Ronan still held her, but he was also shaking with fatigue. From a strange type of sitting position he fell onto his ass on the floor and managed to take her down with him. He stretched out, and she lay sprawled across him, unable to move without feeling like she would lose her lunch.
“I agree with Kali,” Ronan said as he wrapped his arms around her and shifted her to a more comfortable spot. “No more slip travel. Twice in one day is very unpleasant. I think another one just might kill me.”
“Nah,” Alex said from somewhere above them. It sounded like he was moving around. “You just need to find your sea legs. It gets easier.”
Considering that she felt way worse than she had the first time, she found that hard to believe. “Wait! ‘Slip travel’? What the fuck is that?”
“It’s the way fire demons travel. Quite convenient really.”
“Fire demons?” Okay, now she knew for certain that they’d broken something in her brain. Fire demons? Slip travel? Incinerated seven-year-olds? There was no way she was sane. Maybe she was already locked in a rubber room.
Alex pressed something into her hand. “Eat this. I promise it will make you feel better.”
She squinted at the salt-encrusted cracker and really wanted to roll her eyes. She resisted, of course. Her headache was bad enough as it was. Unable to form any type of smartass reply, Kali lifted the cracker to her mouth and nibbled on the corner instead. It was really, really salty. Great, now she felt nauseous and thirsty.
Kali could hear Ronan munching away, the chewing sound rather noisy with her ear pressed against his chest. She shuffled sideways, intending only to climb off the man—she really shouldn’t have stayed there in the first place—but Alex lifted her into his arms and settled her on his lap as he sat on some sort of bench.
Feeling just a little less woozy than she had a moment ago, Kali managed to keep her eyes open long enough to look around. “Where are we this time?” They seemed to be in some sort of gym.
“My place,” Ronan said as he managed to lift himself off the floor and stay upright with minimal swaying. “Good choice.” He nodded to Alex and then turned and headed out of the room.
“I’m crazy, aren’t I?” she whispered to Alex. “I would have sworn I saw you attack a seven-year-old with flames from your fingers. I’m really in a hospital psych ward or something, aren’t I?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, darlin’, but you really did see what you thought you saw.” He touched her face softly but shook his head as a grin formed on his lips. “Well, except for the seven-year-old. That was actually a pixie assassin, and unfortunately she’ll recover from that and come after you again. Of course, that’s if she can find us. I think she got lucky at my place, but I destroyed your cell phone just in case she was using modern technology to track you.”
“A pixie assassin?” Her voice was way higher in pitch than she liked—and she’d get to the part about her destroyed cell phone in a moment—but pixie assassins? He was joking, right? “Aren’t pixies supposed to be cute and nice and…not assassins and…I don’t know…not real?”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but despite their positive—and very much undeserved—reputations, pixies aren’t nice, aren’t cute, and really do assassinate people. Well, they usually stick to paranormal-type people to assassinate, but I can assure you they are very real.”
“Oh,” Kali said as her headache throbbed just a little more. Maybe she wasn’t the only crazy one in this room.
“Now fire demons, on the other hand,” Alex continued, “have a bad reputation, yet we’ve never done anything to deserve it. I mean, yeah, we can incinerate anything we want to with our bare hands, but it’s not like we go around doing it all the time. And hey, what’s with the Halloween BS? I don’t look like a guy with red skin, yellow horns, and a tail, do I?”
She shook her head and wondered how long she was going to get to stay in crazy-land.
“You still going on about needing a better publicist?” Ronan said as he strode back into the room. He didn’t seem the least bit affected by whatever had knocked him on his ass a few minutes ago. Lucky bastard. Although, if Kali were honest with herself, she’d admit that she was staying in Alex’s arms more for her own reasons now. The headache wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been, and the nausea was mostly gone. But she snuggled just a little closer when she saw jealousy flash across Ronan’s features. It lasted but a moment, yet she knew exactly what she’d seen.