Hart and Hunter

Chapter 24

Ch. 24: Julian

"Julian, are you certain?" Halloran asks, leaning over me with a hand on my shoulder. "Are you certain it was the Shadowlands you saw?"

I raise my head just enough to glare at him and immediately regret the effort as pain lances my eyes.

"No, I'm not certain," I groan, rubbing my temples. "I only know it wasn't anywhere earthlike, and it didn't look like Faerie either—what I've seen of it, anyway."

"Can you describe it?"

With a sigh, I dredge up a few words to convey the impressions I'd received.

"It was... gray."

"Gray?" Halloran frowns. "What was gray?"

"Everything." I sigh again and lean into Dane, who sits at my side on the picnic bench. "It was like a... perpetual twilight, beneath these huge trees. Some were as wide as buildings at the base, and so tall I couldn't see the tops. They were endless—just a wall of gray in every direction. The ground was gray, too—choked with fallen logs and dead branches and big... rocks."

I gesture with my hands, trying to convey a sense of scale.

"Boulders?" Dane suggests.

"Yeah, boulders. It was really dark under the trees, and I got the sense that there were... things... watching me."

A shudder convulses my body, and Dane rubs his hand up and down my back.

Halloran nods. "That sounds like the Shadowlands, all right. Anything else?"

I shake my head. "Just that Stephanie had been there a while. She was... starving, and terrified. But she was more afraid of him than anything else. She knew swimming through the tunnel was risky—he'd told her there was no way out—but she had to try. She'd rather die than stay there another minute, waiting for him to come back and..."

The memory of horror clouds my mind, and I bolt to my feet as nausea chokes my throat and makes my salivary glands sting. Staggering to the nearest clump of shrubs, I bend over and puke.

Dane catches me before I faceplant in my own vomit, and holds me up as he murmurs soothing promises of the bottled water waiting for me in the car.

"Lords. Is it always this bad?" Halloran asks, standing back a bit with a look of mild disgust.

Dane answers for me while I continue to cough and retch. "No. Only when the impressions he gets are especially unpleasant or intense."

"And you say the, er, 'fainting' is new?"

"Yeah."

"Interesting. I wonder if it's the Fae connection, or..."

Ignoring him for the moment, Dane turns his attention to me. "Can you walk?"

I nod, and we set off through the trees towards the car. My stomach is still unsettled, and the taste of sickness lingers in my mouth. At the car, Dane gets me settled and grabs my kit from the back seat. It's just a small black bag packed with a blanket, bottled water, painkillers, dark glasses, and a protein bar, but it's been my standard psychic after-care package for years.

Dane hands me a bottle of water with the cap off, and I rinse out my mouth before taking a few careful sips. When I'm sure I can keep it down, I swallow the single aspirin Dane places in my palm.

As he slips the dark glasses over my eyes and drapes the blanket around my shoulders, I grumble half-heartedly.

"I took care of myself perfectly well before I met you, you know."