Chapter 3

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The heat was enormous, a drenching, dripping wall of steaming water. It was a shock, even after the jolt of pain, the blast of blinding light. Even so, his bones felt frozen under his skin as he stared out at the tangle of towering green.

New York was gone, it seemed. And so was he.

Not a hangover, he thought, but some sort of psychotic event brought on, no doubt, by too much liquor and too many loose women.

As he watched, dumbfounded, a snake with a body as thick as his thigh slithered off into the high, damp grass.

"We can stay only a short time," Kadra told him, and her voice was dim, tinny, light-years away. "This is the west jungle of A'Dair, near the coast of the Great Sea. This is my world, which exists beyond yours. And the knowledge says, in balance with it."

"I've been drugged."

"This is not so." Annoyed now, she clamped her hands over his arms. "You can see, you can hear and feel. My world is as real as yours, and as much in peril."

"Alternate universe." The words felt foolish on his tongue. "That's pure science fiction."

"Is your world so perfect, so important, that you believe it stands alone in the vastness of time and space? Harper Doyle, can you have lived and still believe you are alone? My heart." She pressed his hand to her breast. "It beats as yours. I am, as you are."

How could he dismiss what he saw with his own eyes. What he felt, touched—and somehow knew. Just, he thought, as he had somehow known her the instant their eyes had met. "Why?"

She nearly smiled. "Why not?"

"I recognized you," he managed. "I pushed that aside, clicked back into what made sense so I could deny it. But I recognized you, somehow, the minute I saw you."

"Yes." She kept her hand on his a moment longer. It felt right there, like a link. "It was the same for me. This is not something I understand, but only feel. I do not know the meaning."

And in some secret chamber of her warrior's heart, she feared the meaning.

"I'm standing here sweating in a jungle in some Twilight Zone, and it doesn't feel half as strange as it should. It doesn't feel half as strange as what's going on inside me, about you."

"You begin to believe."

"I'm beginning to something. I'm going to need a little time to process all the—"

She whirled, the sword streaking into her hand like a lightning bolt. A creature, no more than three feet high, with snapping teeth in both its mouths, shot out of the brush and leaped for Harper's throat.

Despite the shock of it, his instincts were quick. His hand whipped down for his gun. It hadn't cleared the waistband of his jeans before Kadra's sword sliced through both heads with one massive stroke. There was a fountaining gush of vile green liquid that stank like sulfur.