. “That wasn’t here ten seconds ago.”
“Nope.” Persh’al wrinkled his nose and kept walking forward. “And it won’t be here ten seconds from now, either. This place isn’t exactly a place.”
“Obviously.”
“Whatever you think you see in here, kid, don’t pay any attention to it. That’s how you get stuck-stuck in here.”
“What about those creatures? I’m sure we should pay attention to those.”
Persh’al shrugged. “Yeah. If they notice us. Might depend on the mood they’re in.”
“Their mood?”
“Sometimes they don’t even show up. Not everyone has to fight a bunch of slithery, spikey, whatever-else creatures when they’re crossing. As long as we don’t run toward or away from anything but go exactly where we wanna go, we’ll be fine.” He chopped his hand through the air in a straight line ahead of them and nodded.
The wind died, and in seconds, the black smoke spewing from a larger collection of liquid-less geysers blotted everything from view.
“Ah, shit.”
“Keep moving?” Cheyenne asked, gauging where he was by the sound of the troll’s heavy breathing.
“That hasn’t changed. Slide your foot out to make sure you’re not gonna knock yourself out cold on a—” His foot thumped something solid, and he grunted. “Whatever this is. Just move around it and find how to keep going. What was that?”
“My arm.”
“Huh.” Persh’al gave her forearm a little squeeze, then nudged her sideways as he tried to step around whatever was in his way. “I hate this.”
Another gust of wind broke the wall of thick, blinding smoke in front of them, and when it cleared, they were standing in front of
