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“It still helps.”
“Helps?”
“In forgiving you,” she mumbled.
I didn’t expect returning the necklace or telling her I accepted her relationship with Zeke to fix the rift between us. We were both too wary of each other.
There was still so much about me she didn’t understand, and I didn’t know if I would ever feel comfortable enough to tell her why her existence threatened my peace more than anything.
And she could never promise me that the thing I feared most wasn’t still a possibility.
23
HAUNTED
RAE
Iwasn’t sure how long we’d been in Feranzis. I figured we were on our second day in the cursed forest since we’d slept overnight, but without knowing how long the tranquilizers had kept us unconscious, I couldn’t be certain.
Even then, it was difficult to gauge the passage of time in a place that felt perpetually shrouded in night.
The glowing fungi and strange plants offered no clue. The thick canopy swallowed the sky whole, hiding the sun and moons the same way the cyan fog hid everything beyond a few dozen feet. Without my phone, I couldn’t pinpoint how long we’d been wandering in the forest.
My stomach growled.
I hadn’t eaten since the ball.
I glanced at Cyn and Zeke, who walked on either side of me, surveying our surroundings.
How much energy did it take to transform? To stay transformed in Zeke’s case? How much had Cyn lost in his struggle against the curse of this place?
“Are any of these mushrooms safe to eat?”
While I couldn’t tell dangerous mushrooms from safe ones, I knew some wild mushrooms on Earth were edible. Dark magic infected everything in this place like the plague, so I doubted the same was true here, but asking wouldn’t hurt.
Cyn looked at me. “Hungry?”
“Starving.”
Zeke groaned and leaned on a tree. “I didn’t want to say anything, but I’m ready to gnaw my own arm off.”
“You’re always hungry,” Cyn said with an eye roll and a half-smile.
They’d mostly returned to their usual dynamic, but I noticed a nervous tension between them whenever they got too close to one another. I wondered when the thread would snap, forcing them to confront their feelings while they were both in their right minds.
“The bioluminescent mushrooms aren’t safe, and I suspect the others aren’t either. Too many weird-looking ones.”
“Weird,” I deadpanned.
Cyn pointed at a cluster of what looked like plain white button mushrooms.
“What about them?”
“Watch.”
I waited, and it wasn’t long before I understood what he meant by “weird.”
Atop the mushroom cap, a central hollow opened, releasing tiny, wriggling tentacles that snaked over and under the cap before curling back inward and disappearing into the stem. Once absorbed, beige pus oozed from the top and hardened, creating a new cap as though nothing had happened.
