Page 34 of Spelunking Through Hell

His jaw was still sharp, his cheekbones so pronounced that they looked as if they could be used to slice cheese, and his eyes were still very, very blue. Not Johrlac blue, but still startlingly bright for a human man. The tattoos I could see were familiar ones, all save for the cameo now tattooed in the hollow of his throat, higher than any of the others around it. Since unlike me, he did his own tattooing, the position of the image was impressive. I just couldn’t imagine what magical benefit the profile of a human man was supposed to provide.

I couldn’t imagine much in that moment. Even as he stared at me and I stared back, my thoughts were skipping like a scratched record, dancing around admitting who he was, even as I knew exactly who he was; I couldn’t bring myself to think his name, despite the fact that his name had been the only one occupying my thoughts for so long that it had drowned out almost everything else, the loss of him transforming love into an obsession. I had become my own cautionary tale in the search for just one man, and now that I had found him, I couldn’t even think his name.

He was holding one of my mother’s revolvers in his long-fingered hands; he’d been studying it before I managed to catch his attention by being an unexpected person in his space. His hands tightened around the gun as he stared at me, and I stared back, and neither of us moved. I wasn’t absolutely sure that I was even breathing. If his hands hadn’t moved, I wouldn’t have been sure he hadn’t passed out without falling down. It’s a neat trick, and one that I’ve seen people accomplish before, if not very often.

Finally, he took one hand off the gun, reached up, and adjusted his glasses, a gesture so familiar that it felt almost like he had punched me in the gut.

“You made it farther than I expected,” he said, and his voice, like everything else, was the same, British accent so different from the one I’d grown up with. He and my grandparents were all former Covenant, but they’d been from the west, and he was originally from London. The difference was subtle if you weren’t accustomed to hearing both voices on a regular basis, but growing up the way I had, it was as noticeable as the difference between Massachusetts and Maine. “How many of my people did you kill?”

“N-none,” I managed. This wasn’t the conversation I’d imagined us having on our reunion. That conversation had sometimes been a cliché out of a romance novel, all tears and inexplicable string quartets, and sometimes it had been a string of shouted recriminations, me blaming him for leaving me the way he did, him blaming me for getting hurt and causing him to make a crossroads bargain in the first place. It had never been a calm accusation of murder.

He raised his eyebrows, expression politely disbelieving.

“I knocked a few of them down, and when one of them threw a spear at me, I threw it back and hit him in the shoulder, but that’s all,” I said. “Considering I passed out in a barren wasteland and woke up stripped of my clothing and weapons in something that pretty much looked like a harem, I don’t think that was an unreasonably violent reaction. I mean,really, Thomas—what else would you expect me to do?”

“Impressive,” he said, then smiled in a way that didn’t reach his eyes, looking oddly relieved. “You even sound like her.” He kept smiling as he raised my mother’s gun and aimed it levelly at my chest. His hand didn’t shake at all. That was almost worse than him pointing a weapon at me. The fact that he did it, and he didn’t flinch.

“I admit, when they described you to me, I had a moment’s hesitation, even though I knew better. I know better. People change, you see, and while my wife may not have been magically gifted, she knew people who were. If she’d been fast and foolish and made unwise bargains, she could have held herself together long enough to reach me. I desperately want to believe that you might actually be real, and not another damned imposter—which is why I can’t do it. So, as I’m done hesitating, I suppose now is when I ask you: who sent you here to kill me, and how long ago did you kill my wife?”

Silence fell over the room like a hammer, so heavy and all-consuming that even if the acoustics hadn’t been so well-designed, I wouldn’t have been able to hear anything beyond the frantic pounding of my heart. I swallowed, bile and bright, metallic adrenaline in my throat, and tried to keep on breathing. Thomas wasalive. I was right, I’dbeenright all along, and he’d been out here for me to find... and he thought I was an imposter who had killed his wife to take her place. This wasn’t the worst scenario I could have imagined. This wasn’t a scenario I had ever imagined.

I stared at him, trying to figure out how I was supposed to react, and horrified confusion curdled in my chest, recovering the rage that had carried me here. I swung my voulge back into position, aiming it at him, like a polearm could ever win against a six-shooter, and snarled, “No one sent me here butme, and I wasn’t planning to kill you—not if you turned out to beyou, anyway. I just wanted to bring you home. And I’m not gonna lie. I’m not a big fan of this Autarch guy you’ve turned into.”

“You are a poor imitation of the woman I lost,” he said, voice imperious and cold. “Whoever trained you should have primed you better for success, not just thought I’d be turned by blonde hair and a pretty face. You don’t evenlooklike her.”

“Are you fuckingserious?” My temper has never been great at the best of times, and even if Thomas didn’t believe I was who I appeared to be, he knew how to press my buttons. “I’ve been killing myself crossing dimensions looking for you, and now you point my mother’sgunat me?! It’s like youwantme to kick your ass!”

I ran straight at him, gambling on the idea that he thought I was a paid assassin, someone who wouldn’t be interested in risking their own life by putting word to action so quickly, and that that might be enough to throw off his aim. I can’t dodge bullets. There’s trained to stay alive and then there’s superhuman, and I don’t cross that line. But I know how Thomas tends to aim, and he always pulls a little to the right; not enough to miss what he’s aiming for, but enough to result in imperfect bullseyes. I used to tease him about it, and he’d counter by pointing out that my lousy left hook was the reason I’ll never be a boxer. Everyone has their weaknesses. Train with someone for long enough, and they’ll turn familiar.

My instincts proved correct, and his shot missed me. Seeing him shoot my mother’s gun just made me angrier, though. How could he think I wasn’t me when he was holding my mother’s gun? “You better have both of those,” I snapped.

I was close enough at this point to throw my voulge. Unfortunately, my aim is very, very good, and I never learned how to miss to make myself seem more helpless. Competency can be a curse when it’s not optional, and impaling my husband immediately after finding him didn’t seem like agreatplan, even if hewasshooting at me. I can be pretty annoying sometimes.

His mouth thinned, lips forming a grim line, and I knew he wasn’t going to miss a second time. Planting the end of the voulge against the floor, I jumped, using it as a pole vault.

My granddaughter, Verity, uses poles for dance and exercise equipment, and she’s taught me a few tricks I would never have thought of on my own. Using them as a launching point is on the list. My feet hit him in the chest, knocking him back several feet. That was good. The blow didn’t knock him down, which was less good, and it didn’t cause him to lose his grip on the gun, which was worse. I wanted him unarmed if at all possible.

Raising my fists, I fell into a fighting pose, all too aware that as soon as he brought the gun back up, I’d be in real trouble. There would be no evasion at this range, and all teasing aside, he wasn’t going to miss when I was in closing range. “Get your hands off my mother’s revolver,” I snarled, and went for a roundhouse kick.

“She wasn’tyourmother,” he countered, blocking the blow with his arm, only to wince and take a step back. I kick hard.

“Frances Healy was so my mother.” I paused for half a beat, considering. I knew closing with him would put me at a disadvantage, but as long as he still had the gun, getting close enough to disarm him was my best bet. I stopped, running the math in my head, and smiled. “Did you bother to reload my guns after you stole them from me?”

“I wasn’t expecting I’d have to use them!”

His eyes narrowed as he pointed the gun at me and pulled the trigger again. At this range, he couldn’t possibly miss.

The hammer clicked down on an empty chamber. If I hadn’t been so understandably furious with him, the look of surprise on his face would have been a beautiful thing. As it was, I beamed and moved closer. “Hi,” I said brightly. “I shot five people on my way to reaching you, you bastard.”

Then I punched him in the face.

The blow snapped his head back. He stumbled, losing his grip on the gun. I glared at him as it clattered to the floor. It had taken harder hits while in my hands, but it wasmine, not his, and he didn’t just get to throw important things aside because he didn’t think they mattered anymore.

Maybe I was projecting a little. I didn’t care.

“That hurt,” he said, and raised his hand, a ball of fire forming above his palm. It was weak and wavering, barely substantial enough to qualify for the name “fireball.” He flung it at me anyway. I raised my arm to block it, taking the hit just below the wrist. It stung, but didn’t really burn, and dissipated quickly enough that it might as well have been nothing.

“Magic not working right?” I taunted. “I hear that happens to men your age.”

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