by Lanie Bross
The way he had looked at her, the hunger in his eyes, made something ache deep inside of her. His square jaw. His strange half grin. That stupid Bay Sun Breakers T-shirt, revealing broad shoulders and strong arms.
She was an Executor, and feelings had no business in her life, but for one second, she wondered what it would be like to kiss him.
How could a boy she’d met only twice before make her feel like this—hot and cold and shivery, both sick to her stomach and full of adrenaline? These were human sensations. In all her time exiled to Humana, no one had affected her quite like Luc did.
It didn’t matter.
It couldn’t matter.
But why did it have to be his fate? That part still bothered her, even though she had never questioned Miranda, or any of the other fates she had had to execute before. It was why she had hesitated when she could have slashed her knife across his throat and been done.
What did it mean?
Was it because she hadn’t stopped thinking about him, thinking that somehow, he had been chosen for her? But that was insane. Her thoughts didn’t matter. That was the whole point. She must do as the marbles dictated.
She had to follow him, to find him. The Unseen Ones didn’t care about reasoning or second-guessing; all they would see was that she had failed, just when she was so close to being restored to her home.
Her fingers found the locket around her neck, and she pulled it out from under her shirt in preparation. She closed her eyes. There could be no confusion, anger, or helplessness. Only one thing: determination. She would enter the gateway to the Crossroad and find him. She backed up so she could get a running start. She sucked in a lungful of air, trying to calm her pulse.
Then she ran.
Her boots thundered across the roof. Pushing up and off the small ledge, she launched herself into the air. Wind tunneled straight through her, making her gasp.
This is going to hurt.
Suddenly, she remembered the face of a terrified woman; she’d been standing on the Golden Gate Bridge, swaying like a reed in the wind. About to jump. It had been Corinthe’s job to catch her, to pull her back from the edge. She remembered how the woman had suddenly turned and started to weep, how she had thrown her arms around Corinthe, squeezing until Corinthe’s chest hurt.
Corinthe had pulled away. She had not understood the touch, the rush of feelings that had overwhelmed her.
I’m sorry. The thought flashed through her mind but then was gone as a sharp burst of pain took away her breath.
Nothing else mattered.
Corinthe fell into the swirling chaos of lights and sound that was the Crossroad. Inhuman noises echoed around her: screams and howls, the laments of all the corrupted or lost souls that had been banished to the spaces between worlds. She felt as though her head would explode. She fell, tumbling out of control, into vast emptiness.
She would stay lost in the Crossroad forever unless she could calm down. Concentrate. Breathe. Still gripping the locket, she pulled at the clasp and the top flipped open. The ballerina immediately began to spin to the tinny melody.
Corinthe’s heart skipped a beat when the dancer began to slow. She watched in fascination. Where would it point? To home, or to Luc?
She closed her eyes and imagined the soft moss and the twilight air buzzing with fireflies, the smell of flowers in the Great Gardens, the stone statues that jealously guarded the river that flowed into all time.
No. Corinthe wanted to go home, but to be accepted there required one thing: killing Lucas. She focused on him instead—his black hair, the square jaw, the way he’d held her waist when they were both knee-deep in the water.
Her eyes fluttered open and the winds lessened. She felt more stable as she willed the ballerina to find him. It slowed to a stop, finally pointing to a coil of greenish-blue mist. It wound its way to the right and Corinthe leaned in that direction. The howls began to recede; the pounding in her head began to ease.
The ground solidified under her feet. The mist ebbed, until it swirled around her legs like a lazy cat. She cautiously moved forward as the fog dissipated, searching for the right doorway. Thousands of worlds connected at the Crossroad, and if she chose wrong, she might be lost forever. He might be lost forever. Lucas.
Humans entering gateways and traveling the Crossroad between worlds went against the very laws of the universe. Only Messengers and Executors were allowed to travel them. One thing was clear: it was her fault Luc had gotten away.
But the coil of mist still hung faintly in the air, and she could detect his human smell—something slightly spicy but soft, like cloves. The dim outline of trees took shape in front of her. Soon she had cleared the mist, and she found herself in a forest. The air felt thick and warm and humid on her skin. Almost instantly, she began to sweat.
Corinthe had seen the world of the Blood Nymphs on the great stone maps in the garden of Pyralis, which depicted the whole layout of the universe. The stones, like the universe itself, would constantly shift and morph, but she knew each world had a different relationship to the center of things.
She didn’t know exactly where this particular world existed, only that it was far from Pyralis Terra. It was dominated by forest, and beyond that, an endless mist.
The other Fates had told stories: wisdom collected through the ages from the marbles, from the whispers that reached them through the Crossroad. The Nymphs who lived here were parasites, and they were very protective of their forest. Of this forest. They nested in the branches of the living Salix babylonica trees and fed off the blood of the sentient creatures.
The sister tree of the Salix babylonica grew in Humana. They called it the weeping willow, as though the suffering of their kind could be felt even across the worlds. She brushed her fingers through a curtain of wispy tendrils so thin and delicate they looked like they might break off with only a gentle pull. The branches stirred, moved closer to her touch. A stem curled around her wrist, tugging gently, as if the tree wanted to play.
Corinthe knew better. While the trees appeared to be victims of the Nymphs, they could be as cruel as their bloodsucking masters. She slowly reached for her blade and remembered too late that it had disappeared into the void with Lucas.
She disentangled the vine carefully from her wrist and took several steps away from the tree. Angry hissing filled the air and the tree shook, the ends of its branches lashed out like whips. A high-pitched whine sounded behind her. Corinthe spun around.
Nothing.
Over her head, perched among the vast canopy of branches, which barely allowed any sunlight to penetrate, dozens of Blood Nymphs were watching her, their skin different shades of blue and green, so that they blended perfectly into the shadowed branches.
The whine sounded behind her again. This time when she swung around, a Nymph stood only a few feet away.
This one was pale yellow and virtually transparent, with spidery red veins crisscrossing the surface of her skin. Her flowing hair matched the color of her skin. Her eyes were slanted and lacked eyelids; they were like amethyst marbles. The Nymph hummed again, a sound that reminded Corinthe of the whine of an enormous mosquito. It made her skin crawl.
Above them, the others joined in, and soon the air filled with a crescendo of high-pitched echoes. The noise made pain blaze in Corinthe’s head. The trees swayed as if dancing along to their song.
“I’m not here to harm you. I’ll be quick.” Corinthe hoped that the Nymphs could not smell her fear. They fell silent again, watching her. Did they know what she was? Could Executors even perform fates here? Could she defend herself, if she needed to?
In Humana, Corinthe was an Executor. Here, though, the lines were blurred. She had never harmed another living creature of her own will, didn’t even know if she could. The ramifications could be catastrophic. She had lost a single marble and had been banished to Humana for it. What kind of punishment might the death of a Nymph, an unfated killing, bring?
Several more pairs of glowing a
methyst eyes peered down at her through the canopy of leaves. How many were up there, watching her, waiting?
Corinthe backed slowly away from the Nymph, glad that it did not follow. Then she quickly ducked down a pathway. The Nymphs would still watch her, but Corinthe was more worried that they would find Luc before she did.
Females who wandered into this world might end up as the Blood Nymphs were—parasites, killers, transformed into the pale, evil creatures with their sharp teeth and lidless eyes. But males? Males were teased, tormented, and bled slowly, skin pierced by sharp teeth in a thousand different places. Then they were fed to the trees.
She pushed on, faster now. She had to find Luc before something happened to him. He had to die by her hand. That was what the marble had shown. Her knife.
There was no other way to interpret it.
Her fate depended on his.
If she did not find Luc, if she did not kill him the way the marble had indicated—the hand, the knife—she would never be allowed to return to Pyralis Terra. Just thinking about her home sent such a strong wave of yearning through her that she almost stumbled.
Dozens of paths spiraled in different directions, dead-ended or changed orientation suddenly, only to curl around and return to where they had started. If Corinthe got lost in the mazes, she would be unlikely to find her way out and would be left to the fickle impulses of the Nymphs.
Corinthe stopped and closed her eyes. A light breeze blew tendrils of hair across her neck, and a burst of a sweet, exotic scent filled her lungs. The acrid harshness of Humana began to fade from her thoughts, and her old senses returned, sharpened. A subtle pattern emerged in her mind and she followed it, eyes still closed. Sounds filtered through the canopy: soft calls of birds, the rustle of leaves and the creak of old branches, the gurgle of the Nymphs feeding somewhere over her head. She didn’t dare glance up. She didn’t want to see what could not be unseen.
A lingering aroma of cloves, out of place among all the sweet smells of flowers, guided her down a narrow pathway to the right. The trail led deeper into the trees, the sunlight all but swallowed by shadow and fog. Several times Corinthe had to stop and backtrack when the scent faded, but she always found it again. Her tracking skills were rusty, but the more she used them, the easier it became.
A low hissing stopped her. The sound was lower, quieter than the calls of the Nymphs. She peered through a tangle of vines. A dozen enormous, translucent flowers grew in a circle in the middle of a sun-filled clearing. The flowers looked almost like guards, standing with their backs to one another. There was nothing like them, even in the garden of Pyralis, where every flower in the known universe grew.
Corinthe pushed her way off the path, mesmerized by the way the light hit the petals and shifted into different hues, as though each petal were made of a prism. Their buds were the size of overgrown pumpkins; their petals curled inward. It wasn’t until Corinthe stepped closer to examine a peculiar-looking vine that she saw it wasn’t a vine at all, but a slim wrist with green-tipped fingers.
Not Blood Nymphs. Not yet.
Inside each flower, a girl hung suspended, pierced with hollow vines that slowly drained her blood. Corinthe circled the flowers, a sick taste coating her tongue, and saw glimpses of paper-thin skin and unseeing eyes, of blood swirling through the hungry plant. It wasn’t the light that made the petals appear to change colors; it was the exchange of fluids from plant to girl. She knew vaguely how Blood Nymphs were created, but seeing the process up close made her feel sad and sick at the same time.
Sad. Sick.
Human feelings.
At the last flower, Corinthe stopped. This girl was early in the transformation, because her hair was still black—the same color as Miranda’s hair, Corinthe thought, and felt a momentary ache, wishing she had her Guardian’s advice.
The flower’s pistil had pierced the girl’s skin right at her wrist, just below a small tattoo of a jasmine flower. Corinthe watched as the girl’s blood slowly leaked out of her body, into the plant.
Was it too late to do anything for her? Corinthe couldn’t be sure. As far as she knew, the process of alteration was reversible if caught early enough. But past a certain point it could not be stopped—both plant and human would die.
It doesn’t concern you. Corinthe heard Miranda’s voice urging her to move on. This girl’s future was not in her control.
Already the girl’s skin was ghostly white. Soon her skin would take on the blue tint of the flower that changed her. Her blood would slowly be replaced with a fluid that would keep her alive, but only until she could feed like the rest.
It was a horrible thing to watch, but something compelled Corinthe closer, until she was just inches away from the girl. The aroma of cloves was overwhelming now, and Corinthe realized it hadn’t been Luc’s scent she’d been following.
She raised her hand, hesitated, then gently pushed a tendril of hair from the girl’s face. The girl stirred and moaned quietly. Her lips were blue-tinged, bruised-looking. Corinthe stared, unable to look away. A memory tugged at the back of her mind, but she couldn’t make it materialize.
“Hello?” Corinthe’s voice was soft as she leaned closer to the girl.
The girl’s eyelids fluttered, and she opened her eyes. Corinthe couldn’t look away.
She searched around the edge of the clearing and found a rock the size of her palm, smooth and tapered at one end like an ax blade. She closed her fingers around the stone and stood in front of the girl.
The vine was meaty, and sawing at it barely made a difference, but she didn’t stop, gripped by something she didn’t understand. The desire to free the girl was her only thought. It moved her past the pain, the sharp agony she felt in the vine, in the plant itself.
Clear liquid oozed from the cut vine and ran down her wrist. It itched, and Corinthe swiped at it. Her pulse thundered in her ears as sweat beaded her forehead.
It wasn’t working.
The vine was stringy and tough, and the rock just wasn’t sharp enough. She stopped to catch her breath, looked around for something sharper, and felt the air around her begin to vibrate.
A subtle rippling pattern ran through the canopy above her, and the leaves whispered words she didn’t understand. Branches closed in, eating away at the blue sky.
The Nymphs’ whines started quietly but crescendoed until they were nearly deafening. Bursts of pain exploded in Corinthe’s head; she dropped the rock and squeezed her hands over her ears. The noise sent her to her knees. It felt as though a knife was splitting her in two, making her whole body throb.
She fought the urge to scream as the pressure built inside her head. Just when it seemed that everything in her would explode outward, the sound abruptly stopped. The silence was deafening, beautiful.
Slowly, Corinthe took her hands away from her ears and dug her fingers into the earth, pushing her body upright. Her legs trembled, and a faint buzzing still echoed in her head. The clearing was revolving slowly in her vision; she took several deep breaths. A Nymph landed soundlessly in front of her, baring its teeth.
Corinthe moved into a crouch and scuttled backward. There was a hiss behind her. She swung around: another Nymph, close enough to touch, watched her through narrow eyes.
More Nymphs dropped from the trees, until she was completely encircled.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt anything.”
What had possessed her to try to free the girl? The urge felt like a distant, foggy memory, and it had clearly been a mistake.
“I was looking for someone, but he isn’t here. If you could direct me to a gateway, I will go and never return.”
Low, angry humming met her request.
A tangle of vines detached from the trees and slithered along the ground like a massive green snake. The trees had begun to lean closer, to weave their branches together like a fence, and she knew she had no hope of escape. The humming of the Nymphs swelled again. The vines lashed out together, encircling her legs and
yanking so hard she fell onto her back. More vines twisted around her arms, pinning her to the ground.
Suddenly, a low rumble like the sound of distant thunder reverberated through the ground. For a second the plants stilled, and a hush fell over the clearing. Even the Nymphs stopped crying. They began, inexplicably, to retreat.
The rumbling grew louder and changed into a thousand tiny beating wings. The canopy of branches above her parted, and Corinthe saw an enormous dark blot against the sky: thousands of tiny winged insects were swarming toward her. Corinthe felt her blood run cold.
Hornets.
She struggled to breathe through the panic filling her body. Fueled now by fear, she strained against the vines, kicking her legs, thrashing and pulling, but the vines only tightened their grip.
The first hornet stung her on the thigh and a searing flash of fire shot up her leg. She screamed, heard her voice sucked greedily away by the vegetation around her, as though the trees were feeding on her pain.
More fire: on her stomach, her left arm, her hand, one agonizing jolt after another. She barely noticed when the vines loosened and slithered away. The hornets’ venom coursed through her body; it instantly made her limbs weak and her fingers numb. When she rolled onto her side, her vision wavered, and the trees swam in and out of her sight. The clearing grew dim. Was it nighttime already?
Her body was so heavy. …
She wanted to sleep. …
Dimly, she thought she saw a small carving in the tree just in front of her. Almost like a door …
Her body quickly grew numb; the fire turned to an icy cold like she’d never felt before. But in her mind, she felt calm, cloaking her fear in a softness, a quiet. She seemed to hear music playing … as though the locket was open and calling to her. … Her mind was turning slowly, like the ballerina on its stand. …
Corinthe realized, with complete clarity, that she was dying. This was what she got for interfering. This was her penance.
Barely conscious, she watched the carved door swing open in the tree’s trunk.