Stone Cold by Rory Ni Coileain

Author:Rory Ni Coileain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books
Published: 2017-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

Terry’s stomach offered the cautious opinion that it might actually be safe to look up. He gave it the space of a few ragged breaths, just in case, then lifted his forearms off the back of his head and slowly sat back on his heels.

The rocking in three dimensions had indeed stopped. If it had ever been happening to begin with. And reality had stopped trying to turn itself inside out.

Though what it had decided to do instead was a mystery. Standing in a little island of what passed for normalcy, except for the silver-blue light playing around his feet, he was surrounded by… well. If he were in a YouTube video, he’d say someone had applied a blur effect to everything outside the circle of light he’d stepped into. And somehow put up a wall between him and the blur. He wasn’t quite sure why he thought there was a wall, but he was as sure as he could be.

Looking at the blur—at anything outside the circle of light centered on the flooring sample he stood on—made Terry feel dizzy. Plain old dizzy, thank God, not what he’d just been through, but it still wasn’t a feeling he was used to, not after years of pirouettes and grands jetés, and it was definitely one he didn’t like. I’m not going to look any more. There’s no point.

Until he found himself looking again, trying to make sense of the weird chaotic blur all around him, where a few minutes ago there had been the shell of his studio. And a gorgeous Fae.

Fae. No doubting that now. Unless he wanted to assume he, himself, had suddenly had a psychotic break, and was imagining all the whirling insanity outside the calm eye in which he sat.

He had to get out, though. Which meant he was going to have to try to penetrate the not-quite-there barrier between his new little island of almost-normal and whatever was still out there. Slowly, carefully, he got to his feet, bracing himself, his feet shoulders’-width apart, his knees slightly bent.

Almost exactly the way Maelduin had been standing on the subway. As if he expected the whole world to go insane, around and under him.

Nothing went any crazier than it had been a few seconds ago, though, so it was time for the next step. Terry made himself look, one more time, trying to figure out where to make his attempt; he knew there was a light clipped to a drywall stud not far from the flooring sample, but every time he thought one spot of the wavering translucence was brighter than another, the brightness moved. Same for the faint shadows that might be Maelduin—except that no matter how those moved around, there always seemed to be two of them.

What. The. Fuck. Terry reached out a hand.

Something pushed it back. Hard. And it was numb, dead like a novocained jaw at the dentist.

He took a couple of quick steps back from the barrier. Too far. His back hit something, and the something hit back.

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