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The ground shook again.

“Callum.” The humor was gone from Vincent’s tone.

My hair lifted in a breeze that hadn’t been there before. I backed away from Callum, bumping into the horse. Vincent dropped into the other language, the one he’d called Nyndrec. Whatever he said seemed to work because the ground stopped trembling under us, though my hair still whipped around in a breeze that didn’t reach the men. Amaria circled my wrist again, and I frowned.

When Callum turned back toward us, closing the distance, his face was blank, a coldness to him that hadn’t been there before over the last several days. My chest tightened. A strand of my hair caught on my eyelash. He carefully pulled it free and tucked it behind my ear, his skin never touching mine.

“You don’t understand Nyndrec?” he asked.

I shook my head. “The… the woman. Lillian.” I closed my eyes and tried to remember her words, but they were foggy from both head injuries. “I… don’t remember a lot of what she said. But she said the Archmage guy gave us Alwesh and two others. Dur-something, I think.”

His nostrils flared. God, I felt like prey again.

“Dorónmarc?”

“That sounds right,” I said.

My ankle ached to high heaven now that the pins and needles were gone from my leg. I leaned back against the horse. Hopefully she didn’t decide to move because I would absolutely end up flat on my butt in the snow.

His voice was gentler this time, though the aloof expression didn’t change. “You were kidnapped?” When I nodded, he pressed his lips into a thin line. “Did you touch a ticket at all?”

All I could picture was an old-school concert ticket.

“A ticket? Like a piece of paper?”

He shook his head.

It was Vincent who explained quietly, “The items that are laid throughout Avicourt that bring omegas to participate. They’re spelled so only omegas can see and interact with them. They have a powerful transportation enchantment applied to them that brings the omega to the kingdom that commissioned the item so you may be given the choice to participate.”

“We touched a hand mirror,” I said. Then, just to make sure I was tracking properly given everything going on in my head and body, I asked, “So kidnapping isn’t the standard practice?”

Callum’s eyes widened, and his hands shook again. “Standard practice? Your very presence on Magefall was a violation of the treaty. Your entire participation was illegal.”

“At least you touched a ticket,” Vincent murmured. “So we don’t have the absolute mess of the century on our hands. It’s going to be a nightmare as it is nullifying both bindings and getting you back home.”

The blood drained away from my head, making me sway into Amaria. My head lightened, and the world spun around me for a terrifying moment. Amaria’s arm looped around my waist, keeping me from falling on my face.

“I… We can’t,” I croaked.

Except wasn’t that exactly what our plan had been? To get back to each other so we could figure out a way home? It had to just be my own pessimism over the possibility of actually managing to return cutting through everything.

“You must,” Vincent said grimly. “If you did not consent to participate, we have no choice but to allow you to return to your life before.”

“But it’s too far.”

Shelby’s voice was gentle. “There are very powerful mages in Embercrest. The King has spent several decades building the House of Calyr to rival those of Ferias.” She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, her lips curling into a small, sad smile. “No matter where you come from in the Far Lands, we will be able to get you back home.”

In for a penny, in for a pound at this point.

“But we’re not actually from there,” I admitted. “We’re from a… a place called Arizona.”

All four of them froze, the shock palpable like it was its own entity between us. Despite the body heat of both women, I froze under a new breeze. Callum frowned, his eyes catching on the bits of my hair that lifted under the swirl of air. Two more seconds, and I was going to have that breakdown. Shelby circled my wrist, her touch lingering longer than Amaria’s.

“The world… we call it Earth. It doesn’t have magic, not like this,” I said into the silence, gesturing to the coin in the snow. “We were on a trip—Sloane and me—a trip to a place called Maine. We took trips all the time, every chance we could. And we were walking the shoreline and found this black mirror. We went to pick it up so there wasn’t trash on the shore. The…” I tried to remember the order of events. “The ground shook, and there was this terrible wind. It was louder than—” I choked on the freight train comparison. They clearly wouldn’t understand that. “Louder than anything I’ve heard here, actually. Deafening. I tripped and fell backward and hit my head. Everything went black, and I lost track of most of what was happening. Someone picked me up and then the next time I truly woke up, I was in a small cottage room with Sloane.”

I waved my hand toward the weird tattoo under my ear.

“Then all of this happened.”