CHAPTER 1
It was the silence that disturbed her the most.
Not the black, moonless night sky overhead. Not the hours she’d spent wandering alone in that darkness, trying to find her way through an endless stretch of scorched forest and barren earth. No, it was the complete and utter stillness that made her blood run cold in her veins.
The deadness of the place chilled her to her bones. It seeped into her marrow like poison, like a warning, as her feet navigated the cinders and dead foliage on the ground.
Phaedra didn’t scare easily. None of her immortal kind did. Yet she couldn’t deny her urgency to leave this place. Her heart hammered with that need, the only sound she heard in the maddening quiet surrounding her.
Out of old habit, she reached for the bracelet on her wrist. She’d worn the leather thong with its small piece of precious Atlantean crystal for as long as she could recall. The amulet could teleport her away in an instant. But her wrist was bare. She’d given the bracelet to her friend Tamisia weeks ago, never imagining she might need it herself.
Phaedra was on her own here. All she could do now was push on.
The wasteland maze of denuded, skeletal trees only seemed to expand the more she tried to escape it. One jagged path turned into another, then another. Straight trails morphed into circular loops that carried her nowhere. Clearings she thought she was heading toward instead moved farther away before dissolving altogether, nothing more than mirages.
Frustration gnawed at her.
There had to be a way out. She just needed to keep going until she found it.
Against the pitch-dark night, a pale shape emerged from behind a cluster of gnarled, blackened trees several yards away.
A doe.
Graceful, calm, as white as milk, she stepped out to the broken path ahead of Phaedra. Dark, placid eyes blinked once in acknowledgment, no trace of fear in the animal’s gentle face. It waited, its breath softly misting in the chill night air.
“Hello, there,” Phaedra whispered.
She didn’t dare move, loath to spook the beautiful creature. All the anxiousness of her frantic trek through the alien landscape faded under the doe’s comforting presence.
“Where did you come from? Are you lost like me?”
Carefully, she took a measured step forward. The doe retreated a step.
Phaedra immediately paused, frowning in disappointment. “Please, don’t be afraid of me.”
The deer backed up farther. Then she calmly turned around and began to step back into the lifeless forest.
Phaedra followed. The doe kept an ample distance between them, but she didn’t bolt. She didn’t abandon Phaedra to the wasteland. Instead, she seemed to be leading her somewhere. Guiding her toward something.
Not out of the forsaken woods, but deeper into them.
The twisted trees grew thicker the farther she followed the animal, the scorched bracken at her feet more tangled and forbidding.
“No.”
Phaedra wasn’t sure if she spoke the word aloud or voiced it only in her head. The doe glanced back at her, halting in the darkness. There seemed to be a question in the soft eyes, an entreaty.
Phaedra shook her head, her long brown hair stirring in the night breeze. “I’m not going any farther.”
She waited for the animal to resume its retreat into the forest. She fully expected the unusual creature to disappear like the apparition she was certain it must be.
But the doe didn’t leave.
Slowly, it approached her.
It stepped toward her with serene purpose, until it stood close enough for Phaedra to touch.
She couldn’t resist the temptation to brush her fingertips over the gleaming white coat. The fur felt like velvet under her hand, the steady pound of the doe’s heartbeat a reassurance Phaedra didn’t even realize she needed until the vibration of it thrummed beneath her fingers.
