I got contacts. Soon as we figure out where we are, I’ll get us outta here, okay?”
I nodded. I was grateful for Ray’s former occupation, which had involved a fair amount of smuggling into the fey lands. If I had to be stuck here with anyone, I was glad it was him.
He smiled as if he’d heard that, which perhaps he had. “Look, I’m gonna go get a fish and some firewood. You want anything else?”
I frowned. “Shouldn’t we move on before making camp? Put some distance between us and the fey?”
Ray shook his head. “It’s gonna be dark before long. That’s rule number four: never travel in Faerie at night. It’s dangerous enough in the daytime.”
I absorbed that, and my stomach growled, as if placing an order. “Another fish, then?”
“Another fish it is.” He arched an eyebrow. “Don’t wander off.”
I gazed after him, wondering if that had been a joke.
Ray sloshed back into the stream, but the area nearby was rocky and the water turbulent. He eventually ventured further away, where a bend in the river and some trees mostly hid him from sight. I would have been more concerned about that, but he was a master vampire. He could take care of himself as well as hear me if I called out.
And I could hear him cursing in between dives, which made me smile.
After a while, I started looking through the waterlogged blanket of items that I had taken out of the capsule. I opened up the soggy knots and spread the fabric out to dry. I put the contents on the other side of me and took stock.
There were the four blood bags, which had surprisingly remained intact. There was the mirror, which had not, but I had the flint and striker so that did not matter. There was a small bundle of kindling, which seemed odd with how heavily forested this area was—until I remembered Ray’s comment about the trees.
I gazed at the ones across the river, but they were so thick that I could not tell if anyone, or anything, gazed back. They had huge, old, wizened trunks, like the last stretch of woodland I’d seen, most of them topped by massive canopies of dark green leaves. There was a scattering of yellow tops among the group as well, one that was violently red, and another that was vividly purple.
The more colorful ones explained the varicolored leaves that floated gently downstream, and had collected near the waterline. They were all different sizes and shapes, some spotted and speckled with age, others still bright and vibrant. I couldn’t name all of the species, but some were oak and a few looked like maple.
If there was anything odd about the trees, other than their size, I couldn’t tell. Although occasionally one would shiver slightly as if in a breeze, while the surrounding forest stayed still. I slowly laid the sticks out to dry, still watching them, and wondered if it would be taken as an offense if we actually built a fire.
And then wondered at finding myself in a place where that was a reasonable question to have.
I went back to exploring our cache.
There was the small bag of emergency food, which was nuts and some odd, orange colored, dried fruit. There was the canteen-like container of something that was definitely not water, as I had first assumed. I sniffed it, and then tried a minute drop on the end of my tongue.
Fey wine.
And it was fresh. Like everything else in the cache, it had been put there relatively recently. As if someone else had discovered the capsule and did their best to hide it, but also used it on occasion, for what I did not know.
But I did not think that it had been the Svarestri, who had seemed as surprised by it as we were.
I put the canteen aside.
There was also the knife that I had managed to hang onto somehow, although Ray had taken it “fishing.” And a few strips of the first blanket, which he had ripped up for bandages. And that was all. That was everything we had to help us survive in the hostile environment of an alien world.
Fifty-fifty, I thought.
I put the blanket aside and started massaging my legs, trying to get them working again, but had to stop when the pressure opened one of the wounds. I frowned at myself—I should have expected that—and rebandaged it with some more blanket strips. The wounds were deep, as if the fey