“No!” said Ainsel angrily. “Don’t talk like that.”
Remy smiled a sleepy, beautiful smile. “It was going to happen eventually…”
It wasn’t fair. Even as wrecked as he was, he was gorgeous. She still wanted to push his hair out of his face. And why not? He was dying and he wanted her to stay with him and she was furious at him. She slid her palms up into his hair.
Then she caught her breath and froze. This close to him, she could think of another way to touch him that didn’t use her hands. It was ridiculous, embarrassing—
He blinked up at her, his silver-blue eyes fogging over again. He was in so much pain. It didn’t matter what he thought of her later, if he was around to think it.
Breathlessly, she dipped her head and pressed her lips to his. Instantly she could feel the magic in her passing into him, a river of power that shook her and made Remy go taut beneath her. Tyler, as horrible as he was, was right. Her hands were a limited conduit compared to her kiss.
Remy groaned and shifted under her, bumping his nose against hers. She could feel the magic churning through his body, blasting the poison away and erasing the damage done by the battle with the centipede the same way an ocean’s waves repaired damage to a beach. His mouth was so soft against hers, and the magic flowing between them made her feel warm all over.
The ground shook again, and not a brief tremor. For the second time, Ainsel froze, then pulled herself away from Remy. He reached for her with a half-healed hand, his eyes closed, but she turned away. He wasn’t dying anymore; with rest he’d heal. But she was dreadfully sure there was no time for any rest.
There’d been two earthquakes when they arrived, too. One for her… and one for him. She knew with a queasy certainty that the demonic centipede had been sent for her, somehow made for her. That meant that there was still an earthquake-born monster coming for Remy. If hers had been terrifying, what would his be?
Slowly she stood up, clenching her toes against the ground. The centipede was half-buried in a hill of its own making. Already the corpse seemed fossilized and ancient, a part of the landscape. If she hadn’t been there as it fought and died, she would have thought it a relic of another era.
Ainsel picked up a chunk of churned ground left over from the centipede’s death throes. She couldn’t fight whatever was coming, but maybe she could distract it from Remy, lead it away from him. Bracing herself, she waited for it to arrive.
She didn’t have long to wait. It didn’t burst from the earth as the centipede had done, but raced in from the horizon: a low, rounded shape on many legs. It was an unholy combination of wolf and spider, with eight many-jointed legs of fur and exposed bone and four sets of lupine jaws under four pairs of eyes, arranged in a snarling circle.
The monster was even more horrifying than the demonic centipede, but it didn’t fill Ainsel with the same mindless terror. It was an abomination with no place in nature, reflecting madness and savagery—but it wasn’t her madness.
It was very fast, though. She hoped she could stay out of its reach. If she could hurl her missile into one of its eyes, surely it would chase her. She braced herself, hefting the crumbling bit of packed earth.
“Hey,” said Remy, behind her. “Come here.” His burned hand, the skin still pink, slid around her elbow. Then he pulled her back into his arms, his mouth coming down on hers.
The magic between them reignited. As his mouth opened against hers hungrily, his remaining injuries regenerated into whole flesh. The healing took strength from her—and gave her a different energy back again, filling her with something luminous until she felt like the only thing stopping her from floating away was his arms around her.
It could only have been a few seconds, even though it felt like a lot longer. The ground shuddered underfoot. Ainsel pushed weakly at Remy’s chest, still holding the fragment of shattered earth.
He let her go, giving her a warm look. A smile curved his mouth. “Thanks for that.”
Then, faster than her eye could follow, he changed. Not into the half-man half-wolf form he’d been limited to before, but into a huge, majestic black wolf, half again as large as the ones that had stalked her and sent her here. He flattened his ears at the abomination, shook his head, then sprang sideways, into the long twilight shadow that Ainsel cast.
Literally, into her shadow. He jumped sideways and instead of landing beside Ainsel, he sank into the darkness.
Ainsel blinked. Then the jaws of the abomination were all howling, as the Remy wolf lunged from the abomination’s own shadow, giant fangs flashing.
Remy’s spider monster wasn’t as big as the centipede had been, but it was still big enough to eat Ainsel as a snack. That didn’t seem to matter to Remy, though. On four legs he was even better at dealing with prey than on two. This spider was nothing more than angry, aggressive prey.
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It only took a minute, no more, for a healed, transformed Remy to bring the spider to its knees. He fought strategically, jumping around the creature using its own long shadow to strike and vanish again. Unlike the centipede, the spider made no attempt to escape. Instead it fought wildly until the end, much as Remy had done with the centipede. The difference was that Remy won both times.
When the spider died, it shriveled, rapidly becoming less than half its original size. Soon it fossilized into little more than a distinctive looking boulder beside the ridge of the centipede’s corpse. Meanwhile, the giant black wolf was barely scratched.
He loped over to Ainsel and sat down, then flickered back to the form of the boy, crouching on his heels. His clothes were ragged, but not as ragged as Ainsel might have expected from all the shape changing he’d done. Then again, he could step through shadows. Maybe he kept his clothes in the place between the shadows too.
Ainsel giggled at the thought, then stifled her mouth with her hands. It wasn’t even funny. Nerves, it had to be nerves. Remy was looking at her, his brow wrinkled like he was trying to make a decision.
“Now what?” she asked. “Do you drag me back to Tyler?”
He stood up with a boneless grace. “I’d be pretty dumb if I did that. At least, the way you mean. I am kind of thinking of bringing you back with me for other reasons though.”
Ainsel’s heart started pounding hard again and she remembered the warmth that had come with their kisses. Despite her dry mouth she managed to say, “What do you mean?”
His heavy eyebrows raised. “You still really have no idea, do you?” Before she could do more than half shake her head, he went on, “Until you touched me, I was losing my mind. And then… just the touch of your hand, and the curse retreated.” He laughed sardonically. “It’s not gone for good, though. Just standing here I can feel it lapping at the edges of my mind. It’ll flood me again if I leave you behind. I’ll be crazy, unable to really think through the noise… and no match for Tyler or Danui.”
The setting sun finally slipped below the horizon, leaving only fading purple twilight spilling across the landscape. The wind picked up, blowing fine particles of dust between them. Ainsel hugged herself and tried to focus on what he’d actually said, not what she’d expected—hoped?—he’d say. “Why are you cursed?”
Remy shook his head, then turned his face toward the wind. “Hmm? Oh. The curse is because I was exiled from my world. It happens to everybody sent across worlds without protection.” He frowned. “Supposedly. Not to you, and now I know why. But for my kind, when we go to the Middle World or the Far Worlds—” he looked around meaningfully, “we slowly lose our wolf and go insane.”
“The Middle World is where we came from?”
He inclined his head. “I’ve heard there are five worlds. The Middle World is the pivot, where the humans came from. We don’t belong there, but it’s closer to home than here.”
Ainsel wrapped her arms around herself, as if she could ward off the fear his words raised. “I’m afraid of going back.”
The shadows played across the planes of Remy’s face as he tilted his head. “You should be. Tyler wants to kill you and he rules the pack now. He’s…” He shook his head. “He shouldn’t be able to do that, but he does.”
It hurt in a way she hadn’t quite expected, hearing it stated like that. She looked where the sun had vanished. “He was my friend.”
“He’s good at lying.” When Ainsel didn’t say anything, he added, “I’m hungry. Let’s go see if that pile of rocks has any food.”
“What if I didn’t want to?” She kept looking at the horizon. She was lost, out of place, afraid and alone, and it was a long time until the sun would rise again.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
“What if I don’t want to go anywhere with you? Would you chase me down?”
He moved closer to her, close enough to run the back of his hand along her cheek. “No choice. I’d go mad without you.”
And she was hurt, too. It was stupid and irrational; it wasn’t his fault that her kiss healed him. She held herself stiffly despite the way his touch made her blood warm, and wondered if he was used to such… practical physical relationships. The way he’d kissed her before and touched her now certainly suggested it.
He frowned and dropped his hand to her shoulder, holding her lightly but firmly. “Look. The easiest way for you to get rid of me is to come back to the Middle World with me. Help me deal with Tyler, and save Danui’s pack. Then…” he hesitated. “I don’t know what will happen after that. But I’ll leave you out of it.”
She looked at his pale, glinting eyes and wondered what would have happened if he’d come to school and just been a normal boy. If Tyler had just been a normal boy, too. But neither of them were normal, and neither was Ainsel.
She looked around. The two monster corpses were deeper shadows in the cloak of evening. The lingering glow from the horizon was all but gone. A glittering belt rose from the horizon where she would have expected a moon, dotting the velvet purple of the night, far brighter and sharper than the stars. Distant slithering noises drifted through the darkness The desert smelled wrong, like metal and vinegar.
She shivered and repeated, “I’m afraid. Of this world and that one.”
His hand tightened on her shoulder and he scowled. “I can protect you. In case any of those monsters show up.”
It shouldn’t have helped, but it did. He’d been amazing fighting the spider-wolf. He felt like somebody she could rely on for as long as he needed her.
Besides, it was better than being alone. “All right.”
His hand relaxed on her shoulder, then dropped away. “Good. Let’s go.” He started to move past her toward the ruins, and she put her hand on his arm to stop him. His bicep clenched under her fingers.
“Wait. What’s that?” She pointed to the horizon where the shattered moon rose.
He frowned “The satellite belt?”
“No. There’s a glow on the horizon there. I can’t…” She ran lightly past him and scrambled up on the petrifying remains of the spider wolf. The centipede was taller but even dead she couldn’t bring herself to go near it.
Once on the top curve of the monster carapace, she looked again at the horizon. The glow she’d glimpsed was steady and unmoving. It was some kind of settlement. She turned and looked at the jumbled ruins in the other direction. They were still dark, and from her height she could make out deeper darkness amidst the crumbled walls: pits of some kind. Not a good place to walk in the dark, even with the best of sight, not in a world where giant monsters came out of the ground.
“Let’s go that way.” She jumped down and toward the light.
He hesitated, looking between her and the horizon, clearly not seeing what she saw. Then he shrugged. “Sure. You lead the way and I’ll be right behind you.”
Ainsel smiled despite herself. “Not too different than yesterday, then.”