“The Court of Wanderers,” he told me with a nod and Rook’s gaze snapped to him, lips curving downward in a frown. I flicked my eyes to him quickly, uncertain. It was clear that he wasn’t happy with Lark for whatever he had just disclosed to me but Lark didn’t seem to care. He just kept nodding, encouraging me to continue.
“But you don’t know where it leads to here, do you?” I asked. “Because you can shadowstep. So even before you were banished, you never took the common route to visit our plane, did you?”
His lips quirked up into a smirk and I could tell he was pleased with my deductive prowess. Pride leaked into my voice as I continued. It wasn’t that I wanted to impress him. Maybe I did. But this was the culmination of my life’s work, the answer I’d been seeking since I was old enough to know the question, and now I had two Fae sitting in front of me who knew of the door, at least the other side of it. They had presented me with the opportunity to confirm what I knew, at least a part of it, and my heart was racing with exhilaration at all I’d already discovered. A Court of Wanderers? What could that mean? Where could that be?
“That professor in Oregon, she had heard whispers of a town up north where people trudged in and out of the wilderness. Not hunters; they carried no weapons. Not hikers; they didn’t wear the proper clothes or bear the equipment. She thought they were aliens but I knew what they really were. So we went to check it out. It was there. It wasn’t even guarded. She couldn’t see it. But I could.”
I didn’t want to tell them the rest. My throat bobbed as I swallowed, my mouth suddenly feeling quite dry. I took a sip of ale and looked past them to the dusk beyond the windows. Nightfall wouldn’t be far now.
Lark narrowed his gaze but didn’t ask me to continue. Rook looked as though he was on the edge of his seat, waiting. But I couldn’t. Because I hadn’t even allowed myself to think about it. Not for ten years now. Not since it happened. And I had never told Professor Chelsea Woodward that I had seen it, that I had let her search that unassuming little cottage, turning it inside out while muttering about wormholes and multiple dimensions, and find nothing. Because I had wanted to know that such a thing existed. I had wanted to confirm my own suspicions of the Fae having created such a door between planes. But I hadn’t wanted to go through it. I hadn’t wanted to travel to the other side. Not because I was afraid of what was waiting for me on the other side but because I was afraid of what wasn’t. Even as a woman pushing sixty, despite looking nineteen, I couldn’t bear the possibility of being abandoned by my mother twice.
So I’d lied. I’d lied and told Professor Woodward that I had found nothing, I’d consoled her when she fell apart in the woods beyond, bemoaning a lifetime spent in search of a portal to another plane, the confirmation that multiple dimensions not only existed but were reachable from our own. But I didn’t look back. Not even once. And I wouldn’t be doing so now if I didn’t need the help of these Fae so desperately.
“It’s time,” Lark said so suddenly that I jumped, having been lost in my own thoughts.
But he wasn’t looking at me anymore. His head was turned and he was gazing outside at the early evening. He twisted in his seat slightly and those dark eyes met mine.
“We should go.”
Chapter six
A Deceptive Goodbye
Itwascoldanddark and the two Fae I’d come here with had lost their patience for my fear of shadowstepping. So before I was even finished arguing for the path up the mountain, Lark grabbed my hand and the world squeezed in around me. Reeling and choking, I collapsed into the snow at the top, hands splayed out before me as I fought to catch my breath.
“Bastard,” I spat, which only earned me a chuckle from Rook.
I rose to my feet again, knees wobbling, and brushed the snow from my coat, my legs, grateful for the thick turtleneck that Rook had supplied when some of the powdery substance stuck to my neck where it melted against the warm skin there and dripped down onto my high collar.
“We’re alone,” Lark said, keen eyes searching the deserted camp.
I looked up from my task and did the same.
“I told you I could do it,” I muttered.
I lifted a boot and set it down in the deep snow, then another. It was much harder to walk now with the freshly fallen snow but I was too stubborn to ask for help so I took my time reaching the camp itself instead. Then I moved to the machinery and instruments that Wyn had left on for our use should we need them. I checked the gauges, walking among them in examination.
“Whatever those are,” Lark began, “we don’t need them.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but snapped it shut a moment later as I watched him peel off his coat. Beneath that elegantly embroidered black tunic, he wore a black button-up shirt, the top button undone, the skin of his chiseled chest peeking through. He took his time, methodically rolling up his sleeves so that his muscled arms were on display as he gazed up at the rift, face contorted into an expression of purpose.
“It’s not polite to stare,” a voice muttered beside my right ear.
I jumped and turned to find Rook standing beside me. Scowling at him, I whirled around to check another instrument but found it had been unplugged when the hulking Fae brute at my side had trodden over the cord. I sighed, placing my hands on my hips, and turned back around to face him.
“Don’t you have better things to do?” I snapped. “Like maybe help him?”
“He doesn’t need my help,” Rook replied with a shrug. “And besides, he told me to look after you instead.”
“Look after me? Why would you need to—”
But a horrible groaning sound interrupted me. At first, it sounded mechanical, like an engine grinding to a screeching halt. But there was something deeper to it, something more sinister, more alive. I felt a chill in my very bones at that sound but watched, frozen in my tracks, as Lark raised both hands, and then pulled them together as though it took everything in him to do so.
The rift above came careening to a halt, crying out its dissent as it did. Then it reversed directions. For a moment, the surrounding air seemed to be sucked in. Then it froze again and there was no movement at all, just a huge blot of inky blackness pigmented against a brilliant night sky. Lark dropped his hands, letting them hang at his sides. He tossed his head back, his eyelids fluttering shut. And that darkness, it leeched from the sky, slithering downward in wispy tendrils of smoke, first toward Lark and then into him.
Gasping, I stepped forward but was stopped from going any further by Rook’s warning hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t,” he said.
