But I did not feel lonely here. I had talked and talked. And Ray had listened, and seemed interested, or at least entertained. It had felt strange, to open up to someone like that, like so much lately. It was exciting, almost dizzily so. I could not remember the last time I had looked at the future and not had any idea what it might hold.
That was why, as frightening as Faerie was, it was thrilling, too. And without Dory to worry about, I could . . . I could do anything. Just anything at all!
Well, anything that my body would allow. But even worry over my legs did not weigh me down that much. For the first time in memory, I felt free.
I almost did not want to sleep for the joy of it.
The wind picked up, and gooseflesh prickled my arms. I felt myself shiver, and drew further into my thick tunic, which was remarkably warm. I saw Ray start back this way, ostentatiously looking at the sky, giving me a chance to notice him.
“Dorina,” he called out. “Are you ready to—”
His voice cut off abruptly, I did not know why. Then a cascade of mental images hit me, too many and too fast to even try to process, like bubbles foaming up from the surf. And something huge stirred in the depths of the water.
Oh, I thought blankly.
That was why.
And then Ray started to run.
He was coming this way, and coming fast, or so it would have appeared to anyone looking at a photo of him. His feet were digging into the soft sand near the shoreline, his arms were in the classic running pose, and his face was snarling enough to show fang. But despite the fact that vampire speed should have had him beside me in an instant, he was barely moving.
I did not think that was his fault, however.
The disturbance in the water became more pronounced, and for a moment, I thought that the fey had found us. That one of their wooden ships was pushing up through the waves, and that we were caught or soon to be. But if it was one of their vessels, it was larger than any I had yet seen.
Quite a bit larger.
Ray was still running, but had yet to complete a single stride. Whatever was boiling toward the surface, however, was moving quickly. It broke through the waves a moment later, in a furious surge of water and a mass of spray worthy of a Yellowstone geyser.
I sank back against the rocks, hoping that they would hide me. They weren’t that much darker than the gray tunic I was wearing, especially now that it was wet again. Perhaps, if I was very still, the Svarestri would pass on by and—
That was not the Svarestri.
The water had fountained up, far into the sky, and was now coming back down again, raining hard on me and half the river. But not so much so that I could not make out what sat in the middle of the stream, threatening to turn my mind inside out. I looked at it for a moment in consternation, because that . . . could not be what I thought it was.
Yet it continued to sit there, disturbing the currents. And displacing enough water that a tide had washed up, soaking our camp and the riverbank in both directions. It was as if a ship the size of a submarine had somehow surfaced in the middle of our quiet mountain stream, only it wasn’t a submarine.
It was . . . a seahorse.
It was bluish-gray, with great, translucent fins crowning its head and wafting along its sides, and a long, delicate snout. It had jewel-like scales that caught and reflected the moonlight, giving it what appeared to be an orange racing stripe down its side. I stared at it for a moment longer, and then I frowned.
Like the tide, the racing stripe was quite advanced for an illusion, which often ignored the lighting in an area entirely. It was one of the easiest ways of spotting a cheap spell, in fact, if distortions around the edges didn’t already give it away. But this had no such distortions. It was simply a huge, ridiculously pretty seahorse that my mind persisted in telling me was real when it quite obviously wasn’t.
After all, we were in fresh water here, not salt, and in any case, seahorses were not the size of school buses!
And then it spoke.
“Here! You, girl. What are you?”
The question was in English, which was also absurd, as there would be no way for any randomly passing seahorse to know what language I used. I started to say something to that effect, and about the fact that illusions didn’t work on me and that I was going to see through this one any minute. But I didn’t.
Instead, I just stopped and stared again, because the seahorse hadn’t been the one speaking, after all. Its rider had. And this illusion was even better than the last. This illusion was—
“Beautiful,” I whispered.
It was a completely inadequate word. Completely. It wasn’t even accurate because beauty was supposed to delight and please the senses, but this beauty . . .
Hurt.