Page 63 of Cherish

Eden simply raises one finger in response.

“You okay?” Hudson asks, a few feet from the rest of us as he crosses to me.

“Of course he didn’t end up in the paranormal pile,” I mutter to myself.

“She’s fine,” Eden answers with a roll of her eyes. “She was on top.”

“Was she now?” Hudson’s gaze takes on a distinctly wicked gleam that has my cheeks heating and my breath catching in my recently reassembled lungs.

“Let’s not go there,” I hiss at him as I look around to see who else is watching.

And spot something, or someone, that makes my heart stop beating.

Holy shit.Heather?“What are you doing here?” I screech at her.

“I decided you couldn’t do this without me,” she answers in an angelic voice.

“This isn’t what we talked about! You were supposed to go back to school. You were supposed to—”

She shakes her head. “I heard you, and you made some very good points. But at the end of the day, I have to follow my gut.” Her gaze holds mine steadily. “I don’t know why, Grace, but I have this feeling that if I didn’t join you, you’d never come back.”

I bite my lip. There’s so much I want to say to her right now… She has no idea the danger she’s put herself in. But how many times have I made a decision based on nothing more than my instincts, then later found out it saved my life? All. The. Time.

So do I have any right to be upset that she followed hers?

“I’m not sure I can protect you,” I admit.

Only to have her fire back, “Well, I’m sure I can protectyou, so that’s fine.”

“Glad to have you along,” Hudson says and reaches for my hand, squeezing it. “Grace was human once, too, and she helped kick some trolls’ asses.”

“Well, if that’s the bar”—Heather grins—“I think I’ve got you covered. I eat troll for breakfast.”

“Actually, I hear certain parts of a troll can be quite—” Flint starts.

But Eden shoves a finger in each ear and starts singing loudly. “La-la-la-la-la-la.”

Everyone laughs, and the tension eases out of me. Hudson is right. Humans aren’t helpless—they just help in different ways.

“This is it?” Heather asks as she spins in a circle. “It looks like a purple Mars.”

I smile, because that’s as good a description of this part of the Shadow Realm as any. Like everywhere else in this place, everything around us is purple—the sky, the land, the trees, even the rabbit hopping by a few feet away.

But here, in this part of Noromar, the land is jagged and rocky with what look like giant fault lines running in all directions. And in the distance are the massive, craggy mountains Hudson and I climbed on our way to Adarie.

It’s strange to be back here, strange to be looking at this place through familiar eyes when everyone else is stunned by it.

Jaxon is standing at the edge of a crater, looking down into it like it’s the most fascinating thing he’s ever seen. “Are we sure Noromar is on Earth?” he says, echoing Heather’s earlier question. “I thought craters like this only happened on the moon.”

“They’re everywhere here,” Hudson tells him. “Not when you’re in the towns but when you’re out in the wilderness like this.”

“This is the wilderness?” Eden asks doubtfully.

“Wilderness as in desert,” he clarifies. “They do have some forests here, but they aren’t as dense as what we’re used to.”

“Is everything really purple?” Macy stares at the peaks not too far in the distance. “Like, even those mountains?”

“Even those mountains,” I confirm. “You can see they’re a dark violet when we get close to them.”

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