“Looks like it’s trying to change that,” Astar noted warily.
“It’s mostly curious,” Stella replied, assessing the dragon’s mental state. “Magical creature, sensing the rift and all. But the dragon coming through is not the problem.”
“No, the problem is none of our people can come through if there’s a giant fucking dragon in the way,” Astar grated out, his worry making him unusually harsh.
Gen slunk forward and slapped the naris with outstretched claws. The dragon snorted, fire spurting out to singe Gen’s gray-striped fur. She yelped and rolled in the snow. The snout withdrew briefly, replaced by an enormous eye. Astar let out a war cry and flung himself at it, sword swinging in a broad arc. Before Stella could utter a warning, the eye disappeared, and Astar’s momentum carried him right through the portal.
Stella spat out a curse that was also part plea to Moranu to preserve her foolishly heroic twin’s hide. Hopefully he hadn’t emerged midair and was now splatted on some forest floor, being devoured by tentacle monsters. Lena regarded her soberly. “That makes officially more of us in the alter-realm than in our home realm.”
“Is that important?” Gen asked, briefly back in human form.
“I don’t know,” Lena replied. “Simply a data point. Balance can be important in my magic, anyway.”
“Are you all right?” Stella asked Gen.
“I am, now that I shifted to heal. Should I go after Astar?”
“No,” Stella and Lena said as one.
“Astar will be lucky if he’s not neck-deep in leaf detritus battling tentacles right now,” Lena said with a grimace, echoing Stella’s thoughts.
“And we need you here to defend us,” Stella added. “Just in case worse comes through or something strains our hold on the portal. So no matter what, please stay with us.” Internally, she cursed Astar’s bravery—and shortsightedness. The rift quivered. “Something else is coming.”
It was their old friends the monkey-lizards. A pack of them came bounding through the portal, chittering angrily. Gen, back in saber-cat form, attacked in earnest, batting them with her head-sized paws, sending some back through the gateway in a surreal version of a child’s game. Others she simply crunched in her fanged jaws and left limp.
One monkey-lizard leapt at Stella, and she barely remembered in time that she didn’t need her hands to hold the gate open. She wouldn’t call it reflex, but she did draw her daggers—just not before the vicious little thing latched onto her leg with four limbs and a prehensile tail. And sunk its sharp lizard teeth into her thigh.
“Ouch,” she screeched, and Gen whirled to look. “I can handle it,” Stella told her through gritted teeth. Jak would say it served her right for being slow and unprepared, and he’d be correct. Lena had no problems using her daggers to fend off the monkey-lizards, despite her greater need to concentrate on the unfamiliar sorcery. She was creating a nicely impenetrable perimeter with her blades—using techniques Stella recognized from what Jak had tried to teach her.
“Ow, Moranu take you!” she screeched as the monkey-lizard gnawed determinedly at her thigh, and she poked it with the tip of the blade. Ineffectively, as it only bit down harder. Go for the eyes and ears. It had big liquid eyes and upright ears. It would be cute, if it wasn’t chewing on her. She pointed the dagger at its eye… And couldn’t do it. In her head, Jak gave her a disgusted look and shook his head. If only she’d kept it off her in the first place. As it was, the small creature’s fear and defensive fury—so immediate and overwhelming with its teeth sunk in her flesh—had her feeling sorry for it.
So tempting to shift to jaguar form, shed her attacker’s grip, and give it a few swats. The jaguar didn’t much scruple about hurting anything, so that made fighting in that form easier. But she’d lose her grip on the portal if she shifted, and Lena couldn’t hold it open on her own.
Bracing herself, she tried a double poke with the dagger tips, like trying to pry off a biting burr—and with no effect. Then a white paw swatted the thing away, Gen’s mighty jaws biting down with a crunch that finished it.
Gen took human form again, giving Stella a perplexed and disgusted look very like the one Stella had pictured on Jak’s face. “I know you said you could handle it, but…”
“Thank you,” Stella said, very sincerely. Glancing around, she saw that all the monkey-lizards were dead and no more were coming through the portal. Lena was cleaning her blades, also giving Stella the side eye. “Please don’t tell Jak,” Stella begged them both.
Gen and Lena exchanged glances. “We’ll discuss a price for that,” Gen informed Stella loftily.
“He’s going to notice the bloody rip in your leathers regardless,” Lena pointed out, “even after you heal yourself shifting.”
Moranu take it, Lena was right. “Something’s coming through,” Stella warned them.
And Astar came careening through the portal, skidding as he hit the snow. He looked around wildly, as if unconvinced of his safe arrival, then blew out a huff of relief. A moment later, a huge black wolf followed him.
“Rhyian,” Lena breathed, straightening as if a crushing weight had dropped from her shoulders.
The wolf shook his fur vigorously, then transformed into the man. Rhy shuddered and stretched, much as the wolf had done, his glossy black hair shivering into place, his deep-blue eyes going immediately to Lena. A moment of wordless communication hummed between them. Their longing for each other, the deep and turbulent emotions suffocating under layers of old anger and careless duplicity, throbbed so thick in the air that Stella thought she might choke on it.
Tearing his gaze away from Lena, Rhy took in their surroundings, noting the bloody carcasses of the monkey-lizards scattered across the snow, raising a brow at Gen’s saber cat, who came purring to rub her cheek against his leg. He turned to Astar and held out a hand. “I am beyond grateful you came for me. You didn’t have to, and—”
“Shut up, cousin,” Astar growled. Ignoring Rhy’s hand, he seized their cousin in a bear hug, and they thumped each other on the back with brusque enthusiasm, the emotions beneath considerably softer. When they parted, both men had to blink moisture from their eyes. “Besides,” Astar said, “Stella and Lena are the ones doing the hard work of holding the gateway open. And Jak and Zephyr are the ones searching for you in the alter-realm. Didn’t you see them?”
“No.” Rhy looked around, as if the pair might suddenly materialize. “They came after me?”
“Before I did,” Astar told him, then glanced at Stella. She had no answer for him, and a pall settled over the group like the falling snow from the gathering clouds.
“I saw mossbacks, almost certainly from the inn,” Rhy said, thinking it through. “But they were afraid of me and ran away. I stayed close to where that tentacle monster yanked me through the rift, just in case. In that empty expanse of nothing, I was afraid I’d never find the spot again.”
Lena frowned. “Expanse of nothing—then you weren’t in my forest?”
“I wish,” Rhy replied fervently and with a wolfish grin. “At least then I could’ve eaten tentacles. I’ve had nothing to eat or drink since…” He glanced at the gray daylight sky. “Last night?”