And so did Cha’s innards, feeling as if her guts had been pulled through her nose, which hurt exactly as much as you’d imagine.
They’d crossed over the border into Moonstone.
Crossing from Obsidian into Moonstone wasn’t like going from the human realms into Obsidian.At all.Not only wasn’t this border guarded and blockaded, it also existed more like a gate from one reality to another, so far as Cha understood.Obsidian, being so close to the human realms and apparently somewhat diluted by that proximity, didn’t have much of a border transition.Dy claimed to feel it but apparently Cha’s limited and highly specific ley-riding magic didn’t stretch that far.
She could have done a better job of mentally preparing for the disorienting sensation, as she’d experienced it that once before, but somehow she’d forgotten the painful, nauseatingly visceral details.Dy had once commented that Phinny seemed to forget the agonizing and exhausting specifics of childbirth once the baby was born—and especially when she decided she wanted to conceive another.No amount of recounting Phinny’s misery in the last months of pregnancy or during labor seemed to make an impact or truly remind her, and Cha and Dy had puzzled together over the phenomenon.
But Cha understood better now.At least, so far as she could think while her body stopped existing on one plane of reality and entered another.It hurt on a level beyond nerve endings and tissue damage, as if she’d been pulled apart and then reassembled as something else.All the old tales of the fae spoke of humans who spent time on the other side of the veil and lost track of years or more.Her body seemed to have been forcibly disconnected from anything like the logical progression of time—and belatedly she recalled how weeks in Moonstone before had been only hours for Dy back in Obsidian.
As she came back to herself, Katu’s warm, furry flank under her cheek reassured her.He seemed entirely unbothered by the transition, but then he never showed any sign of pain going from natural form to carriage and back again.She’d thought about that before, on her first crossing into Moonstone, that she’d been similarly transformed by her passage through that veil dividing realms.
Yes, Katu was fine, but she was so shaken by the non-experience, which had taken forever and no time at all, that it was a while before that odd mental conversation came back to her.Had that all been a figment of her imagination?She often argued with herself internally, revisiting stupid things she’d said to other people, coming up with wittier comebacks than she had in the moment, but this felt… different.
Azul?She asked tentatively, in the quiet of her mind only.
No response.
Of course there’s no response, you idiot,her internal voice answered, not sounding like Azul at all.You’re so fucking ga-ga over that fae that you’re choking on your own pussy sparkle like it’s live pixie dust and having full out hallucinations.
She really needed to get her shit together.
But she couldn’t help thinking of that interrupted daydream or whatever it had been.…listen to that regret and go home before—
Before what?
Clearly that had been her own nerves speaking.If Azul could contact her telepathically, he would have before now.Why send Lenorae with a coin and password if he could just slip into her head willy nilly for free?Because he couldn’t, that’s why.She was just so out of her mind for his fae peen that she was concocting conversations with him.Loony as any human found in the morning on a mound, a hundred years later and with her feet bloodied from dancing all night.
Upon the heels of that thought, exhaustion crept through her bones, as if she had indeed been waltzing with her fae lover for a century, dizzy in his arms.I miss you, Azul,she thought, speaking the words in her mind, however unwise.
No answer, of course.
Overwhelmed by sleepiness, her head pillowed on Katu’s sleek, warm flank, she crashed into sleep.
~12~
Into the Big Yellow
“You put asleep enchantment on me,” Cha accused Dy, who looked completely unbothered.
Dy tucked her golden hair behind her ears, which did nothing to tame the wild and springing mass of it, and shook her head.“A vast overstatement.”
Cha had woken, realized Big Betty had come to a halt, and immediately crawled out of the secret compartment, cursing the stiffness of her body, as if she had indeed slept for centuries.Katu slunk out, yawning widely to reveal sharp white fangs and a pink kitten tongue, going to use the litter box they kept for him and Warg for these just-in-case situations.She’d found Dy in the cab of Big Betty, bleary eyed and sipping a cup of hot coffee.When Cha came through the door—dodging the muscular swinging tail of Warg who was going out, no doubt also to use the litter box—Dy simply pointed at the second cup of coffee, black, just the way Cha liked it.
Sometimes it was good to be partners with a sorceress, even if they cast spells on you.
“It’s okay to drink this?”she asked, though obviously Dy wouldn’t be drinking hers if it wasn’t.
“I’ve kept a shield around Big Betty to keep the Moonstone magic out.We can eat and drink what we brought with us, but only until the magic leaks through.Make hay now.”
Cha had never much enjoyed haying season, but she loved coffee and gulped it down.Really good coffee too.With her brain clearing by the moment, she demanded, “How is it an overstatement saying I know you put me to sleep?”
Dy waved that off.“Just a bit of sleepy suggestion.I use it on my kids all the time.Stop bitching.Eat some breakfast.You need fuel as much as Katu does.”
Hmph.Cha didn’t much care for Dy’s bossy attitude, but she did love Phinny’s cooking.She took a big bite of the pistachio-cream filled bun and rolled her eyes in sheer delight.
“You need protein, too.”Dy handed her another kind of roll, this one with sausage and spinach inside, equally delicious.While Cha ate, Dy stared out of Big Betty’s wide windows at basically nothing.She’d done something to darken them, to screen out the blinding white of the Moonstone landscape, so that it barely glowed.Stark, uncanny, the glittering white dimmed to gray by the shading, the fae realm looked like what Cha imagined the moon might if people could go there and walk around.Hell, for all she knew, the fae could do that and that’s where Moonstone was located.
It broke her brain to think about it too hard, but the fae realms weren’t laid out geographically like the human lands.They were somehow nestled each inside the other.So where the human realm was laid out more or less horizontally, with mountainous bumps and watery dips, the fae realms were spheres.Or irregular blobs.Apparently it was as much of a mistake to picture them as symmetrical geometric shapes as it was to think of the human world as perfectly flat.Obsidian, for example, from the maps Cha had looked at, was portrayed as a big, blobby shape, with a blown-out side that extruded like an arm to connect with the human lands.