Pritkin pulled me through an Alice in Wonderland–type forest filled with familiar things that suddenly made no sense: trees recognizable only by their height, ground just a huge thing that tilted under my feet like a carnival ride, sky an expanse so immense I couldn’t look at it, couldn’t look, not without feeling like I might fall into it and go mad.
Only I was sort of feeling that way anyway.
And instead of better, the sensory distortion was getting worse, and getting worse fast, along with a gut-twisting craving I couldn’t identify, but that had my hands shaking and my skin chilling one second and flushing hotly the next. I looked at my hand and thought I could see actual steam rising from it, an orange-red haze so bright, so bright against the darkened forest that I could only stare.
The branches that we pushed through lashed my body like a hundred little whips. They painted my skin with lines of fire, hot and peppery. Until the sound, the taste, the scent of them swirled up around me with every new stroke, leaving me writhing under their pain-filled touch in a different sort of ecstasy.
Pritkin stopped abruptly, and I ran into him. And discovered that I hadn’t known ecstasy at all. My front connected with his back, and he felt so good, so good I couldn’t believe it. All the other impressions faded, leaving just this: just smooth, warm, rigid, flexing under my hands. Salt under my tongue. Musk in my nose from the sweat I was still trying to lick off when somebody pulled me away, when somebody else wrapped me in a coat, when they separated us.
Pritkin was cursing. I couldn’t understand the words, but the sounds spoke right to my brain, like the sounds of scuffling. He was fighting them; who was he fighting? I didn’t know, couldn’t tell. Just knew that I missed him, that I needed to get back to him, that I had to touch—
I found him again—I have no idea how. I was all but blind, my eyes working but not seeing, my senses so overwhelmed they had practically shorted out, my head reeling and steps faltering—
Until I touched him. And suddenly, everything made sense again. He was still trying to talk, to say something, whether to me or to them I didn’t know, but it was a problem with my tongue down his throat. I didn’t care. He tasted good; he tasted like life, and sanity and steadiness. Where my hands touched him, they felt almost normal, except for this weird sensation that they were sinking into his chest, merging with it. But that was fine, too. I wanted to merge with him, wanted to sink inside, wanted—
Hands wrenched me away, a physical pain. Harsh voices sounded in my ears, but I didn’t understand. And then someone stopped in front of me, pulling my face up to the light, but I couldn’t see anything; my eyes had gone crazy again. They kept trying to taste things, and that wasn’t right . . . was it?
“See what happens when you play around with time, girl?” a terse voice asked. And then the hands were pulling me farther away, and I was starting to panic, and fight to get back, slipping out of the coat and out of their grip, and running—
For a second. Until they caught me, and wrestled me back, and someone said, “Enough of this!”
And then there was a light.
And then there was nothing.
Chapter Nineteen
I woke up in what I guessed was the Pythian Court, since I was pretty sure Gertie was the one who’d just snatched me out of Wales. Pretty sure, but not certain, because Pritkin’s spell was still in full force. And right then, I couldn’t be certain of anything.
But I came around on a chaise in a small, dark room. It had garnet curtains with pompom fringe, an open door with light spilling in, and people talking in heated but hushed voices outside. And some wallpaper, some terrible, terrible stripy wallpaper that I fell into before I could decipher what they were saying, and then couldn’t get back out of again.
Every which way I turned there was another line, shooting up immensely high, into the sky. Like the tallest of trees in a strange forest. And for some reason that thought made me panic and run, and get even further entangled in the never-ending jungle of lines, like bars on a cage, like poles on a merry-go-round, like light posts flashing by in a long, steady line. . . .
The carriage stopped.
Which surprised me since I hadn’t realized I’d been in one.
Someone pulled me out, onto the sidewalk by one of the light posts, and I stumbled into it. I couldn’t catch myself because my hands were cuffed behind me. Someone else gripped my arm, steadying me, and tried to say something, but he was cut off by voices from several sides.
It didn’t matter. I couldn’t concentrate on the voices. I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
Because whenever I did, it was terrifying.
A monster twisted its neck around to look at me, a horrible, elongated thing, like something out of a nightmare. Its massive curve filled half the street, along with a head full of flaring nostrils and enormous teeth. And rolling eyes that stared at me, before it gave an awful, whinnying roar, like it was laughing at my terror—
“Get her away from the horse!” someone said, and I was jerked back, screaming.
And was then marched down the sidewalk in the middle of a crowd of people I didn’t look at, was afraid to look at. I just stared at the sidewalk instead, a boring stretch of brick that even my messed-up brain couldn’t seem to do anything with. And at the feet of the guards or whoever they were, marching alongside me in their black, black boots.
The boots started to leave tarry footprints on the stones, like rubber on a hot day melting in the sun, even though it wasn’t day. I knew that because we kept passing under streetlamps that threw circles of light onto the sticky footprints. And then onto pools of melted leather as the boots began to dissolve, first into puddles, then into holes that opened up in the perfectly uniform brick, deep and dark and—
The sidewalk swallowed a guard.
It just opened up and gobbled him down between one second and the next, I was sure of it. But no one else seemed to notice he was gone, no one else seemed to notice, and what if I was next? What if—
A surge of panic hit, and I tried to run, in a burst of speed that got me nowhere. Because the coat I was wearing again tripped me and arms caught me, and I was twisting and fighting and I must have hit someone, because a voice cursed. And someone else asked a question I didn’t hear.
“Damned if I know!” the first voice said. “Just get her inside. Sooner she’s put away, the better!”