ALL MY LOVE (Lovemark #5)

Chapter 1 Dori Earth Year: Late 2020 * Outer Realms Year: 328I’d never been the type to get carsick before. My mom got seasick a lot, though. I remembered riding the ferry once when I was a kid from Canal Street to Algiers Point, where she spent the entire trip hanging her head over the railing, just puking her guts into the Mississippi. My dad had to rub her back while I fed her a continuous stream of saltines until we landed, and then we had to take the bus home. Today, I totally sympathized with how pathetic she’d looked back then because the motion sickness currently kicking my ass was definitely no joke. With a weak groan, I cracked my eyes open and immediately decided that was a bad idea. A very bad idea. The constant jostling back-and-forth rock of the wagon I rode in was unbearable enough. Its bumbling grind and jarring shuffle had flipped the switch in my stomach to gurgle mode the moment I’d climbed aboard and settled myself on the hard, wooden planks next to the other women. Within minutes, I was resting my cheek on the sideboard and panting miserably over the side with one arm limply dangling down, too exhausted to move. But opening my lashes to discover nothing except violent crashing waves under me was quite another matter altogether. I’m not sure what had happened to the harmless gravel road we’d been traveling on, but it wasn’t there now. I found myself staring straight into an abyss of what had to be at least an eight-hundred-foot drop-off over the side of a cliff that plunged right into a brutal, surging sea. And at the very moment I beheld this frightening sight, the wheels of my ride got caught on some uneven ground, causing the entire wagon bed to flounder unsteadily and tip toward the side of the cliff, threatening to spill its contents—which, yes, included me—directly into the waters and jagged rocks below. “What the hell!?” Gasping, I lurched upright and clutched the sideboards for dear life. This was not how my day was supposed to go. Continuing to pant and will my heartbeat back to normal after the wagon settled down again, I clenched my teeth and shook my head because honestly, this was just my luck. I mean, if I was going to be suddenly sucked from the only life I’d ever known and get thrown through some freaky, Bifrost-looking portal thing until I landed in a completely new world, I couldn’t have found myself in some technologically advanced utopia in the tropics, could I? No…not me. I just had to end up in this...this frigid, medieval nightmare. Except I’m not sure medieval was exactly the right description for the Outer Realms, either. Sure, the place had castles and queens with knights in shining armor. I’d even heard rumors of dragons being around at one time, but they had no coffee or chocolate. I’m totally serious; no chocolate at all. In my book, that was about as medieval as it got. The wagon I was riding in looked more like something from the eighteen-hundreds Oregon Trail, minus the pretty, white bonnet sheet that usually covered them. But the people here used toilet paper—today’s version of toilet paper...on rolls with two-ply and everything. They didn’t talk all that medieval-ish either, at least not how medieval-ers from the movies I’d seen talked. Their dialect was kind of a hodgepodge of present-day and old-timey American English with a splash of a British accent thrown in. I know, I know. So weird. Don’t ask. It made no sense to me either, to be honest. The Outer Realms was downright impossible to compartmentalize into one single category. I just knew I wasn’t home. And I was really missing New Orleans right about now. Especially its transportation system. Gah, give me a streetcar or Uber any day over this. “Where did the road go?” I asked, gulping unsteadily as I glanced ahead to see that every carriage, wagon, and horse in the royal caravan I’d decided to stow myself away on was also riding this close to the side of the cliff. These people were freaking crazy, let me tell you. And the most bewildering part was how my question was met with a chorus of laughter. Laughter! Oh, the clueless earthling had a very logical inquiry. Let’s point and snicker like she’s a freak. Ha-ha, so funny. Even the driver glanced back to snort at me, and I hadn’t heard him speak a single word since I’d climbed into his wagon for a free ride. Finally, one of the women paused her amusement long enough to furrow confused brows and demand, “What? Are you serious?” I didn’t see how the question could be taken as a joke, so I blinked at her before squeaking out my alarm and clutching the sideboards when we hit yet another bump. Then I groaned because, wow, this wasn’t helping my nausea at all. “Honestly,” I muttered, cringing out my fear. “Do we have to travel quite this close to the edge of a cliff?” I told myself not to look down—do not look down, Dori—just before I glanced down, looking straight into the angry sea. Oh God, why had I looked down? My stomach roiled. I spun back to the harem girls I’d been riding with for the past few hours and listened to them laugh some more at my expense as I concentrated on breathing through my nose and not vomiting. “Are you sure you’re a High Clifter at all?” another one of them finally asked. Eyes widening in worry, I reached up to gingerly touch the tattoo I had on my temple. It told everyone who looked at me that I hailed from the Kingdom of High Cliff because all High Clifters had them. If you didn’t have one, you weren’t a High Clifter. Unity had thought it’d be a good idea for me to get one too so I wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb. I didn’t exactly want to be discovered as an outside invader in this unfamiliar world and run the risk of being burned at the stake, hanged, or maybe even stoned to death for it, so I’d acquired one of their marks to fit in with the locals. And yay, go tattoo, it always got me a foot in the door until I opened my big mouth and ousted myself as a clueless newcomer with just about everything I said. “Well, I...I…um...” I shrugged helplessly and flailed out a hand. “I’ve never left the capital before.” “But how could you live in Elaina and never even heard of the Cliff Trail?” The Cliff Trail? Casting the inquirer a tight smile, I muttered, “I’ve been incredibly sheltered.” “Apparently,” one of the ladies said in a dry voice, while all of them continued to stare as if I were some kind of alien. Admittedly, they weren’t wrong, you know, since I hailed from a far-off world. But still… Rude. “What’d your employers do, tie you to the bed from birth?” one of them asked, causing the others to cackle with more laughter. “Did you even get to learn your letters and numbers, or did they only teach you how to pleasure a man?” I blinked, unamused. Truly, these people had the oddest sense of humor. Ever since Unity’s husband, Olivander, had greeted me the moment I’d landed in the Outer Realms, he’d kept me pretty much out of the public eye. For my own safety. Apparently, I had a cursed mark on my arm, and if anyone caught sight of it, I’d basically be executed within minutes, since anyone who possessed one of them was a straight-up monster. So there was that. Plus, the fact that I’d only been an inhabitant on this planet for barely over a month now. Put those together, and I looked pretty dim and naive to these people. I mean, I knew I still had a lot to learn about the Outer Realms. Like the fact that there were actual cliffs in the Kingdom of High Cliff. For some oddball reason, that had never occurred to me before, but here they were! Can’t say I would’ve wanted quite this close a view of them, though. “Well, to catch you up to speed, Miss Sheltered,” one of the older women in the wagon told me. From listening to them all talk to each other, I’d learned her name was Naveen, and she was pretty much the boss mom of the group. “This here is called the Cliff Trail, and it’s the fastest way to get from High Cliff to Lowden. Shaves off two to three days’ worth of riding if you go this way.” Spreading out her arm in the direction facing away from the edge of the cliff, she brought my attention to the scraggly weeds that ranged from two to eight feet high and were thick with huge, piercing thorns. “But if you’d rather take your chances out there in that, be my guest, love.” “I heard only half the people who enter the Thorned Forest come out again,” one of the girls whispered ominously. I winced at the ragged frontier we were passing and then swiveled back to peer across the ocean. As my motion sickness flared back to life, I wondered why I hadn’t seen this when I’d first arrived in the Outer Realms because I’m pretty sure Olivander would’ve had to bring me right through this area to get me from the village of Belle, where he’d found me, to the capital of Elaina. But then I remembered that we’d ridden in his carriage with the curtains drawn, and I’d mostly slept through the whole trip because getting blasted from one world to the next really zapped your strength for a few days. Still… I glanced around me, amazed that I’d missed so much that last time I’d been through here. “Isn’t this incredibly dangerous, though?” I asked. “What happens if we meet someone going the other way?” “Then, they get out of our path.” I winced at the thorns someone would have to step into in order to get out of our way. “But—” Before I could voice another question, however, the wheels jostled too perilously close to the edge yet again. I yelped out a curse and scooted in toward the center of the wagon, seeking safety, only to bump into one of the other girls. “Sorry.” Her name was Erinn, I think. She must’ve been one of the kinder souls here because she offered me a forgiving smile and patted my knee before saying, “Ain’t no danger here at all, milady. We got the fence protecting us.” “The...fence?” I asked slowly. Did I even want to know what that was? “Just there,” Naveen explained, motioning toward the cliff. “It’s an invisible barrier that runs along the side of the cliff. It keeps anything of a substantial size from going over unless you ask it to let you through.” Yeah, did she just say you had to ask a fence to let you through? “It’s like this,” another girl joined in. Ora, if I remember her name right, ripped a heavy boot off her foot and heaved it over the side of the wagon, toward the cliff. But instead of tumbling into the waters below, it stopped short, and the air made a strange buzzing sound against it, crackling with light as if the boot had struck a wall of pure electricity. Then the footwear came bouncing back to the wagon and hit one of the other women in the side of the shoulder. “Ouch!” she cried, clutching the injury and scowling at Ora. “Try watching your aim next time, will you, hussy?” As Ora smarted off some non-apology, I kept blinking at the place where the boot had ricocheted off pure air. “It’s a freaking force field,” I said in awe. I mean, how cool was that? Especially in a wannabe medieval-type world. “A what?” Ora asked, turning to frown at me in confusion. “Nothing,” I murmured, finding a small pebble lying in the bottom of the wagon bed. After picking it up, I flicked it at the force-field fence and frowned when it went sailing right over the edge and into the sea with no resistance at all. “Pebbles are too small to be recognized by the fence,” Erinn explained to me. “Oh.” I nodded, still staring at the spectacular stretch of air beside us. “Huh. That’s so cool, though. I wonder how it works.”