“Not on fire.” Caleb thought about it. “Mostly. But I think you were dreaming, and you talk in your sleep.”
“I damned well don’t!”
“Okay, you spell cast in your sleep. Some weird shit, too. That portal—”
“Portal? What portal?”
“—you conjured up may have permanently scarred some of the boys—”
“Boys?” John said sharply, despite feeling like a magpie.
“I had to bring some of the guys in, and don’t give me that,” Caleb shot him a look. “The vamps that work at that hotel were helping to relieve me, so I could get some sleep, but then you do stuff like open portals full of hell beasts—”
“What . . . kind of beasts?” John asked weakly.
The big shoulders went up and down. “Damned if I know. One of the guys called them fire sprites, ‘though if that’s the technical term I couldn’t tell you. Small, red, evil eyed little bastards who scorch everything they touch—”
John winced.
“—and you know how much vamps love open flames—”
“So you brought in members of the Corps?”
Caleb sent him another look. “Good guys. I trust them.”
But can I? John thought. And hoped he hadn’t been up to anything too illegal. “Was that all?”
“Oh, hell no.”
John sighed.
“I was there three nights ago when you started muttering. Next thing I know, the damned shower curtain walked out of the bathroom all on its own."
“What the—”
Caleb nodded. “That’s what I said. Turns out, you’d conjured up some sort of fey construct, human shaped but formed out of water. I asked Adam about it—you know the one, part brownie?”
John nodded. The diminutive war mage was barely four feet tall, having taken after his paternal grandmother, but spells don’t care about a man’s height. And Adam could more than hold his own in battle.
“Well, he called it a man . . . a manli . . . a man-something. Said the fey use them like squires in battle, the way we do golems.”
“They do not use them in battle—usually,” John corrected himself. “And they’re called—”
He was running, and running fast. He tore through the thick underbrush, getting whacked in the face by tree limbs, some of which sent sprays of burning sap across his skin. Faerie, he thought grimly, as he jumped a gorge, almost missed, scrambled up the other side, and then paused for a second at the sudden appearance of an arrow, white fletched and rune carved, vibrating out of the dirt in front of his feet.
Alorestri, the more clinical part of his brain noted. Wave Dancer clan. They liked to rub red ochre into the carvings, to make them stand out—
Shut up! He told himself, while standing on tiptoe to avoid the arrow.
The fey didn’t miss, so they were playing with him, trying to herd him where they wanted him to go. As if he was an animal, the way they thought of all humans. But he wasn’t an animal.
And he had fey blood, too.
He proved it a second later when he sent the arrow flying back at them without the need for a bow. The sudden windstorm he conjured up was strong enough to also blow three sentries out of the trees and send them tumbling to the forest floor. They jumped up and tried to scale the bank behind him, preparing to run across the river like it was solid land, for water was their element. But earth wasn’t, as demonstrated when a sudden landslide sent them sliding all the way back down.
John laughed, feeling amused and relieved—for a moment. Until the river at the bottom of the gorge began to ripple and bulge in a very unnatural way. And three new figures emerged from the depths, looking almost transparent against the rushing stream, including one with a surprised looking fish swimming round and round inside its watery head.
John stared at it in consternation.
Well, shit.
It stared back, or rather, the fish did. The creature itself didn’t have eyes, just vague indentations in what John assumed was a ward, serving as a magical “skin.” The trio didn’t exactly look human, although their shapes were mostly right, but they didn’t look like anything else, either. Until the vague bulges on the face of the fish creature slowly transformed into the approximation of a saucy grin, a horrible, too wide expression that no human could duplicate, because no human could open up half his skull.
Or shoot up out of the river like a geyser and latch onto the bank, pulling itself towards John like something out of a horror movie—and pulling fast.
Shit, shit, SHIT—
“John!”
He jumped and looked up to see Caleb leaning across the desk, both hands on the doily, eyes narrowed on his face. Like maybe that wasn’t the first time he’d said something. John swallowed.
“What?” It came out a rough croak.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” Caleb demanded.
Not unless I want to get locked up, John thought, staring mutely back at his friend.
He could feel it even now: the panicked sweat trickling down his back as he ran, soaking his shirt; the mad chase through the forest, with him dodging iron hard trunks and whipping limbs, which his watery pursuers just flowed around; the drenching the creatures had given him when he’d finally managed to explode the wards holding them together, causing the little fish to gasp its last on the loamy soil.
And the beating that had followed from the fey, when his brief fight with their creations allowed them to catch up.
It had been savage—they hadn’t liked the fact that he’d used their own magic against them—but that hadn’t mattered. No more than it did when they picked him up and threw him back through the gate he’d painstakingly unlocked. The portal had grabbed him, but John had laughed through a split lip nonetheless, tasting blood but also victory. Because he’d won. The fey hadn’t realized: he’d been on his way out anyway . . .
His way out from where? he wondered suddenly. When had all this happened? He remembered vividly every trip he’d taken into Faerie and that . . . hadn’t been one of them.
He felt disoriented, almost dizzy, the same way he had after the dream about the cave. He refrained from rubbing his backside, where the bruises he’d acquired when he tumbled out the other side of the portal throbbed once again, because Caleb was looking at him like he might be mad. It did not help John’s frame of mind that his friend could be right.
He cleared his throat. “Yes. The, er, the water creatures. They’re called manlikans.”
“Uh huh.” Caleb’s suspicious expression didn’t waver. John couldn’t really blame him. He glanced around, but the only reflective surface in sight, to show him how well he’d managed to compose his features, was the scratched and dented side of the coffeepot. And it just gave him back a nose caught in a furrow and elongated past Pinocchio’s.
But his real expression must have been more convincing, because after a minute, Caleb slowly nodded. “Yeah, that was it.”
He started digging around in a battered cabinet and came up with some shortbread. He took one of the small cookies and slid the rest of the pack over to John. Things were bad when Caleb shared his precious shortbread, so John took a piece.
“Anyway,” his friend continued, after a moment. “The manlikan had gotten all wrapped up in your shower curtain, I guess when it exited the tub. So, there I was, half dozing off, because I’d finished my book and the only crossword type games you had were those damned sudoku things—”