“Are you hurt?‘ she called.
“I’m going to die, I’m going to die,” it moaned.
She didn’t see any blood. Maybe it was short on optimism.
“What now?” she asked, mostly of herself. Absently she sifted one hand through the sand while hunting for options. There weren’t many. “I’m going to see what happens if I climb down to the beach. Just so we know.”
Rule sighed and pushed to his feet.
“I don’t need an escort. You’re hurt. If you… what’s this?” She dug her hand deeper and pulled up… something. It was hard and sort of sand-colored, larger than her two hands put together, but thin, with a slight curve. A fragment of something, she thought. The edges were sharp. Could it be used as a weapon?
She dusted off some of the sand and her breath sucked in.
Pale colors seemed to run through it in a way that changed every time she tipped it to a new angle, colors with the subtle sheen of an opal.
Gan squealed. “Put it back! Put it back! We’re all going to die!”
“What are you talking about?‘
“You idiot! This is a dragon’s nest! We’re food for the babies! They hatch hungry]”
One of the rocks near the cliff blinked. And the earth moved.
Sand slipped and shifted as something beneath it rose, sending her rolling. She ended up on her back, both hands gripping futilely at sand as if she could hold it still, make it stop moving.
Up and up it rose—a head shaped like a snake’s, but the size of a Volkswagen and with a scarlet frill at the back of the skull. A head long and flat and covered with iridescent scales whose colors ran one into the other— steel, blush, twilight. A head on a neck that seemed to stretch up forever, a Loch Ness Monster of a neck, the muscles taut and visible beneath the shimmer of scales— dawn, dusk, the tarnish of old mirrors.
The dragon’s body humped up out of the sand like a football field-sized snake, sending sand slithering and flying, making her blink grit from her eyes. It was thickest in the middle between the pairs of legs, dwindling to a tail long enough to balance all that neck. It lay in a circle, the tail ending near the head, forming a living wall around them. Along its back rested the origami folds of its wings.
The dragon looked down at her out of eyes the size of platters, eyes that were all silver and black with no whites. Fear was a weight on her chest, a taste in her mouth, a clamor in her brain and the noise in her ears from a pulse gone wild. She knew only one clear thought: That’s no baby.
TWENTY-FIVE
Cynna frowned at Cullen. “I don’t buy it. Not as a sure thing, anyway. Too many assumptions.”
Cullen gave his eyebrows a little lift. God, the man even had gorgeous eyebrows. Life wasn’t fair. “Or else you don’t know everything I do. That seems possible.”
“Tie a knot in your ego for a minute, will you? Look at all the big, fat maybes you’ve stacked up. First we have to assume that hell actually is the closest physical analogue to Earth, but some say that’s Faerie.”
“They’re wrong.”
“I suppose you’ve checked that out personally?”
“No. I had it from ni‘ Aureni Aeith. I think you’ll agree he ought to know.”
“I might,” Lily said. “If you tell me who Nee-orenee-aith is.”
Cynna sighed. She could admit it when she was wrong. Not easily, but she could do it. “One of the lords of Faerie, if I’ve got the naming conventions right. You trust his information? 1 mean, the Fae are supposed to have a pretty playful attitude toward the truth.”
“In this case I do. There was a debt.”
“Okay. So, if Rule’s in hell, how the hell did he get there?”
“I covered that. She’s in hell, and—”
“Not established.”
Impatience flashed in those pretty blue eyes. “It’s an assumption, but backed by fact—things that happened before you showed up. Somehow Rule must have been dragged along when She retrieved what was left of the staff.”
She shook her head. “Too many maybes,” she repeated. “Why not go for the simpler explanation?”
Cullen was all polite disbelief. “And that would be?”
“Demon transfer.” She looked from one of them to the other. “Well, there was a demon, wasn’t there, trying its damnedest to possess Lily? Not that anyone but her saw it, but—”
“I saw it,” Cullen said. “Not with regular vision, but it was there.”
“Okay, so that’s confirmed. Now, I don’t know why the demon would grab Rule when it had been targeting Lily, but it’s still a simpler explanation, isn’t it?”
“It might be,” Lily said, “if I had any idea what demon transfer meant.”
“Oh.” She glanced at Cullen, her eyes widening—then narrowing as she grinned. “You don’t know, either, do you? Ha. How about that. I know something the hotshot sorcerer doesn’t.”
He got even more polite. “Would you care to share your vast knowledge?”
“Put simply, demon transfer is when a demon takes something with it when it moves between realms.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “Demons can’t move freely between the realms any more than we can. That’s why the hellgates were closed at the Purge—to keep the demons out. Seems to have worked.”
“Yes, but—”
“I haven’t noticed any demon hordes ravaging the countryside, have you?”
Cynna scowled. “Will you listen a minute? You may know all sorts of fancy spellcraft, but that’s not demonology. Demons vary a lot more than people do.”
“Six-year-olds who watch Saturday-morning cartoons know that much.”
“Maybe they don’t know that some demons can cross unsummoned and without a hellgate. Or maybe you should watch more Saturday-morning cartoons.”
“You know this for a fact?” Cullen snapped.
“I do. They can carry stuff with them, too.”
“Stuff?” Lily said. “Does that include people?”
Cynna grimaced. “I’d have to, ah, do a little research to find out for sure, but I think so.” Research she was not eager to attempt.
“What kind of research?”
Cullen waved a hand dismissively. “Your explanation requires a few big, fat maybes as well. Maybe this particular demon can cross unsummoned. Maybe demon transfer works on people as well as objects. Maybe it decided to take Rule along instead of Lily. Maybe—”
“The demon was here, so obviously it did cross. If you’d get your big, fat ego out of the way—”
“This isn’t about ego. We have to look at the facts, which you’re confusing with opinions. The demon—”
Lily spoke. “Shut. Up.”
Cynna turned to her, surprised.
The China doll looked like she was trying to stuff all sorts of messy emotions back down. “I don’t care who knows more than who, I don’t care who wins your little pissing contest, and I don’t want to waste time finding out.”
Shit. She was right. While Cynna made like the poor little misfit girl trying to get the cutest boy in class to notice her, Rule was trapped in hell. Maybe one of these days she’d grow up. “Sorry.”
Lily drew a deep breath and let it out. “It does make a difference how Rule ended up in hell. He’s either with what’s-her-name or he’s with the demon. But in the end, it doesn’t matter much. I might as well assume I’ll be dealing with a demon. There’s no way to plan for an encounter with Her.”
“Shit.” That came from Cullen. He looked like he was vibrating. “That’s what I was afraid of. What Isen was afraid of. That if you knew where Rule was you’d try to go after him.”
Lily looked at him as if he’d said something really stupid. She kept looking.