For a moment, I just lay there, staring at the wildly thrashing treetops. Lightning flashed, rain poured, presumably thunder crashed, but I couldn’t hear it—my ears were seriously screwed up. Something to do with the awful pressure in that portal, which had left me looking at a scene out of a silent horror flick. All it needed was a guy in a cape.
Or a monster in a tree.
My ears popped after a moment, allowing me to hear the vulgar cussing going on somewhere nearby. Which broke off abruptly—I guessed because I’d just been spotted. “Well?” a furious voice squeaked. “Are you just going to leave me up here?”
I looked around and saw Rosier wedged in between two tree branches, glaring down at me. It looked like demon lords were sturdier than I’d thought. And then he started cussing again, fluidly, impressively, in a multitude of tongues, at Gertie, at the world, at me—
“Why . . . are you mad . . . at me?” I finally asked, when I could speak.
“You didn’t let her go!”
“What?” I stared up at him.
“The girl! I told you to let her go!”
“And then what? Gertie would have—”
“Transferred her attention to you!”
“Her attention . . . was already . . . on me,” I said, wondering what I was missing. “Did you hit your head?”
“Her attention was half on you and half on me. I needed her distracted—”
“For what?”
“For this!” And he held something out in his tiny fist.
Something that dropped at my side a second later, small and shiny and looking a lot like—
“A dart?” I picked it up.
“She wasn’t planning to kill you,” he told me, heatedly. “She was planning—”
“To drug me.” My fist closed over the small thing, and my head jerked up.
“I managed to lift it off her in the chaos,” he continued while I got shakily to my feet. “But I wasn’t close enough to use it and she had me by the back of the neck, like a misbehaving kitten! If you had listened—”
“I thought you were panicking.”
“I don’t panic.”
I looked back at him.
“I rarely panic. You need to learn some trust—”
“It wasn’t about the trust—it was about the crazy.”
“Sometimes you have to get a little crazy!”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, locating a break in the treetops. And staring upward at a sky boiling with clouds, at a rainstorm pelting down, at a smothered moon hiding
the insanity until a burst of lightning flashed, just outside the range of my spell. And illuminated an upturned wagon suspended impossibly in the air above us.
With its rider still in residence, because, like me, she’d just performed a major spell.
And she was tired.
“Wait here,” I told Rosier.