“Mircea, they’re going to kill us!”
“They’re not trying to kill us, else they’d have left some of their number behind to ambush us,” he said, with the lack of concern of an immortal. “They’re trying to slow us down.”
He thought about it for a moment.
“Can you shift a horse?”
“I can shift you—back home!” I said, furiously.
And the next thing I knew, my bottom was smacking down onto the hard forest floor.
“Mircea!”
I shifted back onto his horse as he plunged ahead, which had not been the plan. I don’t shift onto moving objects given a choice. Especially one that was ducking and dodging and fleeing through a thick wood with low hanging branches that smacked me in the face, and arrows that ripped through my curls, and a surprised deer that darted out in front of us and would have been a serious road hazard if we’d had a road!
But my power had sent me straight back to Mircea anyway, maybe because the damned spell had us linked. I’d ended up slamming into the back of his horse and then grabbing hold of him, both to keep from falling off and so that I could shift us out of there! But he shifted me first—high into a tree this time—so high that all I could do for a second was to cling to the upper, very thin looking limbs, and try not to scream.
And then I d
id it anyway, in a delayed reaction that startled a few hundred birds out of their perches. A ton of small bodies hit me from all directions, causing me to shut my eyes and cling tight for all I was worth. And when I opened them again . . .
It was to see the fey thundering across an open field, toward a rocky outcropping.
The tree’s height gave me a stunning view of rolling hillsides blowing with golden grain, blue skies filled with fluffy white clouds, and Mircea, bent low over his horse and riding hell bent for leather after the fey. He was actually closing on them, with no armor and no second passenger to slow him down, but they didn’t seem concerned. They weren’t even looking behind them anymore; I didn’t know why.
And then I realized why: they were heading straight for a sheer drop off, a rocky plunge into nothingness at the top of the mountain, as if the whole damned group was suicidal.
I didn’t have Vamp-o-Vision anymore, so I couldn’t tell what the hell they thought they were doing—
And then I could, because Mircea wasn’t here to lend me his abilities, but with Lover’s Knot in effect, I didn’t need him. The zoom feature had me crying out again, and clinging harder to the rough bark under my hands, as the sudden feeling of rushing forward almost caused me to literally go flying. But I held on, and sure enough, there was a portal there.
It was situated maybe half a dozen yards off the edge of the cliff, I supposed so no human accidentally stumbled into it. It was purplish gray and swirling, like a rotating patch of storm clouds, and increasing in size because the fey had activated it. Intending, I supposed, to take their captive straight through into Faerie.
What they wanted with Mircea’s wife, I didn’t know, but I knew one thing: he was absolutely going to take that leap right behind them. And that was a no-no for so many reasons that I didn’t even wait to count them. I shifted, grabbed him by the shoulders, and almost succeeded in pulling him off the horse.
But when you learn to ride from basically the time you can walk, and hone your skills by keeping your seat in battle, you don’t fall easily. He caught me, cursing. And then hauled me in front of him again, just as we approached the cliff. The fey must have already taken the leap, for they were nowhere to be seen. And neither was anything else except for the rapidly closing mouth of the portal, which no, no, no—
“It’s too small!” I screamed. No way were we making that.
And we wouldn’t have, had Mircea not shifted us at the last second, with our horse halfway through its leap off the cliff and nothing but open air below us.
We landed in the middle of a rain of what remained of our ride on the other side, because Mircea hadn’t shifted the animal, too. And the portal had not been large enough. Fortunately, I didn’t get much of a look at the result before we were rolling down a hill on a bloody slip and slide.
“Not . . . on your goddamned . . . life,” I panted, clinging like a limpet when Mircea tried to rise.
“Let go!”
“Bite me!”
“Another time, dulcea?a,” the bastard said, using the pet name he’d always had for me. Only, right now, I wasn’t feeling all that sweet. Right now, I was feeling fairly murderous. Not only had he co-opted my power, but he’d used it to bring us to the last place I wanted to be! Faerie was breathtakingly dangerous, and even worse, my power didn’t work here.
“Any distance . . . from the portal . . . and the Pythian power . . . won’t function,” I gasped, as we wrestled together.
“I don’t need it now that we’re here!” Mircea snapped, and then frowned, possibly because I had him in a head lock. “How are you this strong?”
“I’m not!” I snarled. “You are. Nodo d’Amore, remember? It works both ways!”
Mircea said something in Romanian that I’m fairly sure was profane, and then proved that six hundred years of dirty tricks trump strength any day. The next second, I found myself face down in horse parts, and he was gone, sprinting for a tall, rock-cut canyon like all the demons in hell were after him. Or one really pissed off Pythia.