Page 74 of Spelunking Through Hell

The people we’d evacuated with us had set up a campsite, and they mingled with Ithacan satyrs, perfectly at ease in this new place. Children ran by, shrieking with laughter. It was almost like being back at the carnival if the carnival had been mostly made up of cryptids. Although—out here—everyone was a cryptid. Earth’s science hadn’t verified the existence of anyone here except for me, Thomas, and Sally, and Earth’s science said Thomas and I were both much older than we actually were.

Sally was the first to spot me. She was standing near a firepit talking to several of the guards, leaning on her still-present polearm, when her eyes went wide.

“Boss! Boss!” she yelled, without taking her eyes off of me. “She’s awake!”

She didn’t move, just stayed where she was and pointed as Thomas emerged from another tent that had been constructed nearby. He turned to follow her finger, then broke into a run, heading directly for me. I braced for impact.

It didn’t come. He slowed when he was still several feet away, stopping when he was just barely within arm’s reach, and stared at me, swallowing hard enough that I automatically followed the movement of his throat. I blinked. The cameo tattoo was gone, meaning its effect had been canceled or discharged. He was aging again. We both were.

That was nice. The way he was looking at me wasn’t, particularly. Maybe there was something wrong with me that I hadn’t seen yet. “I got something on my face?” I asked, trying to sound light and disarming. I didn’t do a very good job of it. If anything, I sounded scared out of my wits, which wasn’t far from the truth. Maybe he’d been so sure that I was going to die that he was disappointed that I hadn’t. Maybe—

He lurched abruptly forward and wrapped his arms around me before I could finish the thought, jerking me against him and kissing me deeply. I stiffened for a moment, startled, then relaxed and kissed him back. The embrace lasted for what felt like several minutes before Sally said, from closer than I necessarily liked, “Okay, she’s moving under her own power. Do you have to try to suck her face off when the rest of us are watching? Some of us don’t have any good options for agirlfriend unless we want to get with one of the goat ladies, and we’d rather you got a room.”

Thomas broke off enough to turn and glare at her, not letting go of me. I started laughing. Sally smirked.

“Thought that might make you let go enough for her to tell us what’s up,” she said. “Helen wants us to get moving by dark. The locals are apparently getting a little grumpy about us being out here, and their leadership doesn’t understand enough dimensional theory to get why this is technically a rescue mission for their whole world.”

“I’m ready to go when the rest of you are,” I said. “I feel fine.”

Thomas glanced at me, anxiety in his eyes. “Truly?”

“Okay, that’s enough of that.” I planted my hands on his chest and pushed myself free of his embrace. “You don’t get to keep giving me funny looks and asking if I’m okay without telling me what you think is wrong. I know I had a heart attack, I know I stopped breathing, and I know Sally broke several of my ribs during CPR. I also know that Phoebe patched all those things upandfixed the damage from the stroke I apparently also had. She says I shouldn’t be subjected to any more magical healing for a while, which is fine, since you can’t do it, I can’t do it, and we’re going the fuck home as soon as we finish getting all these people back where they belong. I’m not really seeing what the problem is.”

Thomas looked down. I raised my eyebrows.

“Not making this any easier on yourself by making me wait for answers,” I said. “Actually making it harder.”

“Okay, if Mommy and Daddy are going to be fighting, I’m going to be elsewhere,” said Sally. “Call me if you decide to murder each other. I want to watch.”

“She’s much less deferential now that she doesn’t have to depend on me for her existence,” said Thomas. He didn’t sound sorry about that.

“Yeah, I can really see that, with how deferentially she was always speaking to you before,” I said. “Now tell me what the hell is going on, and why you can kiss me but not look at me.”

“Magic can be very taxing,” he said, slowly. “It costs the caster in some way, generally.”

“I know. It’s why I was passed out from low blood sugar when Sally found me. Half my pack is effectively self-rescue medications for after I’ve crashed my system too far out of whack.”

“And magic would do something similar if you were built to channel it.” He took my hand and began leading me toward a collapsiblebench someone had set up nearby. Like most Ithacan designs, it had an air of the classical Greek about it, while also being made of canvas and lightweight metal. I’ve never been entirely clear on their overall tech level. It seems to be rustic but post-Industrial Revolution, whatever form it took in their world. “Magic, cast too far beyond the caster’s capability, or channeling too much power, can do permanent damage.”

“This is a lot of talking that doesn’t involve giving me a simple answer to the simple question I asked you,” I said, as we sat. “What’swrong?”

“The spell was channeled through you, as I removed the pneuma. The price that had to be paid... I didn’t pay it.”

“So what, did my face melt off or something?”

“No. You’ve aged. Not too much!” he added quickly, apparently anticipating shouting or something of the like. “No more than a decade by my estimation.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. “Just means no one’s going to look at us funny when we get home. I mean, you’re clearly in your early thirties. It would have been weird.”

He blinked slowly. “You’re not upset?”

“Sweetheart, I’m well into myeighties. Physically nineteen or physically twenty-nine, I’m in incredible shape for my age, and we’re both alive, which is more than we expected yesterday, or whatever day it was we went to your throne room to do something massively stupid. We get to go home. After we find safe places for all these people, we get to go home, together.”

“With Sally.”

“With Sally, yes. I already accepted the fact that you went and picked up a kid while I wasn’t looking. Given that her best friend is apparently running around with our granddaughter and her parents probably think she’s dead by now, I think we have to keep her. That’s fine. Kevin’s house has a lot of rooms, and so does our place back in Buckley.”

Thomas laughed, and kept laughing as he leaned over, draped his arms around my shoulders, and rested his forehead against my own. I smiled and leaned into him.

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