Black Heart

2

I MUST HAVE BEEN BORN UNDER THE UNLUCKIEST star there ever was. I couldn’t even drop a sword in the dirt without its retrieval turning into a minor saga. The blade flashed as the water ran over it, so tantalizingly close. But I knew as sure as I knew my own name that if I put one fingertip in there, the sprites would be upon me.

I floated back to the shore and settled down in the dirt, just out of reach of the spell. I wrapped my arms around my knees and stared hard at the stream, willing a solution to present itself.

Everything went blurry, and I wiped the tears out of my eyes. I figured I had a right to cry. I had been hounded out of my home. I was hungry, tired and pregnant. And I wanted my sword back.

That sword had saved my life in the Maze, and countless times after. And if I left it here, it would be gone forever, because I was most definitely not coming back to this place again.

There had to be a magical solution that didn’t involve putting my hand in the water. I had already tried and failed to draw the blade toward me like Thor calling Mjolnir.

My skill as a firestarter was completely useless against water. The truth was I’d never learned to do much with my power except smash obstacles in my way.

Think like Lucifer would. There was both danger and wisdom in such a thought. Lucifer was a master of subtlety, a trait that I did not seem to possess. Subtle magic did seem to be required here.

On the other hand, thinking like Lucifer even for a moment opened a door that I wasn’t sure I could close again later.

You could just leave the sword and go home. It’s just a piece of metal. Maybe Lucifer will have another one made for you, this time with an auto-return feature.

That hardly seemed likely. Lucifer had put a bit of himself inside that sword, and he had done that for a reason. He certainly wouldn’t give any part of his power away again, especially not with Evangeline leaning over his shoulder.

My many-greats-grandmother bore no love for me. She doubtless felt even less kindly toward me now that she had lost both her eyes and one arm as the price for passing from the dead back to the living. Despite the fact that the price had been set by the universe and not by me, I was sure to get blamed for this. I always get blamed for such things.

No, I couldn’t leave the sword behind. It was more than a bit of metal. It was a powerful magical object. More than that, it was mine. I didn’t easily give up anything that was mine.

And the idea of being defeated by a bunch of sneaky water monsters did not sit well with me at all.

Grabbing the sword out of the water was out of the question. But what if I moved the water? Could I even do that? The enchantment on the stream was very strong. If I tried to shift the water, it would probably fight back. Still, it wasn’t as if I were trying to divert the whole body. I just wanted to move the water around the sword so I could safely grab it without being grabbed myself.

Trouble was, I’d never tried to do this kind of magic. I wasn’t really sure where to start.

Think subtle. Think like you did when you exorcised Amarantha from J.B.

That had definitely been a delicate magic. I’d had to get Amarantha out without killing J.B. It had been difficult, but I’d been under pressure. So I hadn’t really thought about how to do it. I just did it.

Now I was dawdling. I knew I was. I even knew why.

I’d honestly grown so accustomed to succeeding that I didn’t know how to fail. I didn’t know what other option I had except to leave the sword behind if this didn’t work.

I stood up, took a deep breath and flew into the air. I positioned myself above the water, well out of the reach of any water creatures that might rise up. I hoped. There was always the possibility that the sprites could spray out of the surface like a giant fountain.

I reached for my power and it surged up, the way it always did, like a massive tidal wave. Except this time I didn’t have a plan for it, or a place to go. My body was suffused with magic, magic that tingled on my skin and arced across my fingertips. I imagined that magic as an invisible force that poured steadily from my hands.

The moon had risen, drenching the sky and the landscape with blue-white light. I opened my palms, directing the spell at the water around the sword.

As soon as the magic hit the surface, the creatures exploded out of the water, hissing, their hands grasping for me. When they saw how high I was they gave off strange watery growls. I pushed the spell harder, into the face of the creature nearest to the sword. It flinched and covered its face for a moment with its hands, but this was not enough to make it leave. The spell didn’t seem to do more than irritate it.

I wanted to just break the ground open and send the water into a chasm. That was more my style. But there were doubtless numerous animals that depended on the stream for water, and I didn’t want to cause an ecological disaster. I just wanted to get my sword and go home.

I pushed the magic again, with more force, and a strange thing happened. I was aiming for the mass of creatures huddled around the sword. The magic bounced off the group, seemingly without affecting them at all. The spell spun sideways, hit the bank of the stream, and caused several clumps of dirt to tumble into the water.

The sprites gave a sharp cry as one, holding on to their heads. I was going about this the wrong way, apparently. The creatures must draw their power from the bank of the stream, not the stream itself. Or maybe they did draw power from the water, and the presence of dry land was like kryptonite. Either way, I could stop messing around with the water. Which was good, because I wasn’t making much headway in that arena.

I shifted position so that I was closer to the shore, and sent a full blast of nightfire into the land that ran along the lip of the stream. It exploded in a very satisfying way, raining earth over the water creatures.

As soon as the dirt splattered over them, steam rose from the creatures’ bodies at the points of impact. They screeched at me, the sounds horrible in my ears. Their voices were like pieces of broken glass grating together. I hit the bank with more nightfire, keeping up a continuous stream so that the creatures were pummeled over and over.

They screamed, they howled, they gnashed their watery jaws together, but they would not yield. These creatures didn’t know me. I never gave up, not in an argument with Beezle or a battle against a more powerful foe. And I was pissed. And hungry. And thirsty.

All of those things were merging inside me as white-hot anger. I just wanted my sword back. It didn’t have to be this difficult. How much more pain could these creatures take? When would they give up? When would they give in?

I was so busy working myself into a fury that I didn’t notice that most of the creatures were gone. Only one remained, hovering over the sword like a possessive spirit, refusing to let go despite the fact that it was obviously in extreme pain.

Now it was really down to a battle of wills. But I would win. I could feel it. I could taste it.

The more dirt I blasted at the creature, the more of its body was eaten away. After a while it was a gross, distorted version of itself. It looked like a Dalí painting, its limbs elongated. Huge chunks were missing from its head and torso.

I dropped my arms for a moment, overwhelmed by a strange pity for this pathetic thing. It was like a broken insect, a daddy longlegs that had its legs pulled off by some cruel child and was left with nothing but its body, quivering and crippled on the ground.

“Let go,” I said.

The creatures hissed at me in response.

“Let go,” I repeated. My anger had faded, and I’d lost my appetite for punishment. I didn’t want to hurt it anymore. I just wanted it to leave.

The creature rose up in response, showed me the full extent of the damage I’d done. It lifted its head in obvious pride, daring me to continue. But it would not leave, and I had started this, so I had to see it through.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and let my power flow.

The creature kept its head up and its body straight even as the structure of it disintegrated around him. After a while I couldn’t see it clearly anymore. My tears flowed too hard and too fast.

Finally, it was done. The creatures were gone. Whether I’d killed them or I’d frightened them away was irrelevant. I’d won. I flew down to the surface of the water, plunged my hand beneath it, and pulled out the sword.

“Yay for me,” I said sadly.

I touched down on the ground well away from the stream and prepared to open a portal home. At least the Retrievers were a known quantity. Here I could end up fighting who knew what freaky thing.

And really, Lucifer could help for a change. Surely he wouldn’t want his precious unborn grandchild to be taken by the Retrievers. Or maybe he did. Maybe it was part of some grand design of his. I wasn’t going to pretend to understand Lucifer. If I started thinking Lucifer’s actions made sense, then it was probably a bad sign.

I summoned up the energy necessary for a portal, concentrated on my destination and reached for the fabric of space and time.

When a portal is created, a seam is torn in that fabric. I’d never understood how to do this until I’d come completely into my powers. Now it seemed like a simple thing. Think of destination, carve a path home. Easy.

Except that when I tried to create that path, the world resisted. There was no other word for it. There was no space for me to cut a seam.

I exerted more power, more will, and all I succeeded in doing was making myself sweaty and frustrated.

“Just where in hell did you send me, Nathaniel?” I asked aloud.

So I couldn’t create a portal. That didn’t mean that there wasn’t an existing portal somewhere on this world. Every world had an escape hatch. I just had to find it.

I could wander aimlessly until I bumped into it. Or I could use a tracking spell to zero in on its location. The only trouble was I had no idea how large this world was. I could expend a lot of energy on finding the portal and then discover that I was too weak to get there.

I was already past the point of extreme hunger and was moving into that place where I was so hungry I couldn’t feel it. If I ate more than a couple of bites of anything at the moment, it would just make me feel sick. This was really bad, because I thought that my baby was eating up more than the usual amount of resources. My clothes weren’t flapping on me yet, but it wouldn’t be long before they were.

My priority was still to find edible food and water. But if there was a portal nearby, I could go directly there and eat when I got home. After I defeated the Retrievers. Or not.

Hunger and sleep deprivation were making me scattered. I made a concerted effort to pull myself together. Find the nearest portal. Make an action plan after that.

Using the tracking spell was going to be pretty distracting, so I needed to find a semi-safe place to close my eyes. I flew back to the tree where I’d napped earlier. I’d slept there for several hours without disturbance, so it seemed my best option. I settled down in my perch and tried to ignore my growling stomach.

Once, when Gabriel and Beezle had gone missing, I’d thrown a net of power over an alley and found a permanent portal in the middle of Chicago. I wanted to do something like that now, but given the potential size of this world, I needed to start small and expand slowly.

I visualized the net in my mind, imagined it settling over everything I could see. Once I felt I had a good grasp on it I expanded the net out slowly. I deliberately limited the parameters of the spell to a portal. If I expanded it to include anything with a magical signature, I’d end up getting a lot of signals. Anything with even a touch of magic, including the dragon, the water creatures, and the enchanted stream bank, would show up.

As the spell spread its fingers slowly outward, I could “see” the shape of the land underneath it. This jungle seemed to go on forever with nothing to interrupt it except the occasional body of water. There were streams, rivers, lakes, waterfalls. The ground undulated with softly rolling hills, and far in the distance, across the forest, were high, rocky peaks.

All of that water had to go somewhere, so I expected—and found—a huge body that could only be an ocean.

And still there was no portal.

For the first time I felt a little twinge like despair. It seemed impossible that I had survived such insane odds over and over again only to die of thirst or starvation on a lonely planet far from home.

Keep looking, I told myself. Keep going. If you’re not going to fight, you might as well have allowed the water creatures to take you.

My spell expanded outward, crossing the ocean. I sensed the movement of gigantic animals under the surface, and couldn’t help but think of Alerian. Lucifer’s brother. The water god.

He’d first appeared as something that looked a lot like a giant squid. I wondered whether Lucifer and Puck had managed to find out what Alerian wanted, why he had woken after such a long time. I wondered whether Chicago would still be there when I managed to get out of here, or if I would return to a smoking ruin.

Who cared enough to protect it in my absence? Nathaniel? Maybe. But he had sent me to a place that I couldn’t easily leave. He may have done that in order to guarantee my safety, since he knew me well enough to realize I would have second thoughts about running from the Retrievers.

Or, if I wanted to be suspicious, it was also possible that he had sent me here to get me out of the way without killing me and therefore drawing the wrath of Lucifer down on his head.

I didn’t want to think of Nathaniel that way. But he belonged to Puck now, and Puck and Lucifer hated each other. If it came down to me or Puck, would Nathaniel choose his reluctant almost-lover, or his father?

I shook my head to refocus. I couldn’t worry about Nathaniel right now. I had a plan and I needed to stick to it. Find a portal. Find water. Find food. Get the hell out of here ASAP.

My spell stretched ever outward. The ocean finally ended, and on the other side were more mountains, young ones, with high, jagged peaks unworn by time. Past the mountains, in the foothills, I finally discovered what I was searching for. My escape hatch. The portal.

I opened my eyes. It was hundreds of miles away, maybe thousands, and past a series of mountains that were probably loaded with peril. How would I ever get there? The flight across the ocean could kill me. On a good day I didn’t have that kind of stamina.

Well, I had to get there. I would just have to figure out a way. Casting the tracking spell had nearly exhausted me again, but I thought I should try to make some progress in the right direction. I knew there was no food or water for me here, so I decided to fly toward the nearest lake. I just hoped that they weren’t all under the same enchantment as the stream.

I rose above the trees and headed off in the direction where I’d detected a largish body of water. More time had passed than I’d realized. The moon was already setting, so low in the sky that it appeared to brush the tops of the trees.

In the distance, off to my left, something huge spread its wings and soared into the sky. The dragon. Or rather, a dragon. There was no guarantee that there was only one dragon in this forest.

The gigantic animal flew away from me. It seemed not to have noticed me at all. Thank goodness. Maybe my luck was changing. I’d managed to avoid a dragon twice.

I flew low, just above the tree line. I was keeping a sharp eye below, looking for the lake or a good place to forage for food. I didn’t see any movement or any evidence of creatures beyond the dragon.

Soon enough I realized I was too tired to keep going. I lowered into a tree, found a comfy-looking branch, and was asleep before I knew it.

My dreams were tangled things, images of Gabriel and Nathaniel twisted into one body; the dark, lurking menace of the Retrievers; the sight of Alerian rising from Lake Michigan; the feeling that I was drowning when I touched his hand.

Then Lucifer was there, and behind him Evangeline. He smiled at me as Evangeline rose up, growing taller and taller, her belly huge with child, her shadow threatening to smother the world. I was just an insect to her, something to be smashed.

I ran and ran, my own belly unwieldy, swollen with my son, but I could never run far enough or fast enough. She was coming for me.

I woke to a searing pain, and the sensation of falling. There was an arrow embedded in my upper right thigh, and whoever had shot it had knocked me out of the tree. I flapped my wings so I wouldn’t smash into the ground. But they got tangled in something.

A net.

I hit the dirt hard and all the breath went out of my lungs. I rolled over, the net twisting in my wings and covering my face. My thigh burned from the arrow embedded in it. I grabbed the net with my hands and tried to set fire to it, but it was made of some kind of flexible metal and all I succeeded in doing was burning myself.

There was a flurry of movement all around me, soft footsteps in the dirt, voices whispering in some musical language. I struggled inside the net, flopping around, unable to make any headway because of my wings.

Tall, slim shadows crowded around me, their faces hooded. They all held bows with nocked arrows pointing straight at me.

I stopped flailing around. I was only tiring myself out anyway. There were six of the figures surrounding me, all of them perfectly still. I knew that if I tried throwing magic, those arrows would fill me up like a pincushion.

I hate feeling trapped, and I hate thinking I have no choices. I had enough obstacles in my way without being kidnapped by some hostile species.

“What do you want?” I asked, trying to sound like I wasn’t as insanely ticked off as I actually was.

The hooded figures did not respond.

“What do you want?” I repeated. I confess that I sounded a lot meaner the second time around.

Which may have been why one of the figures stepped forward and hit me in the head with his bow.

Everything faded to black again.

Someone was calling me.

Madeline?

Gabriel? Was that Gabriel’s voice?

Madeline, be careful. They are not what they seem.

“Gabriel!” I shouted, or rather, tried to shout.

My mouth was gagged with a piece of cloth. I was in a low hut that appeared to be constructed of large leaves and long strips of tree branches. The floor was dirt, making the structure little more than a glorified tent.

My hands and ankles were bound with something cold and metallic. I tested the strength of the bonds to see whether I could pull them apart. I am a lot stronger than an ordinary human, but the bracelets around my wrists had no give. In fact, they seemed to get tighter. My skin chafed against the metal, and I ceased before I tore my wrists up.

I lay on my right side facing a wall, so I rolled myself to the other side so that I could see the rest of the room. This was not as easy as it seemed, especially when one’s ab muscles were—ahem—underdeveloped. After spending several moments doing an excellent imitation of a fish out of water, I managed to heave myself to my left side.

The view from this side was less than inspiring. The hut was small and round and just one room. In the center were a fire pit and a small opening at the top of the hut to vent smoke.

There were no other objects in the room. Several leaves cut into long strips hung over the doorway in a kind of makeshift curtain. I was alone in the hut, but there were surely guards posted outside. Well, I wasn’t going to lie here and wait for them to come for me.

I still had my wings. I tested them out to see whether my captors had restrained them. Unfortunately, they had. I felt some kind of cord pulling on them. There was no way I’d be able to fly like that. I was trussed up like a Sunday turkey, and I couldn’t move at all unless I flipped over and did an impression of an inchworm.

Crawling on my belly hardly seemed like an efficient method of escape. But if that was the only option available to me, then that was what I would do. Nobody had ever taken me prisoner before, and I was a little insulted.

Plus, I had pretty much been spinning my wheels since I’d landed on this stupid planet. Now that I knew where the portal was, I wanted to get to it.

The first order of business was to get out of these bonds. If I had endless time and energy, I could probably figure out a way to pick the bracelets apart at the molecular level. But I did not have endless time or energy. So I did what I do best.

I set the hut on fire.

My palms faced outward even though they were bound behind my back. So all I had to do was call up some fireballs and make sure my hands pointed at the walls.

Soon the hut was smoking. Very quickly the flames spread, and in a short time the whole hut was ablaze. The heat of the flames got uncomfortably close pretty quickly, and I rolled toward the exit.

A guard rushed in, his face set in lines of surprise. His hood was pushed back against his neck, and I could see the pointed tips of his ears. Faerie, I thought.

He looked from the flaming wall to me. I widened my eyes and tried to look helpless. I flopped my feet up and down a couple of times so that he would know what I wanted. He seemed torn for a moment, unsure whether he should douse the fire or save the prisoner.

I heard shouts and cries outside as the fire spread. The guard seemed to make a decision. He knelt beside me, hovered his hands over the bracelets that bound my ankles and said something in that musical language I’d heard earlier. The bracelets clicked apart, and the guard put his hands under my shoulders to help me to my feet.

He wasn’t stupid enough to release my hands or my wings, but that was okay. I could work with this. I stumbled as he dragged me out the door, both of us coughing from the smoke that now billowed out of the hut.

Several faerie were running toward the blazing structure carrying containers of water that sloshed onto the ground. The guard pushed me to one side so that I fell to the ground again. I rolled over and sat up, glaring at him.

He pointed his finger at me and said something in a firm voice that was likely some variation on, “Stay here. Don’t move.” Then he ran in the direction the other faeries had come from, probably to help with the fire dousing.

The faeries trying to put out the flames took very little notice of me except to shoot me a quick glance and get on with their business. That suited me fine.

The hut was isolated from the rest of the village, which appeared to be made up of several structures considerably more elaborate than my prison. The village was set in a large clearing, and my hut was right on the edge of the forest. That also suited me fine.

I scooted backward on my bottom toward the underbrush. Leaves scraped against my back. I waited until I thought everyone was engaged with the blazing hut, then went a little farther, until I was against a tree. I used the tree as a brace so I could rise to my feet. The wound in my right thigh burned like hell as I put weight on it.

Then I turned and ran. My hands were bound painfully against my back, and it made running extremely awkward. But I needed to get away. I would figure out how to break the manacles on my wrists later.

The forest was so thick and dense that the sound of activity in the village was quickly muffled by the foliage. I could hear my own desperate, frantic breathing and my unsubtle crashing through the bush, but no sounds of pursuit.

The scent of smoke drifted along behind me, clinging to my clothes and burrowing inside my nostrils. I don’t think I ran for very long, but after a while I was wiped out. My body was losing energy fast. I just couldn’t keep up with the constant exhaustion and hunger and fear anymore. With every day that passed, my baby got bigger, using more and more of my resources. I was supposed to be eating chips and dip on the couch, not running for my life from creatures that intended me harm—again.

I wasn’t really paying attention to where I was going. I was just trying to get as far away from the faerie as possible.

So, naturally, I stumbled into the dragon.