“What’s got you stuck in the doorway, Alestaire? Another peregrine come swooping in through the window to eat the junk you hoard in your quarters, has it?” a disturbingly deep voice asked from just beyond the door.
Alestaire didn’t move an inch, barely made a move to blink. Had the man literally froze?
“Aliaeslesteaire?” The voice asked again, sharper. “Leste?”
“Les ain’t home right now,” I blurted, seeing as Leste was a little petrified in place at the moment. “Maybe come back later.” And seeing as he looked awfully wizardly lookin’, “Like, after he’s reactivated the mirror and chucked my ass back toward Earth.”
A loud grunt filled the room, a tall, dark figure stepping up behind ol’ Les with that comical look on his stunned mug, to peer over the wizard dressed dude’s head.
Horse face. A man with a horsey looking, long damned face—large dark eyes, flared nostrils, horse like mouth, thick mane of hair and equine ears sprouting up on either side of the wild, dark mop bisecting his large head—blinked and did the same petrified freeze in place as Alasleazylestostairs or whatever.
“Kornosepgos... Gasep,” horse guy garbled out, his head hastily dipping to bump into the back of the still gaping Leste-y-pants. “Merlin’s beard,” he added, as if for effect. Assuming Kornosepgos and Gasep were curse words and not in fact his name, I sat there quietly, waiting.
Glancing from him to the mirror, I hooked a thumb at my reflection, venturing in a voice much calmer than I felt, “Listen, bud, you think you could give a gal a hand, work this mirror thing? I’ve got work in a few hours, an electric bill to pay, you know how it is, right?”
“Gasep,” he said again.
“Gesundheit. It is a bit dusty in here, isn’t it?” I got an A for effort, forcing a smile I didn’t feel.
Horse guy shook his head and, shoving Leste to the side, sending him yelping and tumbling into a small writing desk covered with jars of I didn’t care to know what near the door, stepped inside the room. “Gasep is my name, milady.” Horse guy was huge, and sporting a rather impressive set of wings tucked into his back.
“You’re a Pegasus man?” I blurted, gaping.
“Pegosian.” Flashing me a set of thick, horse like white teeth, he nodded and dipped his thick frame in a bow. The man was like the Clydesdale of Pegosians, just huge all over. Thick, soft looking leather pants hugged his tree trunks for legs, his hooved feet free, his upper half bare but for the short black hair covering his body.
I fell asleep watching a dirty movie, or reading a really weird book. A really good weird book. The world did not have Pegosians.
“You have brought supper, milady?” Gasep asked. When I stared at him in confusion, he jerked a weird looking thick finger at Cap.
“Supper? Are you mad? This is my dog! You don’t eat dogs!” The You freak! was tacked on silently but heavily implied.
“Dawwg?” His head cocked and he blinked. “What is the purpose of a dawwg, fair one?”
“Ick. Stop it. Call me Vel, seeing as we’ll be spending the next few minutes with each other, until I can open the mirror door thing and go home.”
“Vel.” He nodded, mouthing my name as if he wished to try it out but wasn’t quite sure if he liked it.
Leste the petrified stumbler, who’d been mumbling under his breath for quite some time now, shoving at the immovable Gasep, finally caught the large male’s notice. Gasep moved farther into the room, clearing the blocked entryway for Leste to push through, squeezing his way in past Gasep’s enormous frame.
“Kornosepgos. Dark ones. I thought they’d all died out.” Shucking his awe, the mage a few Merlins short of a Happy Magic Meal’s expression hardened, until he was scowling down at me accusingly. “Who sent you to kill me, assassin? Was it Medu? Xalos? Garmalia? The Sisters Three? What dark magicks have you come to poison us with, hmm?” His eyes shifted, flickering with some, like, kind of inner light, his watery blue bloodshot eyes sparking with the tiniest hint of yellow, like he was a battery but didn’t really have enough juice.
When I just sat there blinking at him, waiting for his tirade and the huffy puffing thing he was doing as his chest heaved in a way that looked like the action was wearing him out to fade, I lifted my hand to scratch at the side of my head.
Leste yelped as my hand shot up and threw himself off to his right, a stack of robes and baskets, and I wasn’t sure quite what else, accepting him as one of their own as he dove. “Gasep, my friend, duck or die!”
“Uh...” My eyebrows shot up as I adjusted my hold on Cap. Looking to Gasep, the less ridiculous of the two at the moment, surprisingly, and shrugged. “Are Xali who and the three things his feisty exes, deities... or?”
“They are mages,” Gasep rumbled out in that deep bass voice of his. “I am not certain if any of them ever bedded him...”
“As if I would soil myself with- The- Never!” the quivering heap of linen and ruined baskets harrumphed in a tizzy.
“Rigggght. Well, whatever that was, if one of you could just, you know, turn on the mirror portal door thing, I’ll just step on outta this weirdness and get back to reality, hopefully wake up and prepare to sue whatever jerks thought to try and murder the people of building 3B.” Standing, rubbing Cap’s scruff reassuringly as he began to shake beneath Gasep’s unwavering stare, his sudden interest in my dog after all that supper talk was making me more than a smidge nervous. “Don’t touch my dog,” I warned him, and just to get my point across, I snapped my teeth at him.
Gasep jerked at the unexpected snap but his lips tipped up, this smile absent of teeth. “I will not touch your dawg, Lady Vel.”
“Mistress Vel to you, Gaspy hoof-foot,” I said with a saucy smirk and an obvious once over of the insanely proportioned male. It was a dream. I could be bold in a dream.
“Hoof-foot.” Gasep laughed, the sound loud and long, thundering in my ears with him this close.
“Don’t be fooled! She’s a dark horned temptress in spotted skin! She will suck your soul right from your mortal shell!” the clothes pile squawked.
Hating on the freckles now, was he? “Are you really his friend?” I asked of Gasep.
The Pegosian glanced to the clothes pile like he was contemplating denying the connection but eventually gave a quick, if reluctant, curt nod.
“Do you think he’s making this all up as he goes?” I leaned in to ask, whispering the question.
Gasep just grinned, his odd features pulling into a blinding smile, dark brown eyes alight. “I am certain he thinks he is correct,” he said loudly, nodding as if to silently agree with me, then muttered lower, “as he always insists.”
“What? What was that? What are you talking about? Plotting, to be sure!” The clothes pile shot up, a pair of dingy looking white shorty shorts that I had a hunch were their version of underwear stuck to his head.
Marching over to Leste the Underwear Masked, I pinched the corner of his dirty drawers in my hand and jerked them clean off his head. Leste yelped, almost going along with them drawers, but straightened out at the last moment.
“Help me get home,” I entreated without preamble. “I’d really like to go home now.”