I stood, pulling my cape tight around me. Aware for the first time of how utterly alone I was, I turned back toward Graystone. At this distance, Dean and Cal wouldn’t hear me even if I screamed.
I hadn’t taken three steps when the mist parted before my eyes, long fingers letting go their hold on the orchard. The soft tendrils curled in on themselves, caressing the ground, and formed a ring just a little wider than I was tall. It moved and flowed, weaving the air like fine dove velvet, and before I could move the ring encircled me. The crows continued to mourn.
“Dean!” I shouted sharply, so I wouldn’t sound scared. I looked toward Graystone. “Cal! Bethina!”
I tried to move away from the ring, but it constricted, the fog closing in again, so I couldn’t even be sure which way the house lay.
“Dean!” I cried. Real fear crawled in, beneath my unease. Something was here. Something that didn’t belong.
“Aoife.”
The voice came from all around, from the wind and the trees and the stone. It sat like a thorn in my mind.
“Aoife.”
“This isn’t funny!” I shouted, spinning in a wide circle, trying to penetrate the mist with my gaze. “Leave me alone!” The panic hadn’t caught me yet, but it was snaking up my back and into my brain as surely as it did the day Conrad pulled his knife on me and I saw that the person looking out of his eyes was my brother no longer.
“Come away, human child. Worlds full of weeping. Come away, Aoife.”
“I won’t …” Hysteria bubbled in my chest and made itself known like a fist around my heart, the niggling whisper that I was just mad and this was all a product of my mind. “I’m not hearing voices.…”
The mist thickened until I swore I was blind. I couldn’t see my own hands in front of me, not the cider house nor the forest nor anything but white.
“Don’t fear us, child.”
I was alone. Alone with the voice. I shut my eyes, like you did when a nightmare had hold of you and you couldn’t wake up.
“Open your eyes, Aoife.”
“No!” I shrieked. Silken fingers brushed over my cheek, across my hands and lips and neck, and I batted at them like spiders were raining down on my skin. This was not happening. This could not be happening. Just because I’d allowed the possibility of my father’s magic didn’t mean that I had to allow phantoms as well.
“You can’t wish us away, Aoife.” The voice became harsh, guttural and, most horrifyingly, real. “Open your eyes, child.”
Shivering, standing stock-still to make myself less of a target, I managed to wrench my eyes open. I wouldn’t bow my head. I would face the first vestiges of necrovirus infection, the hallucinations that ate a rational mind down to a nub.
“I’m not afraid,” I whispered, but even to my ears it was a poor lie. I was afraid, so afraid I felt I might shake apart.
“No need to be.” The fog was worse when I stared into it, writhing in every direction like a living thing. I swore I saw faces, shadows of tall, thin bodies just beyond my vision. Bethina’s story of the pale men and my father’s writings on the Kindly Folk came to terrible life in my memory, and I dropped to my knees, curling in on myself.
“You aren’t real. You aren’t …” My voice faded as the harshest gust of wind I’d felt ripped it away with icy fingers around my throat.
“You lie. You see us,” the voice whispered. “We are real. You just need to look closer.”
“Where am I?” I demanded. The ground had shifted under me, from fozen turf to a spongy marsh. The air smelled different, stiff with pine and deep wild forest rather than the fermented sweetness of apples. And the voice … the voice echoed not against the mountains behind Graystone but across a vast open space.
The pale men had come for my father. I had to assume they’d been responsible for taking Conrad. Now they had taken me, and I strove to calm my hammering heart. If I panicked, I would never get home. I had to keep my head. Dean would keep his head. Dean … I’d shouted for his help and he hadn’t come.
“Where am I?” I demanded again, louder. My voice didn’t shake so much this time, and the small spark of anger grew into a font of fire. My father may have been at the mercy of the Kindly Folk, but they would get an altogether different story from me. I’d fight. It was all you could do if you wanted to survive. Fight was all I had left.
“You know where you are, Aoife.”
“I can’t see.” Despite all of my efforts, cold sweat sprouted against my skin and with it cold panic, the kind that precluded a long trip to the Catacombs from which one never returned.
“Your eyes deceive you. Look again.”
I pressed my trembling hands to my sides, closing them into fists. I looked, and didn’t shy away from the twisted, skeletal faces living in the mist. I could be afraid, but I wouldn’t let it show. That was the bargain I struck with myself as I stared, my eyes watering from the cold wind, into the dense blanket of white.
The mist was quicksilver, changeable with each breath of air, yet I looked not at the figures hidden in its chill embrace but past them, like glimpsing a faint star from the corner of the eye.
Bit by bit, I began to see eyes and faces, lips and teeth and skin in the mist. “I see you,” I chattered. “Who are you? What do you want from me?”
“What are we, child. And who. Who do we want. If you so choose, step closer. See the answers.”
The voice spoke as a ghost on my shoulder. It caressed me with a lilting accent, mercury sliding over glass.
“If I come to you,” I said, watching the figures drift through the mist, “you’ll let me out of this fog. Fair?” I didn’t know if bargaining would be my final sentence or a sign that I wasn’t some terrified, pliable girl, but it was what Dean and Conrad would do. “Either let me out or I’m going home,” I stated. “I don’t have all day.”
Another gust whipped my hair and my skirt like flags at sea.
“So be it.” The mist rolled back, quick and quiet as a velvet-footed animal fleeing a hunter. The figures and faces retreated with it, a rushing of leaves and the scent of briarwood smoke in their wake.
All around, the world came back into view. But it wasn’t my world.
The grass was rust red, the color of rotten iron or old blood. The sky hung overhead, charcoal clouds scudding before a wind that brought a faint scent of night flowers and turned earth.
A line of humped black toadstools crookedly spread in a wide circle around my feet, as if cast by nature’s hand.
“You can leave the hexenring now, child.”
I shrieked as the owner of the voice appeared at my back. Spinning too fast, I tangled my feet and fell to the ground. The spongy peat squashed and sighed like it was alive under me. Damp crept through my skirt and stockings, crawled over my skin and into my bones.
A form stepped into my sight, backlit by the faint white sunlight flashbulbing through the cloud layer. “Human child. Like a fawn. Fragile-limbed and limpid-eyed.”
I swallowed hard, to push down the tangle of wordless screams in my throat. I couldn’t run—he was right on top of me. I kept my face calm. I’d survived for fifteen years by learning how to make my face a blank slate, and I did so now. I kept my hands clamped in fists. It was either that or shake apart, and I wouldn’t show weakness.
My companion, for his part, crouched and folded his hands over his knee. “You have no need to fear me, Aoife Grayson. Not at this precise moment, and not in this place.”