Page 74 of Heir of Ashes

Another grunt.

I suppressed a sigh.

Logan poured the steamy, fragrant soup into a mug advertising an investment firm and passed it to me. I was salivating by then, barely able to contain my drool. I attacked the mug, burning my tongue with the first sip. I was too hungry to care. I took hasty, noisy slurps and didn’t care if Logan watched either. He’d seen worse.

“Slow down or you’ll throw it all up,” he cautioned.

Any other time and I was sure he’d be amused. Instead, he looked … concerned. For me. I felt this warm feeling in mychest … or maybe it was just the soup tracking down to an empty stomach. Either way, I didn’t slow down, couldn’t, even if I wanted to.

Logan sat across from me without another word, and sipped coffee from another firm-advertising mug. When I finished the soup, I placed the mug on the table and glanced up. His expression was bland, a little mild. No traces of the tension or violence I still sensed showed on his face. The concern was also gone, or very well hidden.

“More?” I asked, a bit self-conscious.

“In a minute. Tell me what happened,” he demanded. “One minute you were there, the next you were gone.”

“How long?”

“About six hours.”

I stared at him in disbelief. It had been days. I was sure I had been gone for days. “That’s it? You sure?”

He frowned. “Yes, we got to the restaurant somewhere around nine-thirty. Give or take a few minutes. Where did he take you? Where is he?”

“It felt like days in that place.” I shivered once.

“Where? Where did he take you?” he repeated, his grip white-knuckled around his coffee mug.

“They called it the Low Lands.”

His only indication he recognized the name was the tiny jerk of his hand. “They?” he prompted, his voice a strained whisper.

“Dr. Dean and Remo Drammen.”

The names had barely left my lips when he exploded out of the chair, sending it crashing into the sink. With a vicious curse, he punched a hole in the wall with a sickening thud. “Son of a bitch!” He punched again and again and again, his knuckles splitting open. Over and over, as if he was seeing Dr. Dean in front of him. Plaster and blood flew, making a jagged hole inthe stone wall behind. A bloody, jagged hole where the mortar showed.

I snapped out of my daze and shoved up, grabbing his arm to stop him—and almost plowed face-first into the wall with the next punch.

Damn, he wasn’t holding back.

His knuckles bled from around a mess of torn flesh, plaster, and pulverized mortar. The cuts looked deep enough to need stitches, the blood dripping from his hand and pooling on the linoleum floor, the metallic smell thick in the air.

Was that a piece of the wall or bone? Before I could find out, I pulled him away from the wall and picked up his chair.

“I’m alright,” I began, but was cut off by his sarcastic snort. His cheeks were red with rage, and I wondered if he ever blushed. “Look at me. I’m alright. Look at me.” I waited for his stormy gray eyes to meet mine. “I’m here. They are not. They’re dead.” When comprehension didn’t reach his eyes, I squeezed his arm, trying to anchor him back to the present. “They’re both dead. I’m here. I’m alright.”

His eyes flickered—surprise, disbelief, speculation—I couldn’t tell.

“How?” he asked gruffly.

“Sit down and I’ll tell you.”

When I finished telling him, he let the silence stretch for a moment. I left out no gruesome detail, going as far as my interpretation of the creatures’ joyous shrieks. I expected disapproval, disgust, horror, or just a tiny indication that what I had done was extreme, but he gave me nothing. Not even satisfaction, for that matter.

“In the Low Lands,” he began in a moderate tone, “time moves differently. Sometimes it’s faster, sometimes it’s slower, depending on which path the planet is aligned with. In a way, Iguess you can say it’s unpredictable. You sure looked like you’d been dragged through Hell and back again.”

Yeah, the coldest Hell ever. We fell silent after that, eyeing each other. I could practically see the questions rampaging inside his head. I knew what he wanted to know.

I looked down at my hands, unable to keep hold of his sharp, burning stare, trying to avoid the question I knew was coming. When I looked back up, his jaws were clenched and the fury wasn’t so well disguised. His hands clutched the cold coffee mug so tightly that blood from his knuckles seeped faster, pooling on the table.

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