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I couldn’t allow it. Working my mind through the cords, I pushed outward, using my own light and power—shimmering platinum and green—through the fibers, filling them and using that pressure to force oily black away.
Preoccupied with the effort, I didn’t realize how much closer to Titania’s palace and presence I’d drifted. When I did notice, and tried to pull back again, I couldn’t. As if caught in a tractor beam from the Death Star, I gained speed toward her instead.
Pulling on more power, I fought the drag. To no avail.
I reached for the cat to assist, but she didn’t seem to be present. Not active in this dimension? I dug for that connection to Mother Earth. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
My virtual self hurtled into Titania’s palace of unearthly beauty and unimaginable cruelty. Deeper, through twisting tunnels, I helplessly tumbled. Until I stopped, abruptly, in an inner cavern—perhaps deep inside the mountain, the walls like blacked-out plate glass windows—everything looped and shrouded with billows of cobwebs.
All around, fae of both higher and lower forms were cocooned, wrapped in the web, some screaming, some weeping, some ominously shriveled and still, while Titania reclined in the center. She wore the same face, no longer half-melted from my dragon-blood grenade, but the rest of her looked more like a spider than a woman. In addition to her multijointed fingers, she sported two extra limbs, her arms and legs the same length as those, and all tapped into her various cocooned prey.
Sucking sustenance from them as she healed.
Her lovely face didn’t move, just as a plastic doll couldn’t change its expression, but she nevertheless smiled to see me.The troublesome sorceress pays me a visit? How obliging of her. You’ll be exactly what I need. Come here, tasty lamb.
Unable to resist, I did as she commanded, even as I shrieked inside. Surely it couldn’t end like this. Flailing, I pulled on the connection to Rogue.
Pulled with all my might and will.
Chapter 18
In Which I Encounter a Setback
‡
Every rule was made to bebroken.
~Big Book of Fairyland, “Rules ofMagic”
An abrupt yank.
My head spun, giving me vertigo as if I’d dropped without warning down the last high hill of the Mister Twister roller coaster and I was eight years old again, screaming my guts out in raw, plunging terror.
“Gwynn!” Rogue’s voice rang through my terror, strong, steady and full of irresistible command. “Attend me immediately.”
I opened my eyes to find him bare inches away, eyes midnight dark, his ferociously strong grip biting into my arms with bruising force. No, my eyes had been already open—I just looked through them again, the physical vision less brilliantly acute than the virtual seeing. Energy from both the cat and Mother Earth poured in and my heart started beating with an alarming thump.
“Gwynn,” he repeated. Cranking to life again, my brain delivered the information that he’d been saying it for a while.
“I’m here,” I said. “I’m back. And ouch, you can let go before you break my arms.”
Instead of relieved joy, he glared at me with enough fury to make my heart skip a beat. But he relaxed his grip. Still not letting go of me, however.
Behind him, in my peripheral vision, Athena held the scepter, her purple eyes deep bruises in her ghostly white face. Darling Hercules stood on her shoulders, back arched Halloween-cat-style. As I spoke, he lowered his spine, but still fixed me with an angry stare.
The silence stretched on, nobody moving. My hands throbbed as if burned and I really wanted to look at them. Rogue seemed to have a hold on my gaze, however, and I couldn’t look away.
“I’mokay. Let me go.”
“What in the name of Titania did you think you were doing?” Rogue asked in a menacingly low tone that nevertheless echoed back from the dome with deep reverberations. “I swear I should chain you to the bed, if only to keep you out of trouble.”
“Don’t ever say that, even in jest.” My own temper, raw from all I’d seen, flared in response.
“I’m not joking, foolish Gwynn. I’d rather you hate me than be lost to her as you nearly were.”
“You’d rather destroy my spirit than see me dead?”
“Yes.” He stared back, unapologetic. “And you wouldn’t be dead. Just wishing for it. And that wish, my dear Gwynn, is one wish that would never, ever come true.”
