My exclamation is breathless. “What the fuck?”
I was certain I was headed toward Jonah, and yet I’m right back here.
I’m suddenly horribly uneasy.
This place is supposed to respond to what I need, but I didn’t think it would shift around on me like this.
And I sure as anything don’t need to be coming up on the butt of this orchard again.
My unease grows as I wonder…
Am I stuck?
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Stuck in so many ways.
In this forest. In my uncertainty. Even stuck in moments of time, events I can’t change.
I fight my panic as I wonder if I’ll loop around every time I try to get back to my pack.
Pressing my palm to my heart, I try to stop its hammering.
I’ve faced my father, fought the goddess of death, and even tussled with the keeper, but yet a bunch of sparkling trees are scaring the shit out of me.
Instead of backing away again, I take a step forward, eyeing my surroundings as I go.
Each of the trees is large, but not near the circumference of the ancient trees in the forest of Portland. These ones are slender but sturdy, their branches stretching overhead and weighed with apples.
With each step I take, I assess my surroundings, noting that I seem to be moving forward normally.
Maybe I simply need to walk straight through.
Like moving through the bad to get to the other side.
When I reach the orchard’s central point, the energy radiating from the trunks of the nearby trees is the most intense.
It buzzes at the edges of my senses, sort of like the artificial lights in the apartment where we stayed in New York.
It was easy to ignore that electrical energy.
Not so easy to ignore the power in these trees.
It sends a prickling sensation down my spine, awfully similar to the feeling that overwhelms me when I release my wings.
It’s painful. A tearing sensation even before the tearing has begun.
Fighting the impulse to spread my wings, I hurry onward until I reach the far edge of the trees and only a few steps will take me beyond it and into the rose garden.
The light outside the orchard is growing, indicating that dawn is only an hour away. I haven’t slept and maybe that’s a bad thing, but I’m not sure I could easily lay my head down and close my eyes in this place now.
I pause at the final tree, where an apple hangs right in my line of sight.
I could veer around it, but I reach up instead.
Extending the foreclaw of my right hand, I use it to cut through the apple’s stem, catching the fruit with my left hand so it doesn’t fall to the ground.
The claws of my left hand sink into the apple’s flesh as easily as they tore throughThe Book of Dark Magic.
