Smoke and Mirrors (39)

Thirty-Nine

Wystilor

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Sterling grabbed me by the shoulders and began kissing me passionately, which took me by surprise. I wasn’t sure how I felt at first, but I found myself not minding it so much, then even enjoying it. I—

“What are you seeing right now?” I heard him ask me.

My eyes widened and I shook my head, only to realise that my brain felt clouded. None of that was happening, it was just a hallucination. A very weird hallucination. I shuddered and forced my feet to keep moving through the wide, fallen leaves.

“Uh—there’s a small dog over there, kinda to the left,” I lied. “Do you see it?”

“Nope. We must not be out of the pollin yet. Let’s hurry—we’re in trouble if both of us are getting messed with.”

The scene I’d just hallucinated was still fresh in my brain and I felt my face flush. “Yeah. We sure are.”

He started running again and I followed, glad to have something to think about other than. . . well, whatever that was.

What scared me was the fact that I was actually enjoying whatever that had been. That absolutely could not happen. Not if I wanted to live.

He stopped suddenly and stared ahead with a look of shock. “Silverlace?” he whispered. He shook his head, then balled his fists and rubbed them into his eyes. “Tessa, what do you see ahead of us?”

I glanced at him in confusion, then looked ahead. “Nothing. What do you see?” Then again, after the last thing I’d just pictured, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what he was seeing.

“Nothing real,” he replied softly. He seemed shaken.

“Wow, really,” I replied sarcastically, trying to lighten the mood. “And here I thought all hallucinations were real.”

“Stop, okay? Please. I don’t need this right now.” His words were bitter.

I blinked at his use of the word ‘please’. I didn’t even know he knew the word. I stared at his back. “You okay?” I asked, softer this time.

“Are any of us?” He shook his head. “Just keep moving.” He continued walking, so I followed.

But one question burned in my brain: What was Silverlace?

Eventually, we found a spot where the forest dipped down a fairly steep, rocky slope. Once we slid down that, the trees were even taller.

We reached a point where I could no longer see the sun.

Until that moment, sunlight had spotted small patches of grass and earth, slipping around leaves and branches to illuminate the forest floor. But now. . . none of that was here. It was dark and shadowy, and we had to feel our way through the woods, which was scary.

“Can you keep a little flame on your finger or something?” Sterling asked. “I’ll reflect the lighting.”

I perked up at that. “Oh, good idea! I forget about being able to do things like that sometimes.” I held up my finger and balanced a small flame off the end. Stirling’s reflections poured out from around his feet like puddles, then seemed to harden somehow and twist around to form giant disks of mirrors, which refracted some of the lighting. It was still dark, but I didn’t want to risk burning my energy more than I needed to.

“Did you read the map I gave you?” he asked.

I patted my pocket, where I’d tucked it away shortly after receiving it. “No. Do I need to?”

“Yes,” he said. “We’re stopping at a friend of mine’s house. He’s the duke of Wystilor and has said he’d be happy to put us up for the night. From there, we can figure out how to get Adrian back.”

“Shouldn’t we have brought an army or something to get him? How are we going to do anything?”

He glanced at me. “These woods are hard for large groups to travel in. The more people start seeing things, the more chaos ensues. Whole armies have wiped themselves out here before just by breathing the pollen.”

I winced, but then brightened. “But that means the people holding Adrian can’t be a large group, right?”

He shook his head and jumped up a platform of rocks, then offered a hand to me, which I accepted. “No, not necessarily. Wystilorian Elves have developed methods to reduce the effect of the pollen on their minds. Most of them aren’t phased by it.”

I stepped around an uneven pit in the ground. “Oh. Well, can we ask for members of the Wystilorian army to come help Adrian? He’s the crowned Prince of Fire, after all. He’s important.”

“Well, that’s the thing. Wystilor and Seraphina aren’t on the greatest terms with each other.” He rubbed a hand across his jawline. “It’s been rumored that they tried to have Seraphina killed not too long ago.”

“But this is Adrian, not Seraphina!” I countered. “And if they want that horn back as much as the rest of us do, they’ll do their part to help, right?”

He seemed to mull the idea over in his head. “Maybe. We’ll bring the subject up with the duke when we meet him.”

“When will that be?” I groaned.

He turned and smirked at me. “Have you read the map yet?”

Sighing, I dug the map out of my pocket and unfolded it. I glanced up at him. “Where are we again?”

He walked back to me and glanced over my shoulder at the map. “Right”—he touched a spot just past the entrance into the forest, which made up the majority of Wystilor—”there.”

I nodded and stepped away from him. “I’m assuming the duke lives at the mansion spot ahead of us?”

“Yes.” He continued walking. “If we hurry, we can make it there by the end of today.”

***

“I’m starving,” I whined.

“You’ve already said that,” Sterling replied.

“I know, but I’m so hungry I could eat half the trees in this forest and still have room for dessert.”

“Trust me, I sincerely doubt it.”

I sniffed and tilted my chin. “Well you’d be sincerely wrong.”

He glanced at me with an amused expression. “You haven’t seen the biggest trees yet.”

“Really?! Well I still think—” I cut myself off as a sudden mass of moving water tingled at the edge of my senses. It felt warm, like an animal, except it was massive.

“Do you really think?” Sterling replied, oblivious to the massive presence nearby. “You—”

“Hush, there’s something close by,” I hissed, ducking under a tree branch and hiding behind Sterling.

Instantly, his shoulders and arms tensed. “Where?”

“Through there.” I stuck my arm past him and pointed towards a dense spot in the trees.

“Okay. Stay back and brace yourself. Some of the animals here get pretty scary.”

I swallowed down a reply that went something like, Well if I can stand you, I’ll be fine with anything.

I heard something that sounded like a log being crushed. I could imagine it splintering into a thousand pieces from the sounds of it—but what crushed it?

Sterling slowly held his hand out and a wide ribbon of mirror poured out from his hands, then slipped through the brush towards the creature. He inhaled sharply.

“What is it?” I asked quietly.

“A rabbit.”

I furrowed my brows at that and pursed my lips. “A rabbit?!” I exclaimed loudly.

“Shh! It’ll hear us,” he hissed. “This thing is big. It’s from the deep woods.”

I didn’t risk asking what the deep woods were. I’d probably figure it out soon enough.

Suddenly, another log sounded like a boulder crushed it.

What crawled from the trees was the weirdest, most un-rabbit-like-rabbit I’d ever seen.

The skin around its face had very little hair on it, which allowed me to see the absolutely cursed fact that its skin was transparent. I could see straight to some kind of a bluish-green mass that made up the rabbit’s brain. The rabbit’s fur was a dark, mossy green, which blended in eerily close with the trees around us and made me realise that quite a bit of what I was seeing was not tree leaves at all, but actually rabbit fur curling and pricking out around the gnarled trees.

I barely managed to hold in a scream.

Its enormous nose sniffed the air, which there likely was plenty of in a forest like this. Especially if what Sterling said was right and the trees really did get bigger.

I could hear the wind rushing to the rabbit’s nose. Suddenly she stopped sniffing and began touching the forest floor with her whiskery, fluffy mouth. The pizza-sized nose still twitched though, beating and pulsing as it inched closer to us.

That’s when I remembered one fatal flaw of mine.

I was, most unfortunately, allergic to rabbits.

A sneeze tore itself from my lips and sent a huge wall of fire sparking out from behind me. The rabbit was startled at the wall—which for her was not nearly as big as it was for me—and started scanning the area for the source of the fire, then stared sideways at Sterling and I.

“Quick, more fire!” Sterling shouted suddenly.

I blinked as I processed his command, then realised what he was doing. I stretched out my arms and ignited my entire body, making sure to keep the heat off of my clothes, then forced the flames to go higher and wider behind Sterling and I. He turned and shot out a thick wall of mirror that poured through the fire and formed a gigantic mirror behind my wall of fire, which reflected the fire towards the rabbit and scared it enough that he quickly began hopping away.

We both breathed deep sighs of relief once it was out of sight. I felt my entire body sag for a moment from the loss of energy I’d just expelled, but then I straightened and grinned.

“We scared it off!” I exclaimed. I fist-pumped the air, then turned sharply to Sterling. “But did you see the skin on that thing?! It was clear!”

“Yeah, deep wood rabbits are terrifying,” he replied, exhaling deeply then inhaling again. “We did pretty good.” He quickly added, “You know, for that being your first time and all.”

I nodded distractedly. “Yeah, but there’s one thing still bothering me.”

“What?”

“I’m still starving. Even that rabbit kind of looked tasty.”

He groaned.