“I’m sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“For asking you to sacrifice so much just to help us.”
“Many others have sacrificed much more,” she told him while reaching out to place a hand tenderly upon his arm. In her silence, Tristan no longer looked like a Dryad who might very well have been alive long enough to tempt sailors to the edges of maps scribbled on stained parchment. She’d never told him her age, but the longer Cole knew her, the more depth he saw in her eyes. It could very well be that hers was a sun that didn’t blind a man who gazed at it for too long. Instead, that man was granted a good look at a real celestial wonder.
“When you need to come back, either go to the club where we’re sending you or any of the other temples,” she said. “I’ll leave word with all of them in that region to grant you passage back home.”
“Should I drop your name to Chuna?”
“It wouldn’t help.” And then she leaned forward to place both hands on his face and hold him steady as she kissed him. It was a lingering, gentle kiss placed upon his lower lip, and when it was done, she held him in place to whisper, “You can’t let her feed you anymore, Cole. No matter how much it hurts. You can’t let her keep those things alive while the Nymar are watching.”
“What?”
“Think about it.”
As Cole’s ears filled with the sound of rushing blood, the air around him sprang to life in a pure white halo. A spotlight swept over him and the rest of the group, idly making its way along that portion of the room. The announcer called out some numbers, named a group that was supposed to be there for some stranger’s bachelor party. Whatever names or numbers were given, Cole was sure there were enough to cover everyone in the group. Tristan hadn’t screwed up any flight plans yet and he doubted she’d start now.
“Just don’t think too hard,” she said while gently rubbing his cheek. “The answers will be there when you get a moment to take a breath.”
“What do I do until then?” he asked.
She pointed him toward a stage glowing with light coming from spotlights as well as an intensifying green radiance emanating from the beaded curtain hanging from the ceiling. That same color pulsed constantly throughout the club as beautiful women stepped through other curtains hanging throughout the Hub. Some could have been entering the room from backstage, while others could have been coming in from anywhere else in the world. “Try to stay alive long enough to put the Memory Water to use,” she told him. “I don’t know what you’ve got in mind or if any plan can work at this point, but I learned a long time ago to never underestimate a Skinner.”
Cole had never felt as vulnerable as when he’d been about to step away from the comforting sphere of Tristan’s embrace. “What if we just screw things up even worse than they are now?”
“It would be quite a feat to make them any worse.”
Suddenly, he wasn’t so comforted anymore. “You remind me of the other brunette in my life.”
She patted his cheek, perhaps just a bit too hard, as if to pay a second tribute to Paige. “That’s the good thing about being on the bottom of the mountain. Nowhere to go but up.”
The numbers had all been read, the spotlight had found them, and the crowd was cheering them on. Paige and Waggoner bowed their heads and walked toward the stage while Cole waved and pumped his fists as if he truly had won the jackpot. Just another wild day in Vegas.
Chapter Twenty
Trizs, Hungary
Cole had taken a long jump through a Dryad bridge only once before. Unlike the mildly dizzying couple of steps that characterized most trips, his first international trip felt like plummeting through space with a giant fan at his back to push him along even faster. That was due to the nature of the bridge, which had also put the unhealthy tone into Tristan’s skin. This time he felt as if he’d closed his eyes and stepped off the edge of the stage into a pit. There was no sound or any sensation apart from the yawning in his gut that made him certain he was about to hit a brick wall at any second.
After several minutes of that, he staggered through another curtain, accompanied by the uneven bass line of a song he didn’t recognize. The others were there as well, holding their heads and opening their mouths wide as if on an airplane and trying to get their eardrums to pop. Whatever music he heard in his head was merely an echo from the Hub, resonating in the thrum of passing through the Dryad bridge. The bass lines were really there, however. All the pounding notes and reverberations weren’t in time to any music, but instead came from outside the thin walls of what Cole could now see was a substandard strip club.
“Holy shit!” Waggoner said as he looked outside through the smoked glass of a narrow window.
The other man must have been one of the first ones through, because Paige and Cole were still trying to get their heads to stop rattling. Another thump filled the small building, causing glasses to rattle behind a dirty bar and cheap imitation crystals to knock against each other while dangling from a ceiling made to look like a night sky.
Cole rubbed his temples and looked around. The curtain was set up only a few inches in front of a wall adorned with vaguely familiar Dryad glyphs written in chipped white paint covering a corner of the club. Two raised platforms on that side of the room were barely high enough to be called stages, and the poles leaning precariously in the middle didn’t look secure enough to hold a child. Two men wearing heavy coats waved furiously at the Skinners and spoke in voices that were partially lost amid the commotion.
Now that he knew someone was yelling at him, he could make out the haggard voices shouting in a Slavic dialect. He might not have known what the men were saying, but he could read flailing arms well enough to know he was supposed to come down from the stage. As soon as he hopped over the edge of the platform, glass shattered and a piercing shriek filled the room. Cole recognized that shriek well enough to drop the moment his feet touched the floor. Paige had been around gargoyles as well, which meant she was quick to follow his lead and pull Waggoner down seconds before the flapping creatures crashed through the window and circled crazily near the ceiling.
As his wits slowly returned, Cole enjoyed the view of tracked-in dirt, cigarette butts, and loose change littering the club’s floor. Warped boards rattled against each other as one of the locals made his way over to the side of the stage. “You speak English?” the man asked.
“Yeah.”
“You are Skinners from America?”
Before Cole could answer, he accidentally locked eyes with one of the creatures stuck to the ceiling with a set of hooklike talons. The gargoyle had stretched its flat body so it could survey the club using the narrow black eyes wedged near the front of its body. Those were the sharper of its two sets of eyes, the ones it used in flight. The gargoyle let go of the ceiling to slice through the air like a piece of paper taking a pendulous path toward the floor. “Above you!” he shouted.
The man had the solid build of a farmer, complete with muscles that were too big and bulky to have been sculpted in a gym. He swung himself around while spouting words in his native tongue, which had the sharp tone and rough edges of profanity. Although he had a rifle in his hands, he knew better than to fire a shot at the gargoyle. Instead, he used the stock of the weapon to swat the creature away. Since none of the creature’s blood was spilled, the others flapped near the ceiling like oversized bats. Disturbing, but no immediate threat.
“Milosh is outside with the others,” the man with the rifle said.
“What’s going on here?” Paige asked.
“Same thing as everywhere. The wolves are staking their claim and we are in their way.”