Page 122 of Wilds of Wonder
I’d never heard of anyone wielding magic like what Bellamy had used.
Bellamy waved a hand in the air. “They instructed my brothers to act like everyone else. They didn’t want any attention, afraid of what that attention might bring.”
“Haven’t you ever wondered?” I asked. “Where that kind of power came from?”
“Of course I have,” she snapped. “But my parents didn’t want to risk our family being ripped apart, thrown in the star prisons, or worse, executed. You know how the courts could be about anything different, anything suspicious, anything dangerous.”
I did. The seven courts were infamous for being terrified of conflict of any kind, terrified the Seven Spirits would swoop down and take our powers away if we acted out in any way. What fools we’d all been.
Bellamy reached out a finger, and a snowflake fell onto it. She stared at it in wonder. I didn’t know if she’d ever been out of the star court in her life. She might’ve never even seen snow before, other than far in the distance on the peaks of the Glacier Mountains.
“That day I fell in the lake and saw my future, I saw the bolt, saw Aron in his wolf form. And I saw the girl who would ultimately help me escape the Wilds.”
“Annalee,” I said.
Bellamy stared off into the distance, like she was reliving these memories. “I knew what she looked like. I could feel her soul, her magic. I entered dream after dream after dream, spent night and day searching through minds. It took a while, but I found her, and I started filling her dreams with visions of the Wilds, giving her this purpose, this obsession.I knew eventually she would come and show me the way out. It took five years. But now she’s here and fulfilling that vision I saw of my future.”
“Futures can be changed.”
Bellamy shook her head, her brown eyes swirling with so much anger. “Not this one.”
“So you saw yourself killing Spirit Shadow with the bolt? You saw success?”
She looked away, which gave me all the answers I needed.
“This is a fool’s mission, Bellamy,” I said again. “You’re doing all of this, and you don’t even know if it will work.”
She didn’t answer, her jaw set, arms crossed.
“So what happens now?” I asked.
“You’ll wake up, and I’ll be gone.” She pursed her pink lips together.
“You’re just going to leave us here?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s only a few months until the border opens again.”
“A few months in a dangerous land,” I argued. “Where we can’t get to the outside world and give them all this information. They need to know about this, Bellamy. This place. Everyone here.”
“So they can kill them?” She whipped around. “I don’t think so.”
We wouldn’t let that happen. Change was coming. The frost queen might’ve been the last leader following the old ways, staunchly against change. New rulers were emerging in every court, and from what I’d heard, they all were on the same page when it came to no longer sweeping the atrocities of our past under the rug. I had to believe they’d choose to protect these innocent souls.
“I’m going to stop you,” I called after her.
Bellamy looked over her shoulder as she walked away, her red dress fluttering behind her. “You can’t. I’m already gone.”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
EMORY
Iwoke with a gasp, no longer feeling that delicious cold prickling over my skin. Dust swirled in my face, black and shimmery as always.
I blinked a few times, remembering my dream, my talk with Bellamy. Embers spat from the wall in front of me, floating in the air. No hole to sneak through. My heart sank as I looked at the watch, already ticking past the twelve. The opening was closed.
It was over. Bellamy had escaped with the lightning bolt, and we’d be stuck here for at least a few months. There was no telling the damage that would result from this, what Bellamy might do by trying to use that bolt to kill Spirit Shadow, what her actions might do to incur his wrath in return. He might be trapped in Sorrengard, but we had no idea how close he was to collecting the other weapons, and now Bellamy was bringing one directly to him. This was a disaster.
The others slowly awakened around me.
