A/N: Sorry for the delay, was without internet for the past week, but am back now. :)

CHAPTER 4 - "Not in Kansas Anymore"

"Where am I?" I groaned, blinking without being able to see much. Everything was very dark and I could only just see a steadily drifting curtain of white snowflakes fluttering by my eyes. I felt as raw as if I'd been burned but cold was quickly seeping into my bones to add a whole new kind of ache.

"On top of me," Trent's voice from beneath me made me start. "To which I would normally offer no objection, but maybe you can move your knee, Rachel?" he added.

I scramble to get my arms under me, face warming as I realized where my knee was currently jammed. Crap on toast. I crawled quickly off of Trent, my motions probably not as graceful or coordinated as they might have been, since I felt like someone had just scrubbed my mind across a cheese grater.

Trent grunted and winced when both my knee and elbow accidentally jabbed him in the process of me extracting myself. Rolling onto his side, he pushed himself upright with a slowness that told me he wasn't feeling a whole lot better than I was. It was only after we'd both gained our feet that I realized neither of us was bound any longer. The silver handcuffs were gone, although my bloody, torn wrists remained, hidden but painful beneath the sleeves of my coat.

My head was throbbing. I rubbed my temples only to realize I was accidentally smearing the blood on my hands onto my face. Great. Feeling uneasy and off-balance, I instinctively reached for a line. My expectant grasp seemed to find nothing to fix on and sheer agony flared through my head at the attempt. "Ow!" I breathed, doubling forward and nearly dropping back to my knees.

I felt Trent's steadying hand on my arm and against my back. "Rachel? Are you all right?"

"I can't tap a line!" I gasped, wanting to try again but afraid of the pain. Everything was a little too raw and I felt like I was going to throw up.

"Neither can I," Trent admitted and I felt the gentle pressure of him rubbing my back as I bent forward, panting.

"Yeah? Well why didn't it hurt you?" I grit out, thinking that wasn't fair.

The rubbing against my back stilled for a moment, then resumed. I felt Trent shift against me a little, supporting more of my weight. "Maybe because you took more of a beating in there than I did," he said quietly. He wasn't exactly saying thank you, but I could feel it implied. "Give it a little time. It's possible we're still under the effects of those curses, or it's an after-effect of ... whatever that was that just happened."

I nodded, finding myself not wanting to pull away from the strangely comforting warmth and steadiness of his body. "Well, here's hoping we don't run into anything nasty out here then," I murmured, finally gritting my teeth and shrugging Trent off. We weren't exactly helpless, but without our magic we were at a distinct disadvantage.

Trent gave me a wary half-grin. "Don't jinx us."

I rolled my eyes at him and drew in a couple deep breaths of frigid air to clear my head. I flexed cold, bloodstained fingers to make sure everything was still working and then pushed them deep into my pockets while I looked around. It was dark and the moon was high. We were surrounded by silent trees and falling snow. A thin layer of the fine powder was attempting to adhere to the pine needles and fallen leaves, although it was only just beginning to gain traction. Aside from the snow and the lateness of the night, I would have thought we had ended up right back where we'd been not long before. Well ... I was assuming it was not long before. Time had had no meaning in that in-between place. We could have spent seconds or days in there, I supposed. When my soul was in the bottle, I'd been completely unaware of the passage of time.

"We appear to be alone." Trent's voice made me look back in his direction. He was rubbing his wrists and also looking around. His arms weren't torn up like mine, but the blood crusting his temple and the collar of his shirt was black beneath the moonlit white of his hair in the shadowy starlight.

My breath fogged on the air and I could see that he was right. The trees looked eerily similar to the clearing in which we'd almost been burned to death, but this snowy glade was distinctly lacking the bodies and scorched earth that we must surely have left behind. The moon was nearly full and wispy tendrils of cloud blanketed out swaths of the sky. I couldn't see enough of the stars to spot any familiar constellations. "You think we're maybe in a different part of the forest or that we're like ... in Iceland or something?" I wondered aloud, hoping it was a joke.

"I don't know." Trent's voice was quiet and held a certain amount of understandable strain. He exhaled slowly and then started striding purposefully into the trees. "I'm simply hoping it's a matter of where and not when."

A shiver that had nothing to do with the cold went through me as I fell in step with him while turning that thought over in my mind. I wasn't sure what exactly qualified as exile but somehow it seemed too much to hope that it only meant "a different part of the woods" unless some other variable had been dramatically altered. Wild magic had a horrible sense of humor and irony. What if we'd been held in that limbo for years ... decades ... centuries even? Then pushed back out in the middle of a future where we no longer belonged?

I immediately thought of Peirce and grit my teeth. I didn't want to think about that possibility. I didn't want to think about having to deal with the idea of finding out that everyone I'd ever known and cared about was long dead.

The voice had said that a way could be found. I hung onto that. Wherever we were, whatever had happened, there would be a way to reverse it. I had to believe that.

I looked over at Trent. His brows were furrowed and his features tense. He wasn't wearing a coat, but he was not usually overly affected by cold temperatures. Still ... "You okay?" I asked.

"Fine," he said evenly. I knew neither of us would really be anything like fine until we figured out where we were and what had happened, but we were alive, not terribly injured and things could have been a lot worse.

"I don't suppose you have your cell phone, do you?" he asked after another moment. "They took mine."

I could have slapped myself for not thinking of it sooner. I guess my head really wasn't all the way back in the game yet and the pounding headache was affecting me more than I thought. I pulled up short and quickly searched through my coat pockets, first where the phone should have been, then everywhere else, just in case. Finally, I had to admit defeat.

"No, they must have taken mine too. Or it didn't survive our little out of body experience back there."

Trent didn't look surprised and simply nodded. "Then we best keep walking."

I pulled my sleeves down over my hands and folded my arms across my chest, favoring Trent with a frown as we made our way through the trackless, powdery snow. I was all for moving and one direction was as good as another at this point, but Trent kept pausing to look around and glance up at the sky like he was following some invisible path. I hoped we weren't walking in circles; that would suck. "Where exactly are you going, anyway?"

Trent looked thoughtful. "If we are in fact still in the Mt. Airy forest anywhere near where we were before, then if we keep going west we should find our way back to the road."

Minutes dragged by as we struggled through the uneven terrain and the biting cold. The woods seemed very still. Maybe it was the new snowfall. I was not usually very skittish by nature, but there was something vaguely creepy about it all that made the back of my neck prickle. I had that feeling like I was being watched or like we were not alone. I could see little in the darkness through the trees and falling snow, but it was so quiet, surely I would hear some little sign of movement if there was anyone or anything else nearby ... wouldn't I?

I found myself missing Jenks and his scouting abilities fiercely, even as I was very glad he wasn't here since this cold would literally have been the death of him. It could be the death of me too if we didn't eventually get out of it. Trent may be okay with cold but I was freezing my ass off out here.

I wasn't sure whether I was relieved or worried when some fifteen or twenty frozen and miserable minutes later we broke clear from the cover of the forest and saw a moonlit strip of asphalt winding away like a dirty black scrape across the whitening landscape.

The snow was falling in earnest and about an inch or so had now accumulated on the ground. The road didn't look to have been plowed yet, but it had obviously been salted sometime in the recent past and the snow didn't stick, melting into the tire-rutted gray slush. No cars could be seen and everything was almost eerily silent, muffled in that way that only a fresh snowfall could create.

We climbed up the frosty embankment towards the roadway in silence. I think Trent and I were both torn between hoping we were near Cincy and dreading it because we didn't know what that might mean. Maybe it really would have been better if we'd just been dropped in Iceland or Antarctica or something ... at least all we'd have to have done then is find a way to stay alive until we could get out and get home. I stopped on the slushy gravel shoulder, but Trent took a few extra steps until he was standing on the pavement. I was wearing boots, but Trent was in loafers - poor footwear for this little jaunt indeed.

"If this is West Fork road, then Cincinnati should be that way," he inclined his head to the left, "and I-74 should be around a quarter mile further ahead." Trent started crossing the road, heading back towards the black, uninviting maw of the woods on the other side. I hurried after him, catching his arm and stopping him in the middle of the deserted street.

"Whoa, whoa, and what if it isn't?"

Trent gave me a flat look. "If we don't find the highway we can always double back."

"Or we could follow this road that way," I gestured in the direction Trent had indicated before. "And whether it does or doesn't lead to Cincy, it's bound to get somewhere eventually."

Trent frowned, seeming to consider this. "This road does not look much traveled. We've got a better chance of flagging someone down on the highway."

"If there's a highway and if we don't get lost trying to find it. I say we stick to the road we've already found. Besides, if this is West Fork, then it'll join 74 in less than a mile anyway. We'll go faster walking on the road than continuing to scramble through the woods."

Not waiting for Trent to concede the logic of my point, I started walking down the road. I drifted back towards the side but stayed on the pavement because it was easier than navigating the loose gravel on the shoulder. I couldn't explain why without sounding like a silly scaredy-cat, but I really, really didn't want to go back into the woods again. The road was lonely and quiet, but at least the larger swath of clear space gave a more open field of vision than we had in the forest. That meant we would have at least a few seconds to see and react if something came at us.

I heard Trent sigh and then the wet crunch of his footsteps as he caught up with me, picking his way carefully amid the slippery slush.

We continued on for what felt like an indeterminable amount of time, the cold and silence getting more and more oppressive with every passing minute. I couldn't feel my face or my toes anymore. I didn't want to borrow trouble, but it was hard to prevent my mind from darting from one nasty possibility to another. How awful would it be if there was no one else out there? If we weren't in the real world at all and this was merely some construct of our minds - a purgatory for just the two of us in which this road never ended and there was only silence, cold and this strange creeping dread? It would be like living in a permanent nightmare.

I could have cried for relief when the familiar sound of a car engine broke through the surreal silence and twin headlights cut around the corner, heading towards us on the opposite side of the road. They weren't going our way, but I didn't care. Waving my arms, I tried to flag them down. The car slowed for a moment and then sped up even faster. It ploughed by in the darkness with a splatter of slush a rush of air before vanishing into the night. The fact that it had slowed told me the driver had seen us, but hadn't wanted to stop.

"Jerk!" I shouted; annoyed but still feeling relieved anyway. At least there was life out there, and although I hadn't gotten much of a look at it between the darkness and glare of the headlights, the car had seemed reassuringly familiar in shape and sound. It wasn't ... oh, I don't know, some futuristic hover car for example. I glanced over at Trent and saw what might have been a similar expression of relief on his face.

That thread of optimism didn't stretch far enough to cover my frustration when the next car we saw shortly after also passed us by without an apparent flicker of remorse. They hadn't slowed, so I couldn't be sure they'd actually even seen us, but still!

"What is wrong with people?!" I grouched, in a thoroughly bad temper now. "How can you just drive by when you see people on the side of the road freezing their butts off?!"

"It's late, this is a lonely road. Not a lot of people are going to feel safe picking up two unknown hitchhikers," Trent pointed out. He had his hands pushed into his pants pockets, his breath frosting on the air. "If we're lucky, they will at least call the police."

I glowered at him. "Stop it!" I snapped. "Don't be so damn reasonable. How in the name of Tink's panties can you possibly sound so annoying reasonable when you're standing there in loafers and shirtsleeves in the snow after having been almost burned at the stake by your own people, cursed into some unknown form of exile, and have no idea of what exactly is going on – all while freezing your ass off because nobody had the decency to stop and see if we need help?!" I took a deep breath after the tangled rush of words and the cold hurt.

Adding insult to injury, Trent looked at me with worry instead of irritation. "Rachel?" he said quietly, taking a step closer. He cupped my frozen cheek in his hand. His hand was cold, but it felt warmer than my face and I shuddered. I needed to keep walking. We shouldn't stop. If we stopped, I wasn't going to be able to keep going.

I swallowed, turning my head away from Trent, but his worried look had deepened. He pulled my right hand from my pocket and gripped it, chafing it between his own, trying to work some warmth into the frozen flesh. "Rachel, you're too cold," he said quietly.

"Wow, thank you Captain Obvious," I muttered, pulling my hand away and shoving it back in my pocket. "I'm okay. We should keep going."

Trent didn't budge. "You're not okay, Rachel. You're using Jenks' swear words and making less sense than usual." His face creased in frustration as if he was trying to do something and simply couldn't. "Damn it," he muttered, finally having the decency to look pissed about something. He ran a hand through his hair. "I still can't tap a line or I could warm you."

Gritting my teeth at the possibly impending pain, I tried again as well. I didn't know Trent's warming spell, but it would have at least been comforting. I reached out for the nearest line, willing it into my chi ... and found nothing. The attempt didn't hurt anymore, but it was like being surrounded by water - I simply couldn't make a connection. Worse... I couldn't even hear or feel the lines. It was as if they were too far away or simply didn't exist at all. The yawning, empty fear that sprang to life in my stomach was almost worse than the pain would have been.

What was going on? Surely the spell should have worn off by now. Had both Trent and I been somehow magically neutered? Could we have been intentionally cut off from the lines and from magic like I had been when I was hiding from the demons using the charmed bracelet that Trent had made for me? Was that the kind of exile we were dealing with? The thought made my breathing speed up painfully.

The deep purr of another engine approaching from behind us cut through my haze of worry and made us both look over our shoulders. For a moment I thought the car from before had turned around and come back, but the distant shape of the headlights was different, lower to the ground and farther apart.

"Well this one's going to stop," I said determinedly, stepping right into the middle of the slushy lane and waving my arms.

"Rachel!" Trent complained in alarm, hovering by my side and ready to yank me out of the way.

I ignored him. I wasn't stupid, the car was plenty far away to see us and stop. Well... okay maybe not plenty far, but ... far enough ... right?

"Hey!" I waved my arms. "Hey! Stop!"

The distance between us and the car turned out to be a lot less than I had judged. The vehicle covered it quickly, braking hard as it approached. Tires ground and skidded in protest on the slippery asphalt but it didn't fishtail, speaking to either the good construction of the car or the skill of the driver. The headlights were blinding after the long dark of the woods and I could make out little about the vehicle besides its long, sleek shape. It was a big car, but not SUV type big, more like classic Americana big. It rolled to a halt a mere few feet away, snowflakes dancing in the headlight beams.

Shading my eyes with my hand and blinking, I moved out of the direct glare of the headlights and towards the driver's side of the vehicle. I heard the crunch of Trent's shoes behind me as he followed. From this angle I could now see that the car was a big, black, pre-Turn vintage model of some sort. I took that as another hopeful sign that we weren't in the year 2500 or something.

The driver's window was already down and between the moonlight and the dim interior dash lights I could just make out a young man with short dark hair who looked to be somewhere around Trent's and my age. He was wearing a leather jacket and one elbow of it rested on top of the car door as he leaned out to talk to me.

"Lady, you should be careful jumping in front of cars like that. This isn't a real good place to be hitching," he drawled with a jaunty grin that managed to be friendly and yet wary at the same time. His features were a nice mix of both smooth and angled lines that worked well together.

Beyond the driver, I could see the shape of a second, larger man in the passenger seat. I felt a little ping of caution and hoped we weren't making a mistake. Getting mugged by a couple of traveling axe murderers would be a very inauspicious way to end this particular little adventure. Still, I felt relatively sure that even without our magic, Trent and I could hold our own against a couple of humans if we needed to ... if they were human, of course. I couldn't get a good scent of them from here, not with the distance and the exhaust from the idling car.

"Ya' think?" I shot back sarcastically before I could stop myself, hands going to my hips. I know I should probably try to be a little more charming since we were hoping to bum a ride, but I was cold, tired and not in a terribly good mood.

The driver's gaze caught on my bloody hands and the smudges on my face before darting over my shoulder to Trent, probably noticing his bloodied head and shirt. The man's expression didn't change, but the impression of concern vying with even greater wariness intensified and his body seemed to subtly tighten. His right shoulder dipped a little, like he was maybe moving his hand on the gear shift, or adjusting something on the seat beside him that I couldn't see from this angle. I hoped he wasn't going to just take off.

"Hey, you two okay?" he asked instead, his gaze darted about with a searching expression, checking the tree line on either side of the road quickly before refocusing on Trent and me.

"We were in an accident. Our car went off the road some ways back," Trent lied smoothly from behind me. "We're all right, but would greatly appreciate a ride into town."

"It's kind of freezing out here," I added, aiming for a slightly more winning attitude than before. Giving the driver what I hoped was an innocent and relatively charming smile; I pushed my hands back into my coat pockets again. I didn't have to fake my shivering. It was freezing.

Trent and I hadn't discussed making up a story, but I had to agree with his apparent assessment that the rather bizarre truth would not be the best option at this juncture. The less these people knew, the better it would probably be for them as well as for us.

The man behind the wheel hesitated for just a beat, glancing across at the shadowy shape of his companion. They seemed to achieve some unspoken agreement, because the driver turned back to us and gave a one shouldered shrug. The elbow on the window shifted as he moved that hand back to the steering wheel and his other arm once again moved inside the car like he was shifting something on his lap, or maybe the car had a clutch.

"Sure," he said, gracing us with another one of those rather attractive bad boy smiles and nodding his head towards the rear passenger door. "Hop in."

"Thanks!" I said with a smile of genuine relief, quickly stepping forward and sliding my fingers under the cold metal of the old-fashioned door handle. I pulled the door open and the interior lights came on. The man in the passenger seat was leaning over into the back, in the process of pulling what looked like a knapsack and a tan coat off the rear seat behind him.

"I'll just get these out of your way," he said, giving me a smile as I ducked into the car. I could now see that he was roughly the same age as his companion, taller, but maybe a little younger. Or maybe it only seemed that way because his expression appeared a little more open and his smile a little less guarded.

"You don't have to, it's fine," I assured as I slid across the back seat to make room for Trent. "I can ride with my knees by my chin if it means not walking anymore." The inside of the car was blessedly warm and cozy after the frigid outside temperatures and I felt the delightful warmth of the heater start to seep into me like bliss. Right at the moment I didn't care if they were traveling bandits or hatchet men, as long as I could get warm for a few minutes.

The front seats were built bench style, like the back, something you only really saw in older cars. Despite its age however, I noted that the inside of the vehicle seemed very well maintained and the engine was a warm, throaty rumble. This was a classic, not a beater.

"Don't worry about it," the man in the passenger seat replied easily as he settled the items he'd retrieved on the front seat, quickly flopping the coat down between he and the driver, on top of whatever else was already there. Twisting a little and crunching up what sounded like empty snack bags, he shifted the knapsack down into the wheel well by his feet. The corner of a laptop peeked out from beneath the open flap of the pack as he settled it beneath his long legs.

"We just travel with a lot of junk. Road trip, you know," he added with an apologetic shrug, his gaze shifting between me and Trent as the elf slid into the car behind me. The man's brown hair was on the long side and when he tilted his head it hung around his face in a distinctly attractive manner that was only accentuated by his gentle smile. Damn, I was in a car full of cute guys and I looked like shit.

Trent pulled the door shut and the inside of the car plunged back into dimness once more. The driver shifted gears and eased the vehicle back into motion. The radio was on, but it had been turned down so low it was only a background murmur. The driver reached over now and turned it back up, filling the car with the strains of a song I didn't recognize.

"The spinning roulette wheel,
the laugh of the gods,
the odds are so good now,
but the goods are all very odd..."

The car had a lived-in quality that made me think someone spent a lot of time in it; the interior possessing the soft, distinct smell of a well-used vehicle. Accentuated by the heater warming everything up, the faint bouquet was a mix of stale chips, fast food, laundry, metal, grease and dash polish along with other, less definable scents. Mix that with the faint smell of cinnamon and wine coming from Trent beside me and it was hard to get a real good whiff of either of our new companions, but I was still favoring the idea that they were human. They certainly weren't vampires and they didn't really look or act like elves. The driver could have been a were. He had the right kind of build for it - compact, lean, solid and muscular ... but I didn't think he was. With the heater on like this, if either of the men was a werewolf or a witch the car would quickly have become saturated with the scent of their race; kind of like it was becoming saturated with Trent's scent and probably my own, although you could never really smell yourself. All in all, they were probably human.

"So where were you folks headed?" The driver asked, glancing at Trent and me in the rearview. He looked very comfortable behind the wheel, one hand on the steering wheel, the other down either resting on his lap or the seat beside him.

"Cincinnati," I replied automatically, then wondered if I should have since we still didn't know where we actually were.

The driver merely bobbed his head. "Well, how about that? Us too. So what happened to your car?"

I felt a whirl of mixed feelings churn in my gut at the casual confirmation that we were in fact close enough to Cincy for them to be heading there as well. What did it mean? I looked over at Trent and he gave me a very small shrug, his face unreadable in the dim light.

"There was a deer in the road," Trent answered the man's question, his slightly distracted tone telling me his mind was working away at our situation and he was a little more worried than he was letting on.

"Deer, mm," the man replied. "You sure it was a deer?"

My brows furrowed at the somewhat odd question. I my face and hands were starting to prickle with pins and needles and the uncomfortable warmth that followed having been too cold for too long. At least the rapid return of feeling probably meant they weren't frostbitten.

Trent frowned. "Well it looked like a deer, what else would it be?"

The driver smiled a funny kind of smile. "Right, what else? It's just, we've been driving this way for a while and I'm pretty sure I'd remember seeing dead Bambi on the side of the road."

The man's tone was conversational, but he sure asked a lot of questions. I was beginning to wonder if he thought we'd run someone over or something. The odd intensity of his inquiry kind of annoyed me, although perhaps only because we were having to lie through our teeth. Or at least, Trent was.

Trent shrugged. "I'm happy to report that the deer is fine, although there's a tree that wasn't so lucky," he said sarcastically. "We swerved to avoid the deer and went off the road and down the embankment. It was pretty steep; I doubt you'd see it from the road. It's going to be a bitch to get it towed out," he mumbled under his breath, sounding every inch the put-out businessman who had just lost his favorite Porsche. Trent was almost scary good at this. I practically believed him.

"So you two haven't seen anything ... unusual, out there?" The passenger prompted, his question pitched more earnest and innocent than his companion's tone, but no less oddly intense. In the background, the radio thrummed on, providing a contradictory element of normalcy to this increasingly abnormal conversation.

"Just think what you can do,
you can turn it around,
you do what you have to,
and you will be standing your ground..."

"Unusual, like ...?" I prompted, brows furrowing. A faint prickling sensation started along the back of my neck, and it had nothing to do with my warming body. Truthfully, we'd seen some pretty darn unusual things out there, but none that these men could have any knowledge of ... right? So what were they fishing after? I felt uneasy, but wasn't sure why. Did this have anything to do with that feeling I'd had of being watched?

"Well, you see ..." the passenger looked down, giving a very charming embarrassed expression that when coupled with his floppy hair made him look almost boyish despite his size. "There have been some stories lately about ... odd people seen on the road out here, and a number of motorists have disappeared along this stretch. We just wondered if you'd seen anything."

"Or hit anything, maybe. Anything two-legged." the driver put in.

The passenger gave the driver a look that seemed to be telling him to shut up.

"All I saw was a deer, a tree and a lot of stars," Trent said coolly. I could tell he was also annoyed and growing suspicious. "No Bigfoot or rabid werewolves to speak of."

"I ..." I hesitated, having started to speak before I thought it through. I should have kept my mouth shut because I was going to sound stupid, but then again, maybe it wouldn't hurt to give these men a little something and see where they went with it. Both of them had already stiffened expectantly. They were definitely fishing for something, and seemed to think that maybe we were too afraid or too guilty to tell them.

"I did feel like we were being watched," I said finally, refusing to meet Trent's inquiring gaze. I held my head like I was looking out the window instead, but I was really watching the two in the front seat for their reactions. "But it was probably just that feeling you have when you're alone at night in a dark, unfamiliar place, right?"

"Sure, of course. I'm sure you've had a pretty rough night," the man in the passenger seat agreed reasonably and just a little too quickly. He didn't believe it was nothing, but he was happy to let me believe it was. Interesting.

"How many have disappeared?" I asked, my interest and curiosity both piqued. "And what did you mean by odd people?"

There was silence for a moment, the song on the radio beginning its last chorus.

"Tomorrow the world will seem a little clearer,
The planets align and all will be revealed ..."

"Eight so far ..." he finally replied, a small note of suspicion curling about his words. "You haven't seen it on the news? It's been a pretty big story the past couple days."

"If it wasn't on the shopping channel, she wouldn't have noticed. I only read the financial section," Trent drawled in a bored tone and I elbowed him sharply in the ribs. Yes, he was very convincing, but I did not appreciate being made out to be the ditzy bimbo in this scenario.

"Hey!" I said indignantly.

Trent gave me a squint-eyed glower of protest and rubbed his ribs. "What? You'd rather tell them we've been too ... ah ... preoccupied the past few days to pay attention to the news?"

The men in the front seat exchanged amused looks and I felt my face flame, the sensation almost painfully hot when piled atop my already tingling skin. Oh. My. God. I was going to kill Trent when we got out of this car. Swear to God, I was going to kill him.

"Shut. Up. Now." I whispered to him through clenched teeth.

Trent had the gall to smile at me, although I thought I saw at least a flicker of well-warranted wariness in his eyes.

Oh yeah, laugh it up cookie fart. Your ass is so mine.

"So, you want to fill us in on what we've been missing?" I asked the pair in the front seat sourly, glaring at both of them as if I could laser the half-smiles right off their faces. The tall one in the passenger seat tried to stop smiling. The shorter one in the driver's seat didn't bother.

"The Police have found four abandoned cars on the side of the road or in ditches over the past couple days," the driver told us. "There's blood in the cars, but no bodies and no trace yet of what happened to any of the occupants. A few drivers have also reported near collisions with strange looking, bloody people allegedly wandering around in the road or jumping in front of cars ... kinda like you did." The man flashed that hundred watt smile at me in the mirror.

"Hey, are you saying I'm strange looking?" I shot back, although I couldn't shake how very weird this all was. Their questions made more sense now, at least. Was any of this at all related to our situation, or was this something completely different? Or were these guys just yanking our chain for kicks? My eyes narrowed suspiciously. "And is any of that really true, or are you making it up to scare the bejebers out of us? 'Cause it's not working."

"I don't know, it's kind of working," Trent put in dryly from beside me, making me grin despite myself and making the driver laugh.

"Not trying to creep you out, honest," the man in the passenger seat promised. "But you see how when you told us you'd had an accident, so much like the other reports and the people who disappeared ... we just wondered."

I could see that, I supposed, although I wondered if they'd been thinking we might be some almost-victims, or possible perpetrators. Maybe they themselves hadn't been sure, although that made me wonder why they'd picked us up. Maybe they figured they could handle us if we were carjackers or something. This whole situation gave me an uneasy feeling.

"Yeah, I guess that makes sense," I allowed, not yet completely ready to believe they weren't pulling some frat-boy gag on us. "Would explain why nobody would stop for us anyway," I added sourly. "So where are you two going and why'd you pick us up, seeing as how we might be serial killing highway boogymen?" I felt we'd answered about enough questions, it was definitely their turn.

The two men in the front seat exchanged glances. They did that a lot, I was starting to notice.

"Told you, we're heading for Cincinnati," the driver said easily. "Got a lead on a job. And I figure if you want to jump me ... I might just enjoy that." He gave me a suggestive wink over his shoulder. "Some things are worth dying for, you know?"

I rolled my eyes, although I had to admit that something about his eyes and smile made the incredibly lame pass a little less lame than it rightfully should have been.

Beside me, Trent looked annoyed. "So what kind of work do you do?" he inquired flatly.

"We're mechanics," the passenger answered.

"That explains the car," I thought. If they were traveling in search of a job, it might also explain the odd, inexplicable feeling I had like they had their whole life packed up in here with them.

"I'm Rachel," I said, only now realizing that we'd somehow skipped the introduction phase what with the all the unexpected questions. "He's Trent," I added, nodding at the elf in question when he did not appear inclined to offer that information himself.

"Dean," the driver returned the introduction in kind. He tilted his head sideways towards the man in the passenger seat. "And this is my brother, Sam."

A/N: Soo... the twist I was talking about last chapter is that this is going to become a sort-of-crossover story. :) The focus is going to remain on Rachel and Trent. It's their story and the crossover world is more of a backdrop for it and the setting for their struggle to find a way home, but I just couldn't resist this particular idea when it came knocking. *hides*

I'll add the appropriate crossover information to the story next chapter, until then, virtual cookies to anyone who recognizes into what not-terribly-good-for-their-health universe Trent and Rachel have just been dumped - extra sprinkles if you tell me at which point you figured it out. :D (Incidentally, if you have figured it out, you might notice that the chapter title could have some slight extra layers of meaning XD).

Apologies for any glaring geographical errors. I have never been to Cincinnati or its environs, so I'm getting all my location info from maps.

If anyone's wondering, the snippets of song playing on the stereo are from "Tomorrow the World" by Asia. It seemed appropriate. :)