the crystalline plain. There were broad, ugly facial features on the rock, primitive and simple.
“Here,” I said, and my voice echoed weirdly, though there was seemingly nothing from which it could echo.
I opened another Way, and we stepped from the plain of light and into chilly mist and thin mountain air. A cold wind pushed at us. We stood in an ancient stone courtyard of some kind. Walls stood around us, broken in many places, and there was no roof overhead.
Murphy stared up at the sky, where stars were very faintly visible through the mist, and shook her head. “Where now?”
“Machu Picchu,” I said. “Anyone bring water?”
“I did,” Murphy said, at the same time as Martin, Sanya, Molly, and Thomas.
“Well,” Thomas said, while I felt stupid. “I’m not sharing.”
Sanya snorted and tossed me his canteen. I sneered at Thomas and drank, then tossed it back. Martin passed Susan his canteen, then took it back when she was finished. I started trudging. It isn’t far from one side of Machu Picchu to the other, but the walk is all uphill, and that means a hell of a lot more in the Andes than it does in Chicago.
“All right,” I said, stopping beside a large mound built of many rising tiers that, if you squinted up your eyes enough, looked a lot like a ziggurat-style pyramid. Or maybe an absurdly large and complicated wedding cake. “When I open the next Way, we’ll be underwater. We have to swim ten feet, in the dark. Then I open the next Way and we’re in Mexico.” I was doubly cursing the time we’d lost in the Erlking’s realm. “Did anyone bring any climbing rope?”
Sanya, Murphy, Martin—Look, you get the picture. There were a lot of people standing around who were more prepared than me. They didn’t have super-duper faerie godmother presents, but they had brains, and it was a sobering reminder to me of which was more important.
We got finished running a line from the front of the group to the back (except for my godmother, who sniffed disdainfully at the notion of being tied to a bunch of mortals), and I took several deep breaths and opened the next Way.
Mom’s notes on this Waypoint hadn’t mentioned that the water was cold. And I don’t mean cold like your roommate used most of the hot water. I mean cold like I suddenly had to wonder if I was going to trip over a seal or a penguin or a narwhal or something.
The cold hit me like a sledgehammer, and it was suddenly all I could do just to keep from shrieking in surprise and discomfort—and, some part of my brain marveled, I was the freaking Winter Knight.
Though my limbs screamed their desire to contract around my chest and my heart, I fought them and made them paddle. One stroke. Two. Three. Four. Fi—Ow. My nose hit a shelf of rock. I found my will and exhaled, speaking the word Aparturum through a cloud of blobby bubbles that rolled up over my cheeks and eyelashes. I tore open the next Way a little desperately—and water rushed out through it as if thrilled to escape.
I crashed into the Yucatán jungle on a tide of ectoplasmic slime, and the line we’d strung dragged everyone else through in a rush. Poor Sanya, the last in line, was pulled from his feet, hauled hard through the icy water as if he’d been flushed down a Jotun’s toilet, and then crashed down amidst the slimed forest. Peru to Mexico in three and a half seconds.
I fumbled back to the Way to close it and stopped the tide of ectoplasm from coming through, but not before the vegetation for ten feet in every direction had been smashed flat by the flood of slime, and every jungle creature for fifty or sixty yards started raising holy hell on the what-the-fuck-was-that party line. Murphy had her gun out, and Molly had a wand in each hand, gripped with white knuckles.
Martin let out a sudden, coughing bellow that sounded like it must have torn something in his chest—and it was loud, too. And the jungle around us abruptly went silent.
I blinked and looked at Martin. So did everyone else.
“Jaguar,” he said in a calm, quiet voice. “They’re extinct here, but the animals don’t know that.”
“Oooh,” said my godmother, a touch of a child’s glee in her voice. “I like that.”
It took us a minute to get everyone sorted out. Mouse looked like a scrawny shadow