They spun wildly out into nothingness. He felt Giselle cast a spell. Amazingly, it wrenched them back into the
temple. They sprawled onto the alabaster pedestal. Pain radiated through him as bones cracked and joints pulled apart. He absorbed most of the fall, keeping the witch and the Guardian on top of him.
All three lay there a moment, then without a word, Giselle stood and picked the Guardian up in a fireman's carry. She leaped from the pedestal, pushing out past the crowd of supplicants, and then sprinted across the open space to the wall of lavender smoke. By the time Shoftiel found his feet, they'd disappeared.
He sought them on foot, and then by air as he healed himself. The magic running through the golden patterns on the ground tarnished and faded, but the smoke remained.
After a while of fruitless searching, he returned to the inn. He peeled open the security web with little effort, repairing it before looking for Giselle. She wasn't there.
Emotion churned in his gut. She'd had ample time to return. He tried not to think about what the Guardian might have done to her. Even fragile, she could pulverize the witch with just a thought. He didn't examine too closely why he cared. His business with Giselle was certainly done. The removal of the labradorite cuff had freed him from their deal. Likely because the fool thought she'd die and wanted to release him before that, which made no sense whatsoever. She'd pulled him from the Mistlands to protect her. Why would she release him before she'd escaped with the Guardian?
When he found her, he'd make her answer if he had to light her on fire to get her to talk.
He'd worked himself into a volcanic fury by the time he found her four hours later. She limped along a snaking road, several miles from the inn. Her body was a welter of wounds, her clothes rags. She had no shoes, nor did she have the Guardian. He dove out of the air and snatched her up, flying high in the sky. She shivered from the icy chill of the wind at this height.
"What the hell are you doing?" she demanded, and despite the shaky weakness in her voice, she sent a substantial jolt of power through his arms. "Let me go."
He dropped her, then caught her just feet above the ground.
"Asshole," she said, trembling with fear she couldn't hide.
"Careful. I might drop you again."
"Why haven't you gone off to inflict yourself on someone else? I'd have thought you'd hightail it for the hills the moment I took off the binding."
He'd have thought so, too. He wasn't ready to examine why he hadn't.
"I want to repay your kindness to me," he mocked. "In rescuing me from the Mistlands."
"I gave you a choice and besides that, you deserved to be there for what you did to Max. You still do."
He couldn't argue that. The poison of being wrong burned like acid in his veins.
"So where are you taking me?"
"I thought I might drop you in the tar bog."
"Then you overshot. We passed that ten minutes ago."
"What did you do with the Guardian?" he asked.
She didn't answer right away. Shoftiel continued to fly. He was going north, and though he'd not chosen a destination deliberately, he knew where he was headed. Depending on her answer.
"You realize this is none of your business," she said.
"I'm making it my business," he said, considering dropping her again.
She sighed. "Whatever. Once we got outside the shrine, she and I had a talk. Then she left."
Now Shoftiel did drop her. She swore a blue streak when he retrieved her. "Now tell me the real story," he said.
Giselle sighed. "Doing what she was doing was killing her. If she died, the other Guardians would destroy the earth in revenge. Once she was out of her prison, she couldn't go back inside it. She doesn't have enough strength anymore. The supplicants have been feeding the spell, but she couldn't have lasted much longer."
"So, what does she do now?"
Giselle shrugged in his embrace. "Go home, I guess. Maybe the rest of them will listen to her. Maybe not. I'm not in a hurry to find out. Now can you take me back to the inn? I'm freezing, I'm hurt, I'm tired, and I'm hungry."
He pretended to consider. "No."