“Not at all,” she said. She finished cleaning her hands, shook off the snow and turned to face him, mirroring his stance. The thing was, when he looked into her eyes, the whack-job harpy appeared to be quite lucid. At the moment she looked amused again. “You being a criminal—that was important, because that was how I was going to trap you. I don’t actually care that you broke the law, Quentin. I don’t actually care much about the law, period.”
He raised his eyebrows skeptically. “You have a funny way of showing it.”
She twitched her shoulders, as if shaking off an irritating fly. “What I care about is whether or not you have endangered the Wyr demesne. Smuggling some high-dollar luxury items? So we didn’t get some tax revenue we should have gotten. Big fucking deal. If you go after Dragos—if you do anything to actively try to hurt any of the people I care about—that’s when I will come after you, and I won’t stop until I hurt you bad, or you end up dead, or maybe even both of those things. That’s my bottom line. It’s really quite simple.”
He spun away from her sharply to stare out over the abandoned area without really seeing it, his explosive rage easing back down to a simmer. One way or another, it always came back to Dragos. She would hate to know what he had done last year, and he had no intention of telling her.
“Why Dragos?” he murmured, almost to himself. “He and the Wyr demesne are two different things. Dragos could die and the demesne would go on.” He looked over his shoulder at her. “I’m speaking theoretically.”
“Some form of the demesne would go on,” she said. She shook her head. “It wouldn’t be the same. And it wouldn’t be as strong. I will never forget what Dragos did when he united the Wyr. No one else could have done it. I’m well aware that you don’t like him, but whatever else you may say, no one else can do the job he does. He’s got the strength, the ambition and ruthlessness, and he’s got the financial acumen. Forcefulness and prosperity. That’s a hell of a combination. Hell, you were there this morning too. We’re two of the best Wyr fighters in the world, and he stomped our asses.”
That he had.
Somehow they had managed to move away from the craziness, the violence and the sex, and they were almost having a rational conversation. Quentin wasn’t sure what to make of it, except he was a long way from trusting it, or her. He rubbed his aching jaw where she had punched him and laughed under his breath.
He had to give it to her, she’d made some moves he hadn’t seen coming. He wasn’t about to underestimate her again. He tilted his head as he turned back to her, and he gave her a catlike smile. “Listen to us,” he said. “If someone didn’t know any better, they might think we were almost close to making a truce.”
An evil gleam crept into her narrowed gaze. “A truce?” she said. “Just because we smacked each other around, did a little bump and grind and exchanged more than three words at a time? Fuck, no.”
That internal whip that drove him?
Sometimes it felt good.
He purred, “There we go.”
She still refused to let him drive, even though he knew she didn’t care about the rental policy. There was nothing more infuriating than someone who was being pedantic about something you know they don’t give a damn about.
She drove back to the highway entrance, and in a matter of moments they were moving southwest toward the Bohemian Forest. He made a mistake once. He didn’t make it twice. He wasn’t about to ride shotgun without a seat belt on while she was in the driver’s seat.
Prague and the immediate surrounding area were densely urban, but once they traveled beyond a certain point they were surrounded by scenes of almost desolate beauty, the countryside washed of all its colors in the wintry day. It was as if a giant, unseen hand had taken all the smog from the industrialized area and smeared it over the landscape.
Quentin knew better. He had traveled through the Czech Republic in finer weather and remembered the blue skies, green fields and richly hued lakes.
They traveled in silence for a while. Neither one of them reached to turn on the radio. The heat from their earlier passion lingered, like half-seen coals in a banked fireplace. Images of what happened kept flashing in his mind’s eye. The way she had tricked him and pinned him against the metal door, her lean body pressed against his. The way he had slammed her into the ground and held her, hands around her throat.
His hand on her breast. Her thighs clamped on his. Her body undulating underneath him.
It disturbed him, but not because they were so violent.
Because he wanted to do it again.
He felt like something dark at his core, something that he had kept leashed all his life, had broken loose and was running renegade. He, who took control whenever he could, didn’t feel in control of himself at all. He shifted restlessly in his seat. When he glanced at her Aryal was frowning, lost deep in thought.
She broke the silence first. “Dragos had said that to the best of his knowledge, Numenlaur had only one crossover passageway, the one that led here to Earth that was barred so long ago. But the Numenlaurian army was in the Lirithriel Elves’ Other land when we confronted them, so is there really only one crossover passageway from Numenlaur or does it connect to that Other land as well?”
When the Earth had been formed, time and space had buckled, creating Other lands that were connected to Earth and sometimes to each other by dimensional crossover passageways. They were magic-rich places where combustible technologies didn’t work, and where time ran differently than it did on what Quentin liked to think of as the mainland.
Sometimes the Other lands were immense, as was the Dark Fae land of Adriyel, and they had several crossover passageways to other places. Sometimes the Other lands were mere pockets of space that led nowhere.
Quentin’s eyes still felt dry from the sleepless night and the long flight. He rubbed them as he said, “Dragos is right. Numenlaur does only have one passageway.”
She sent him a frowning glance. “You know this for sure, how?”
“I talked to Ferion when I went to get supplies,” he told her. As she turned her head to look at him fully, he added irritably, “Don’t get pissy about it, and keep your eyes on the road. I wasn’t selling state secrets. Dragos never said anything about keeping our assignment under wraps.”
She looked like he had stuffed a slice of lemon in her mouth, but after a moment she grumbled, “Fair enough. I wasn’t aware that you had a personal connection to the new High Lord.”
“It’s not a close connection,” he said. “We’re family by marriage.”
“It’s close enough that you were able to get him on the phone,” she pointed out.
He pressed his thumb and forefinger against his closed eyelids until he saw red stars. “When I was younger, we spent some time together, took vacations and went hunting, that sort of thing. Now that he’s become the High Lord, I think getting him on the phone is going to become harder and harder to do over time.”
She mulled that over. “I’ve heard that Ferion was the late High Lord Calondir’s son, but is he Beluviel’s son too? It takes two to make a baby, and the woman has the more significant role in the process by far, but at some point Beluviel always disappears from the conversation.”
“Ferion is not Beluviel’s son,” he said. “He was born a long time ago. I don’t know the whole story, other than Beluviel and Calondir hadn’t always gotten along. They had been living separate lives when Ferion was born. Later, they came back together when the Elven demesne was formed in what became the United States, and they stayed a strong partnership ever since, at least in a public and political sense. I can’t speak to the reality in their private lives.”