Because the tough old dragon hide seemed impervious to fire, including the magical variety. Even the great, leathery wings, which were the thinnest and thereby most vulnerable part of the beast, sloughed off the flames like water from a tarp. Huge, burning blue droplets cascaded backward and tumbled off the slick surface, almost hitting me in a few cases, despite my position dangling from a back paw. But most sailed over my head, leaving a trail of blue flame streaming out behind us that I stared back at in confusion.

Not at the visual, although it was impressive enough, but at the thought that we were supposed to be parked in the middle of a ley line. We had been since we passed through the portcullis, taking us who knew how far away from the outer world. So how were we flying off into the sky? How had we gotten back out again? Or had we, because a quick attempt to shift did nothing, my power being as locked away from me as ever.

I stared around at the landscape, seen through the rain of strange, blue fire, and felt my stomach tilt and whirl even more than it had when I’d first been snatched away. Because this looked like Earth, smelled like Earth, felt like Earth, except for the great, fiery dragon flapping through the sky above me. But it couldn’t be Earth, or I’d have been able to shift out of this already.

What if that portcullis hadn’t been a doorway to a stationary bubble, as I’d initially thought? What if we’d gone much further than that? What if the reason my power didn’t work was because we weren’t in a bubble at all, but had stepped through some kind of portal, all the way to—

“Faerie!” I screamed through the link at both men. “We’re in Faerie!”

I didn’t get a reply, or maybe I just couldn’t hear it over the sound of the dragon suddenly screeching overhead, an awful, tearing metal sound that maybe indicated that the fire was doing something, after all. The terrible shriek certainly was, namely rupturing my eardrums, not that it mattered. Corpses don’t need ears, which is what I was about to be, because the creature had just opened its paw.

And the difference between being carried and being dropped was like a shock of cold water to the face. Or a slap of cold air, as the enveloping cave of flesh fell away, and I started to plummet to my death. The old Cassie would have dropped the thirty or so stories to her doom, probably screaming the whole way.