First Crossing (3 page)

Then, masked by the strongest shields he had ever seen, he
spotted a tiny dark orb nested in the layers of her mind. It throbbed and
pulsed with power, and when he moved closer to examine it, a wave of heat
roared back at him, fierce and protective.

Whoa. What was
that?
He backed away, intrigued, and
felt the protective wall draw back to surround the orb. Somehow, it still
managed to exude threat.
Stay away.

It seemed the prophesies had been right. Eve did have far
more potential than most people dreamt of.

He withdrew from her mind, leaving in place a gossamer-fine
psychic connection, and nodded. She was still looking at him unhappily; a frown
creasing her brow and a warning in those silver-gray eyes. At that moment she
looked uncannily like her mother.

Who was waiting to hear that he had accomplished his task
and kept her daughter out of the hands of Roth and his followers.

“Come.” He turned and started running, flowing over the
rough ground and leaves in a way that he knew she couldn’t hope to emulate. Not
yet, anyway. At first he moved much slower than usual, but the psi-link showed
that she was handling it easily. He increased the pace, and she kept up with
that, too.

Is that the best you can manage, O Great Hunter?

The unexpected humor drew a grim smile out of him. She was
resilient: most humans would not be taking events this well. He responded
telepathically.
I can move at ten times this speed – but can you?

Want to try me?

Not now. I can’t risk losing you. Almost there.

He ran for another half a mile, then stopped and turned. Eve
was right behind him, a sheen of sweat on her brow, but breathing a lot more
easily than he had expected. Short strands of blond hair stuck to her forehead,
and he could see himself reflected in her sunglasses. She bent forward, resting
her hands on her knees, and sucked in several deep breaths to recover.

“Now what?”

“We just laid the trail,” he told her. “It’s time to
disappear.”

***

Eve straightened up and looked at him, noting that his eyes
were constantly scanning the terrain; they didn’t rest on one spot for more
than a nanosecond. He was still on full alert, ready for anything. Through the
link that he had established, she could feel his awareness reaching out in all
directions. 

Behind him, she could see the ocean disappearing into the
horizon. They had circled around out of the canyon on to the coastal prairie,
and another few hundred yards would take them down across rocks onto the beach.

“Disappear, you said. How?”

“We’re at an intersection of worlds here. They will think
we’ve gone through SF2, where I usually operate – and where your mother lives.”
He nodded to his left.

Eve’s eyes followed the path indicated by his movement. She
could see nothing but more trees. And rocks. And leaf mulch. Your standard
canyon-type-stuff. She’d take his word for it that there was another portal of
some kind there.

“But we’re not going that way?”

“No.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “We’re going
that
way.”

“To the rocks?”

“To the ocean.”

Eve’s gaze tracked across the rocks to where waves were
rolling in, spending themselves on the sand.  Sunlight glinted off the water,
sending shards of hard bright light into her eyes. She didn’t see a boat
anywhere. Somehow she felt that a boat would be far too mundane a mode of
transportation for Hunter anyway.  So what did that leave?

Swimming?

She looked back at him again and sighed. “I hardly dare
ask.”

“I know you can swim,” he said, “and your genetic structure
protects you from cold that would kill many humans after twenty minutes. This
won’t trouble you. We swim out just a few hundred yards, then dive.  I have to
cloak you for that distance. It will feel strange, but it is necessary.”

His words about cloaking barely penetrated. She was still
stuck on the
‘…then dive’
part. Any time she had dived under a wave, she
had seen nothing but water and sand. Dive to
where?

And how could she breathe? Despite having fae blood – which
still sounded bizarre – she also owned a pair of very mortal lungs. Which
tended to fill with water if the owner didn’t come up for air.

Then abruptly, the link that he had built between them was gone.
Instead, the air around her seemed to shimmer and fold, and the trees and scrub
surrounding them faded.  Eve instinctively put out a hand, trying to feel
whatever it was surrounded them. There was nothing there – nothing to
feel
,
but it was like looking through a veil.

“That’s the cloak in place. It will stay there until I
remove it.” He turned. “Follow me.”

Feeling a bit like a pet dog, Eve obediently trotted after
him. He seemed content to walk, this time, rather than run. Maybe he was
feeling more secure with the cloaking thingummy in place. Without needing to
focus so much on putting her feet in the right place, Eve took the time to
study her escort.

As well showing the bulge of the knife he wore at his belt,
the fitted t-shirt outlined conditioned trapezoids and rear delts. Plainly, he
worked out. That is, if beings from another world
did
something as
mundane as ‘work out’. Maybe they had combat training instead, to deal with the
bad guys who were supposed to be pursuing them. Eve usually worked her back
muscles with barbell shrugs and weighted hyperextensions.
He
probably
trained with a battle-ax.

Why did she feel that she knew him? There had to be more of
a link than him transporting her across worlds as a baby. She frowned at his
back as they left the shelter of the trees and moved down to the rocks that
rose up from the edge of the sand. He had said
“I know you can swim”
–
but
how
did he know? He – or ‘they’ – had to have been monitoring her.
Had she, maybe, caught a glimpse of him when he was watching her, though the
years?

The thought sent an odd tremor through her. This man,
watching her as she went about her daily business. Like a guardian angel.

Or a stalker.

Had he been lurking about when she was a teenager? When
she’d brought down a tree branch on the Marriott boys?

When she was on her first
date
? Ugh.

Something else to put on the long list of things to ask him
about.

He jumped easily down over the rocks, and strode to the
water’s edge. Foam lapped at the toes of his boots. He focused on a point near
the horizon at about ten o’clock, and pointed. “We swim in that direction. I’ll
go first. When I stop, it’ll be time to dive, then you swim along the sea bed
in the same direction.”

“And then what?” Eve asked, nerves adding a tremor to her
voice.

“You’ll feel yourself slip across. Remember the sensation
when you came across from Human Earth?”

Since it had been less than an hour before, she was hardly
likely to have forgotten the nausea and disorientation. Oh joy. “Yes.”

“It’ll be much the same. You’ll be in the water, but you’ll
come up and it will be another dimension of the Otherworld. It’s still the San
Francisco area. We just refer to it as SF3.” He moved behind her and put both
hands on her shoulders. They burned like brands; Eve had to restrain a gasp.
“I’m directing your energy so you can learn to connect with the path to SF3.
Look where I told you to swim. Tell me when you feel the path lock in.”

Tell him when she felt a
path
lock in? Eve sucked at
her bottom lip and stared at the glittering points of sunlight in the direction
he had pointed, and tried to ignore the fact that the heat he was pouring into
her was going straight between her legs, surging in and filling her with erotic
fire. It was unexpected, and wholly shocking.
Holy cow. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

“Concentrate!”
came an annoyed hiss in her ear.

All right for you, buddy,
Eve shot back before
thinking. Then she froze, aghast. Could he feel what she was feeling? Did he
know
what this was doing to her? Oh, crap. She blinked and stared fiercely at
the sea.
Lock on, dammit, lock on.

Then it happened: the heat inside her coalesced into a
laser-bright ray that lanced out and locked onto a point in the ocean.
Bang.
Just like that, she was locked in. Amazing. She huffed out the breath she
hadn’t even realized she was holding, still feeling heat from his fingers.

“Your concentration span,” he said, removing his hands from
her shoulders and moving to her side, “is equivalent to that of a small child.”

Eve treated him to a super-special Black Look, doing her
best to ignore the sexual heat that still lingered below. “Seeing this is all
pretty new to me,” she said coldly, “I think you’re being a bit harsh. You
might be used to locking on to invisible paths, but I’m not.”

Was that a glint of laughter in his eyes? Shit. He
did
know.

Embarrassed and more than a bit annoyed, she directed her
gaze at the horizon. “Hadn’t we better get going? Since this is all so
urgent.
”

She turned and squelched her way into the shore dump;
freezing water lapping against her ankles. Swimming in shoes was going to slow
her down some. Could this day get any odder?

Without waiting to see if he was following, she speared
under the incoming wave and struck out strongly, drawn along by the path he had
established in her mind. Irrationally, the thought hit her that a homing beacon
like this would be handy for the next ocean swim. Then she remembered that she
probably wouldn’t be doing any more ocean swims for a while. Maybe never.

He didn’t have to tell her when they reached the point where
they had to dive. The sensation of a path opening up in front of her simply
stopped, and so did they.

“Ready?” He didn’t give her time to agree or disagree. “I’m
removing the cloak. Dive immediately, and you’ll be drawn through.”

The translucent veil around them lifted.

And all hell broke loose.

***

The sky darkened; wind whistled around their heads, and the
gently swelling waves turned an angry dark green and reared up, spray flying.
Eve saw Hunter’s eyes widen as he looked past her to the beach, then he yelled
“Dive!
Dive!”

She whirled and followed his gaze, and saw dark forms
hurtling towards them, dragging thunderclouds and lightning in their wake. Her
heart leaping in terror, she launched herself towards the ocean floor just as a
giant wave smashed down on her back. Her fingertips hit the sand, then
amazingly seemed to go
through
it, as she arrowed along the magical path
that drew her through. Energy spiraled wildly around her, and she became part
of the sand, the water, the tiny fragments of marine life.

Then she was back on the floor of the ocean, and racing up
to where the sun made the water a glittering halo of green. Seconds later she
burst through the surface, her lungs screaming.

Nausea
… Again, nausea: and worse this time, because
she hadn’t had time to breathe before coming through; her mouth was full of sea
water.

Coughing and choking, she trod water and waited for Hunter
to appear, trying desperately not to throw up.

The minutes crawled by, and he didn’t show. The waves lapped
serenely around her. There was no sign of the tempest that had accompanied
their abrupt descent; no clouds, no angry waves.

Her breathing almost normal again, Eve narrowed her eyes
against the sun and peered at the beach. It
looked
like the same beach
they’d walked across just minutes before, but heaven knew what sort of world
awaited there. She didn’t know what to do. Wait for Hunter? Swim back to the
beach?

She ducked under the water again to look around, but without
swimming goggles it was too hard to see anything. It looked exactly like the
ocean bed did every time she swam in the ocean: sandy.

What awaited her on land, she had no idea. Whatever they had
been running from had caught up with them, she was miserably certain of that.
The question was, had Hunter survived the encounter? Maybe he had stayed behind
to face them, to give her a chance to escape.

All at once she felt overwhelmed. Whatever lay ahead, it was
time to move: the currents here were cold, and even though she could withstand
colder temperatures than most, her teeth were chattering. With one last look
behind her, she started for the beach. Her progress was faster than it had been
going out, because she was able to catch a few waves heading in to the shore.

Sopping wet and cold, and with shoes full of water, she
slogged out of the waves, feeling vulnerable out in the open. Too much of a
target if something came after her. She wouldn’t feel really safe until she was
out of sight.

A few hundred yards distant, she spotted an older-style
cottage set back on a scrubby patch of land.  Sheltering trees were few and far
between, so she approached cautiously, sending out feelers to see if anyone was
there.

It seemed not. That was a relief.

With a quick look around, she tried the front door. As she
expected, it was locked. The back door was secured too; that left the side door
to the dilapidated garage.

Not locked. Thank goodness.

She slipped inside and shut the door behind her, then took
stock. One small, grimy window up high let in some light, enough so that she
could move around without bumping into something. The garage was plainly used
for storage, not to house a car – that was a plus, if someone came home.
Shivering, she looked around for something to wrap around herself, and let out
a quick hiss of relief when she spotted a couple of old jackets hanging up next
to a wetsuit and a surfboard. The one she plucked from the hook smelled musty
and was encrusted with something evil-smelling, but at least it was warm. Traveling
from one world to the next was really taking it out of her; she could normally
shrug off cold temperatures.