I had to go with the wraiths, alone.
“All right,” I said. I kissed him again, breathing in his scent,sliding my hand around his neck like I could anchor him to me. “On the other side, then.”
He remained close, even as he whispered a word in the wraiths’ language. Only when they had closed in, their cold forms enclosing me and lifting me from the ground, did his forehead break contact with mine.
The temperature plummeted. I gasped as the chill leached through my clothes and into my bones. Their touch wasn’t grip, but mist, insubstantial, but wherever it passed over my skin, numbness followed. Being lifted by them felt like being pulled upward by a tide with no center, no hands.
They moved like water, carrying me away, away from him. I watched over my shoulder until we crossed into the trees, and then he disappeared from my vision like a candle’s flame extinguished between two fingers.
CHAPTER FORTY
The wraiths moved fast—muchfaster than any horse, even at a gallop. I finally understood how they had so thoroughly decimated us humans in the southern district.
They were impossibly quick, like shadows under the moon.
The trees rushed by, and I was carried in what felt like icy silk. No hands touched me, but all around me I was girded by shadow. Even so, traveling to the iron gates took hours. The Sylvanwild lands were much larger than I’d realized, and nearly all of it was filled with dense forest.
The wind hissed past my ears, cold and constant. The forest became a smear of motion, and somewhere between the blur and the silence, my body grew heavier. Not asleep—just untethered. Drifting.
My eyes closed, and the forest vanished.
I stood barefoot in the middle of a snow-covered field, the hem of my jerkin wet and clinging to my thighs. Ahead of me, the horizon glowed with a strange light, and there—at the center—stood my mother. She wore the same threadbare shift I’d seen her in the day she died. Her face was the way I remembered it from childhood, untouched by grief or acid rain.
Blond hair, blue eyes, hands white with flour.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said, her voice the wind itself. “Not yet.”
I tried to step toward her, but my feet wouldn’t move. The snow beneath me wasn’t snow anymore; it was ash. I looked down and saw the southern district burning around me, flames licking up from the ground without fuel.
“I’m trying,” I said, though I didn’t know what I meant. “I’m trying to get out.”
My mother didn’t smile. She only raised her hand and pointed—to the left, where the ash swirled into a shape. A throne, twisted and overgrown, half-formed from root and bone. Something glinted on the seat.
I stepped closer. The air grew colder with each footfall.
As I neared, the outline sharpened: a dagger, long and curved, its blade the color of deep frost. The tip gleamed like a thorn, wicked and waiting. It didn’t feel abandoned.
It felt asleep.
Behind me, something bellowed. A sound I didn’t recognize and somehow knew too well.
I jerked my head over my shoulder?—
And the vision shattered like glass.
The wraiths had stopped moving. I blinked, my body aching with cold. I was no longer in the field or the fire or anywhere but here in Sylvanwild. The air smelled of rust and stone. The moon was no longer out. The forest was gray with predawn light, as were the high iron bars in front of me.
I was at the iron gates.
I turned. Behind me, the wraiths were nearly invisible in this light. Almost incorporeal, like a barely-there skein of muslin. But their scythes still gleamed. They hovered a moment, then slid off into the forest. They seemed to evaporate, those fae of old, who had harnessed nature too long and too voraciously.
If Dorian was right, and I had used magic, then their fate could be mine.
But Dorian was wrong. He had to be. I was human, not fae. And a human belonged in the Kingdom of Storms, not here.
I spun toward the vine-covered gate. I had arrived. I was free… nearly.
When I approached, I found the latch undone. It creaked, a squeal in the early morning, as I opened it to the world beyond.
