"You're so beautiful," he murmured as he kissed her throat. "So damned beautiful."
"Thank you for not letting me go," she said, her voice thick with emotion.
He stopped what he was doing and rolled onto his side so he could see her face. Her eyes were dry, but deep lines cut into the skin around her mouth and between her eyebrows.
"I couldn't do it," he said, tracing the curve of her jaw with his finger.
She shivered at his touch and closed her eyes.
"It was like being dead, but with dreams. It's not bad . . . not really."
"What're you talking about, Bell?" he asked.
She opened her eyes and shrugged.
"I don't know. It feels so far away now. Like with each breath I take, it gets further and further away."
She smiled at him, her dark brown eyes clearer than they'd been only a few moments earlier.
"You're feeling better?" he asked.
She nodded.
"I am."
"So what next?" he asked.
She sat up, pulling her knees into her chest. She yawned, but the exhaustion was beginning to fade from her eyes, the lines disappearing from her forehead and around her mouth.
"Well, I think we should try to find the Red Chapel. It's the only place I know of in all the dreamlands," she said, arching her back and stretching like a cat. "I don't know how we find it, but maybe if we just think about it, it will come to us."
"It's an awful place in real life," Evan said, wishing they would go anywhere but there.
"It's where you lost your coven," Arrabelle said, in understanding.
"Lost them . . . ? It was a massacre. The Flood stole Laragh, then burned Yesinia and Honey on a pyre in front of the Red Chapel. Niamh saw the whole thing." He didn't get into the fact that Niamh was the reason the chapel had been burned down to its foundations. Suffice it to say, it had been a horrific night. He and Niamh had both almost died and their coven had been destroyed . . . all because of The Flood.
"We don't have to go-" Arrabelle started to say, but Evan took her hand in his, brought it to his lips, and kissed it.
"I go where you go, Bell."
• • •
It was funny, but they didn't have to go far.
They'd set off as soon as Arrabelle had felt well enough to walk, their hands intertwined. He found himself just happy to be in her company, pleased he was the reason she was up and moving, alive, not buried in a field of mushrooms.
"I ate it, like an idiot," she said, swinging her arm as she walked-and by proximity and connection of their hands, his arm went with hers as they matched their steps. "I'm an herbalist and I ate a poisonous mushroom."
She laughed, a clear throaty sound that made Evan's heart beat faster.
"It happens," Evan said. "I'm just glad I found you."
"How'd you know where I'd be?" Arrabelle asked, swinging their arms faster.
"I didn't," he said-which was the truth. "I just started walking. The others thought you were dead, but I didn't care. I just felt like I had to go and find you."
"I'm not mad at them for leaving me," Arrabelle said. "I get it."
"You were there one minute and the next you were gone, Bell," Evan said. "It was surreal."
"I walked for so long," Arrabelle said. "And there was nothing. Do the dreamlands scare you as much as they do me?"
"They do," Evan said, nodding in agreement.
"And I haven't been hungry since we got here. Except when I was being compelled to eat those mushrooms."
Evan realized he hadn't had a meal since they got to the dreamlands, but when he did a mental check of his hunger level, he found it at zero.
"Very strange."
"I wish Lizbeth or Lyse or someone would just swoop in and find us," Arrabelle said-and before the words were even out of her mouth . . . a shadow cut across the sand.
Eleanora
That horrible witch-the excommunicated blood sister, Helen Cordoza-had breached the carefully constructed spell that Devandra and Thomas had so elegantly crafted. It happened in a heartbeat. One moment the mess hall was full of women working magic under their breath in hisses and murmurs, the next, the evil bitch had crossed the threshold, snapping the delicate web of their spell.
A surge of black-camouflaged men and women streamed into the large room, semiautomatic guns at the ready. Thomas ran for the hatch, magic crackling between his fingers as he tried to stop Helen from destroying the invisibility spell completely. But it was too little, too late. A man with a black grease-painted face lifted his gun and blew Thomas's head off.
He was the first casualty-and then all hell had broken loose. The Shrieking Eagles attempted to stop The Flood's men, but there just weren't enough of them. Daniela had run into the room from the galley kitchen and that Helen bitch had slammed the empath with enough magic that she'd been thrown back ten feet in the air, her head hitting the wall at a funny angle. Eleanora had been sure her neck was broken.