Page 31 of Hunted By Wolves and Shadow
Locke took one look past me at the dark shadows and Mist and grabbed my arm. Before I could shout another warning, hepulled me with him and a sensation like plunging through cold water washed over me.
When I regained my senses, I had to cover my eyes as brightness stabbed through my eyelids. I’d never seen any light so bright. Locke and I had tumbled to the ground together in a tangle of my skirts and cloak, but I couldn’t rise while I couldn’t even see. Only when I could peer through a narrow slit between my fingers did I roll aside to squint at impossible blue above.
“What—?” I blinked until I could lower my hands, though I didn’t think I’d ever be able to fully open my eyes in this painful brightness. “The sky!”
Was this what it looked like beyond the Mist? All our curses of blue skies and sunbeams suddenly made more sense if the sky looked like this past the misty shroud. No wonder people had started to curse it when it was gone. Did that mean the Mist had lifted? How could that be?
It took my jumbled, fear-drenched brain several heartbeats to register the trees around us were short and round, covered in jubilant green instead of the towering mossy trunks of Aglonbriar.
This wasn’t my forest.
“Use your hood, Emi. It’ll help while you adjust,” Locke said calmly.
“Where are we?”
We were lying beside a bushy hedge on a hillside. A dirt track ran between endless rows of vibrant orange vines, interrupted only by small copses of trees like this one. In the valley below, smoke trailing lazily from clustered rooftops.
My head whipped around, but there was no sign of the wolf or any ominous Mist. The chilly damp was gone, and the warmth on my face had no match in my memories. I gawked at my surroundings as questions piled upon questions until there was only one answer that fit.
We weren’t in Anterra anymore.
I’d had no idea there was a gate to another world so close to Grandma’s cottage, but that was the only explanation for the sunny surroundings. And I did mean sunny. That was actual sunshine, warm on my face and drenching the hillside in brilliant light. Manic laughter bubbled up before I could stop it. Locke had hauled me with him through a gate to another world!
I’d never traveled out of Baines or to another fief, and now I was in a whole other world? How had this happened? Would I be able to go home to my father and sister? Did I even want to? The laughter died on my lips as my reality began to sink in.
“Emi?” Locke interrupted. “Want to tell me what we just ran from?”
“You—You saved me.” My body began shaking, my brain so overloaded I couldn’t see straight. My upper lip quavered and my eyes threatened tears. I threw my arms around Locke’s neck and clung to him like a child grasping her mother’s skirts. “I thought he would kill me.”
“He? I thought it was wolves.”
“Wolf. He—” I had no idea how to explain what just happened. One heartbeat I was kissing the man I hated, and the next he transformed into a monster and chased me through the woods. Neither of those things made any sense.
Nothing from the past half moon had made any sense. From discovering Grandma’s death to being trapped with Wolf to wondering every day why he didn’t kill me too. Tears spilled over my cheek as I clung to Locke and trembled. “Grandma is dead and I tried to kill him and he stopped me like I was nothing andI don’t know what he was talking about, but we were stuck there together because the Mist is crazy and did you know it’s a curse and I tried to run and then he was a monster and then I fell down and then…and then you were there.”
“Whoa, slow down, Emi. What are you talking about? The Ruby Witch can’t be dead.”
Old hurt and anger rushed forward, startling me back from him. “Don’t call her that.”
“O-kay.” Locke regarded me cooly, and I suddenly knew he would get rid of me as soon as he could. I was a problem to be solved, an inconvenience. He’d reacted to the situation, but he hadn’t really meant to save me, had he?
“I can’t—You can’t take me back.”
“I have to. I didn’t mean to smuggle you into Zocere in the first place.”
“Oh! Is that where we are? It’s so warm.” I tilted my face to the sun with my eyes securely shut and swiped away hot tears, grasping the resolve that was firming in my mind. I had to take control of my own fate. I couldn’t be helpless like that again. I wouldn’t be the Emi who’d been at the cottage anymore.
“Come on, Emi. I’m sure the wolf is gone now. I’ll take you all the way to your grandma’s cottage and you can tell me what happened.”
“No. I can’t. You can’t make me.”
I’d had enough of other people deciding my destiny. I’d stayed with Jade and my father, thinking they needed me, hoping they’d appreciate me someday. I’d suffered the taunting of people like Nolan Blueheart and the cold shoulders of everyone in Baines because I thought it was all I deserved. I’d faced the forest and my fears to look after my grandmother when no one else would, just for the chance of a kind word or touch. I’d let Wolf trick me into an uneasy truce while being trapped in a cottage by a curse I knew nothing about.
I was done.
Locke may have saved me, and I was grateful, but he didn’t get to force me back to that world. I’d seen the curse now, and I was lucky to have escaped. Here in Zocere, there was no Baines, no Jade, no Nolan, and no curse. Zocere was full of people who’d never met me and wouldn’t call me witch spawn or judge me for no reason. It was full of fresh starts. Best of all, there was no Wolf.
And if that sent a lance of pain through my heart as I brushed off my skirts and strode away to the sound of Locke’s protests, I could ignore that too. I was not going back there.
