Jax gripped his arm. “Calm down, Alex. Let me handle it. I know what I’m doing.”
“Let you handle it? In five minutes you’re liable to vanish again.” How could he tell her how much he feared being locked up? “You’ll be gone again and I’ll be left here alone to handle it.”
“Not this time,” she said in a somewhat haunted voice.
Alex looked up. “What do you mean?”
She gazed into his eyes for a long moment. “If I hadn’t gotten here in time you would have been lost.”
“Lost? You mean I would have been killed when she was finished?”
“Yes. I had to get here as fast as possible. I wasn’t able to take certain . . . precautions.”
“Precautions?”
“I had to forgo the procedures I used before.”
“What procedures?”
“I didn’t have time to establish a lifeline this time.”
“A lifeline . . .” Alex paused a moment. “Do you mean that you can’t get back to your world?”
Her gaze broke away. “Not for now.”
He suddenly realized the magnitude of what she had done in order to save his life. His worry about everything else evaporated in his sudden concern for her. “When will you be able to get back to your home?”
“You let me worry about that. For now I’m stuck here.”
“For how long?”
“Maybe a day or two.”
“But maybe longer?”
She swallowed. “Maybe forever.”
The lightning died out again, plunging the room into gloom lit only by the faint glow of streetlights, but it was enough to see the worry in her eyes.
“It’s all right, Jax. You won’t be alone. I’ll help you.”
She gestured with her knife to the still body on the floor. When lightning crackled again a flickering rectangle of light coming in the window fell across the curve of Bethany’s naked hip. “Yes, I can see that you have everything well in hand.”
Despite everything, Alex was able to smile just a little.
“Do you think your friends will send anyone to help you?”
She shook her head.
“Why not?”
“Because right now I’m the only one able to undertake such a journey. We’re on our own.”
He let out a deep breath. “Jax, I need you to know how sorry I am for the way I treated you the last time.” He discarded the speech, the excuses, that he’d rehearsed in his mind a few hundred times. “You came to help me and I didn’t listen. I didn’t mean to belittle what you and others have done. I just didn’t understand. It was so hard to—”
She lifted a hand to keep him from going on. “When I went back the last time I told people about some of the things I saw here, some of the technology I saw. They reacted much the same way as you. They didn’t believe me, didn’t believe that I had succeeded in coming to this world. Many of them thought I was making it up to cover failure.
“It made me realize just how hard it had to be for you. I suspect that were the situation reversed and were it you who had come to my world instead, I wouldn’t have believed you, either.
“For now let’s both try to be a little more understanding of the gulf between us. We need to help each other if we’re to survive what is coming.”
Alex didn’t know what was coming, but he nodded. It felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders, a weight that he’d been carrying since she’d left the last time.
Still, it was profoundly difficult to get his mind around the idea that this woman had actually come from another world.
“Where is this world of yours? Your home? Is it across the universe? In another universe? Through some wormhole in space that allows you to step out of your world and into mine?”
“I can only tell you that the place I come from is on the other side of darkness, on the other side of nothing.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We don’t either.” She lifted a hand in a helpless gesture and then let it drop to her side. “There’s a lot I can’t explain. All I know for sure is that they are very different places, but at the same time they are very much the same. Right now, though, that’s not our problem. Right now, our problem is that if we’re going to find answers we first of all need to stay alive and to do that we need to get out of here.”
Alex nodded. “What are we going to do with Bethany’s body?”
“Send her back to my world,” Jax said as she squatted down beside the dead woman.
When next the lightning flashed Alex was shocked to see Jax using the tip of her knife to cut strange symbols in Bethany’s forehead. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sending her back to my world.”
“But before you said this is a world without magic. How do you expect to do such a thing if there’s no magic here?”
“She came here with a lifeline, the same as I did the two previous times. I’m merely activating it.”
He gestured to the bed. “Jax, there’s blood everywhere—it’s all over me. Even if you get rid of Bethany’s body, her blood is still going to be everywhere just waiting to be discovered.”
Working at the grisly task, Jax spoke without looking up. “The blood is hers and not from this world. It will return with her.” She looked up and grinned. “I wish I could be there to see their faces when I send their queen back to them like this.”
As lightning flashed, the room lit for a moment in its harsh glare only to plunge back into shadows as a cracking boom of thunder shook the house. Outside, branches clattered together in the wind. Rain beat steadily against the windows.
Jax swiftly cut two more mysterious symbols. Despite Bethany being dead, blood oozed from the strange network of lines. Alex couldn’t help taking in the design with an artistic eye, seeing the sense of movement in the lines’ composition.
“There,” Jax said to herself as she stood.
“There what?” In the harsh illumination of another flash of lightning he peered down at the dead woman. “What’s supposed to happen?”
Bethany might have been beautiful in life, but in
death, with the way the wound across her neck gaped open, she was grotesque. The sight turned his stomach. In the next flash of lightning he noticed a stab wound in her lower back. Jax’s blade had been bloody when he’d first seen it. It dawned on him that she must have stabbed Bethany first to disable her.
As Jax stood, the flickers of lightning died out and the room again went dark. Rain thrumming against the window made the darkness feel altogether creepy.
When the lightning crackled again, there was nothing at their feet. No body, no blood.
Alex blinked in surprise and disbelief. Bethany was gone.
Just . . . gone.
“There,” Jax said. “Feel better?”
“How did you do that?” he asked in shock, pointing at the empty place on the floor.
“I told you. I activated her lifeline to pull her back.”
Unable to believe his own eyes, Alex backed up until he bumped into the bed. “No, I mean, really. How did you do that?”
He turned and in the next flash of lightning saw that the sheets were pristine white. There was no blood. Not a speck. He looked down at himself, then ran his hand over his clean shirt. There was no blood on it.
It was as if Bethany had never been there.
Jax leaned in. “Are you all right?”
Alex nodded dumbly. “It’s impossible, but I saw it.”
“I’ve told you every word true, Alexander.”
He could only nod.
She let out a sigh. “This must all be hard for you, Alex. Later on maybe I can help you understand it better, but right now we have to get out of here.” She cast him a suspicious look. “By the way, what happened to that fellow out in the other room, out near the door?”
“What—” Alex remembered then. “Oh, him. I broke his neck.”
“Really?” Jax arched an eyebrow. “Well done, Alex. Well done.”
“There were two. After I broke his neck the other one tied me to the bed. Then Bethany sent him out to wait until she was finished with me. He’ll be out there in the rain somewhere, waiting.”