Page 145 of Threadbound

Bran had placed both sweater and coat on the bed, and now he stripped off even the long-sleeved shirt he’d been wearing, leaving him shivering slightly and bare-chested.

Jamie frowned. This couldn’t be good for him.

Another glance his way told Jamie that Bran didn’t want to hear it. So Jamie kept his fretting to himself, trying unsuccessfully to convince himself that once they got there, once they cured Cairn and the Holly King, that everything would work out.

Ignoring the extremely large war elephant in the room.

Bran let out a long, deep breath, his hands held out in front of him, and a strange, eerie kind of dark glow—it was hard to describe, how a glow could be dark—seeming to shimmer the air around his extended palms. His lips were pressed tightly together, a furrow on his brow as he concentrated, the dark glimmer expanding, extending, becoming oddly translucent in a way that made the shapes Jamie could see through it seem wrong and twisted, even though he could clearly make out the desk and the small television through the distortion.

And it kept growing in size.

Sweat broke out on Bran’s skin, his forehead and temples, moisture making the pale skin of his body shine. Jamie wondered if this magic was harder in human form, or if shifting even to his true form would sap his strength rather than aid withthe spell. The look of concentration on Bran’s features made him not ask.

When Bran’s hands began to shake, Jamie almost stepped forward, but then Mad Ally put his hands on Bran’s shoulders, his own, big palms glimmering with a reddish light that seemed to seep into Bran’s skin. It didn’t look healthy, but Bran drew in a deep breath, his hands steadying and some of the lines of strain leaving his expression.

The distortion in the air expanded, and kept expanding until it was the size of a large mirror—or a doorway. Which is what it was, Jamie supposed.

“Go,” Bran rasped, his voice strained. “Jamie first.”

Jamie grabbed Bran’s clothes and their bags and stepped forward, hesitating.

“Go,” Bran repeated.

Jamie went.

Chapter

Forty-Eight

While Rob and Trixie were gaping at the impossible night moor around them—filled with the flickering lights of flora and fauna and an almost-full moon—Jamie caught Bran as he stepped through the portal and lost consciousness, the distorted shimmer of the doorway blinking out behind him.

“Good catch, lad,” Mad Ally said softly. “Dinna realize how wrecked he’d be.”

The wulver was in fae form now, neither human man nor wolf, but not like a movie werewolf, either. He was dressed in simple fae-style clothes, suede trousers, the collar of a linen-like shirt visible under a camel-colored coat that hung down to his calves, and brown leather boots and gloves, so Jamie couldn’t tell how furry—or not—he was under his clothes. But what Jamie could see of his features didn’t look like the Wolfman masks he’d seen in Halloween stores—blond hair swept back in an almost-mane from Mad Ally’s face, long, pointed ears angled back from the same place where human ears went, he had a smooth forehead, cheeks, and jaw, lips that were slightly brownish, butnot hairy, and wide-set blue eyes and a wide-human-looking nose that was several shades darker than the rest of him. When he spoke, his teeth were sharp and definitelynothuman-looking.

Even in this form, Jamie still saw himself in the fae’s features—it was just more unsettling, so Jamie decided not to think about it. Instead, he awkwardly re-dressed and then hefted Bran’s form, lifting him like a sleeping child, although the fae was neither, limp against Jamie’s chest.

“You need help?” Rob asked, noticing.

“Can you take our stuff?” Jamie asked him, and Rob nodded, reaching over and heaving Jamie’s backpack and Bran’s satchels onto his shoulders. Trixie came and took one of the satchels from him.

“Jamie, this is?—”

“Impossible?” he half-grunted.

“Amazing,” she breathed, the air fogging in front of her with her breath.

“And deadly,” Mad Ally put in. “If ye dinna know where yer going.”

Rob turned a blank grey stare on the broad-shouldered wulver. “Deadly.”

“Aye,” Mad Ally replied, his face a blank. “Most things in Elfhame would just as soon eat ye as look at ye.”

Trixie’s eyes were wide, and Jamie saw her swallow.

“You’re shitting me,” Rob challenged, his dark skin a little ashy.

“He’s not,” Jamie said shortly, worry and the knowledge that his arms were going to get tired quickly making him brusque. “Don’t touch anything, don’t eat anything, don’t step off the path unless Mad Ally tells you to. Got it?”

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