It wasn’t his impossibly quiet nature that shocked me, but what was happening just to his left side.
Kai’s familiar was rolling around in a familiar brown, grease-stained paper bag. He pounced in and out, small paws attacking the pile of… salted fries that were scattered around the overturned bag.
Sensing my arrival, Emon uncoiled from his perch on the bottom step, and lifted a head towards me.
“If you do not make that monster stop doing this to me, I am going to be forced to sink my fangs into his fucking throat.”
I scoffed at the serpent, nudging him out of my way with my foot. “Kai,” I called out, announcing my arrival. “My familiar has expressed his disdain for you. Care to explain why?”
Kai cracked a single eye open, and then sprung up from the floor as if caught in an act he wasn’t supposed to be doing. “Oh my god. Romy managed to pull you away from Arwyn’s sidethen,” he said, completely ignoring my question. “It feels like Christmas day.”
“I never thought there’d be a day you would be excited to see me.” My eyes fell back to the overturned fries when I noticed more strange shapes. Burgers, some half-eaten, others nothing but corpses of gherkin and bun. “If Romy told me you found some fast food here, then maybe I would’ve come down sooner.” I gestured to the mess, unable to ignore the pungent smell of grease and salt. “What’s all this?”
It was… quite possibly the most glorious sight I’d ever laid my eyes upon.
“I’ve been busy,” Kai said, stretching out his arms.
“Eating your weight in processed food or something else?”
Kai rolled his eyes. “Bit of both.”
“IF YOU MAKE ME GO BACK I WILL STRANGLE YOU, WITCHLING.”Emon’s panicked screech was so loud and sudden, it made me stumble over my footing.“NO MORE. NO MORE!”
I clutched the side of my head as Emon’s internal screech threatened to give me an award-winning headache. “What’s going on?” I asked, fingering my temple.
Kai’s posture straightened, his shoulders rolling back. He took in a deep breath, held it and then answered, “I think I can get us out of here.”
My heart thundered in my chest, but I also felt it in the tips of my fingers and toes. Every inch of my body became sensitive, as if his admission had flayed me down to my nervous system. “Excuse me?”
“Correction. Icanget us out. It was pretty simple to figure it out too, after you admitted what you gave me when you brought me back from the dead. Using Bahmet’s magic, I can literally open a curtain from this reality, back to the world we left behind. The fast food behind me is proof.”
My heart beat a million miles a minute. “As is the sheer panic that my familiar is currently drowning in I gather?”
Kai chewed his lip, shooting a nervous glance to Emon. “Yes, sorry about that. Needs must and all. I didn’t want to risk being the one who left, just in case I couldn’t come back. The little demons were the perfect testers.”
“Animal testing is bad,”Emon croaked in my mind.“Really bad.”
The headache wasn’t getting any better. My urge to join Kai’s familiar on the floor and start rooting around in the bags of food was becoming too hard to ignore. “Is it safe?”
“That’s a loaded question,” Kai replied. “Safe in terms of us leaving the Witch Trials before the final game, then yes. I think so. But what is waiting for us on the other side… that’s a more difficult answer to give.”
“Why?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“The Hunters are still in control,” Kai said. “Witches are being gathered across the globe. Hysteria and panic. Tomin Hopkin may be stuck here with us, but his poison has continued to spread even without him. Therealworld isn’t the same anymore.”
My urge to eat the food around me faded, like ash caught on the wind. I felt sick to the core, like my mind hadn’t paid any care to the world we left behind. And yet, everything Kai had just admitted felt justified. Like information I’d already worked out, but dared not admit for fear that would make it real.
“I need you to tell me everything,” I said, leaning onto the wall for support. “And I mean everything.”
“And I will. But I can do that once we get out of here,” Kai said. “Romy is going to be getting Arwyn ready. He needs to see a doctor, you know that. I’ve been perfecting the… size of the curtain that leads us out of here and I think I’m almost there.”
I figured it all out in that moment. This was all planned. Romy had got me out of the room to speak to Kai, so she could work on getting Arwyn into a position that was moveable. Those three days I’d lost beside him, and the coven hadn’t stopped planning.
Something Romy had said repeated in my mind.
They’ll both will be stuck in a never-ending loop. Tomin’s suffering, Bahmet’s failure. Over and over.
I locked eyes with Kai. “We can’t leave until we find Verena and bring her with us, can we?”
