(Or maybe he’s kidnapping us?) Liam suggests. (How do you say ‘we aren’t worth any real ransom money’ in Romanian?)
(I trust him,) Carys replies, undeterred. (He seems nice. Apparently he’s a real family man—he has six kids. Or maybe six goats. I’m not one hundred percent sure I’m not mixing up the words for ‘children’ and ‘goat’. But either way, I don’t think he’s going to kidnap us or murder us or anything.)
(Well if nothing else, the Nice Goat Man seems to be taking the long way around, doesn’t he?) I ask.
(You could just enjoy the scenery,) she suggests.
(There’s nothing to my left but empty fields, and Liam’s giant head is blocking the window to my right.)
To my surprise, after a second of hesitation, Liam gives me a crooked smile and takes my teasing bait. (You should feel grateful that you get to stare at me,) he replies. (A lot of people would kill for this view.)
(Behave, children,) Carys scolds.
(I will, as long as Elle stays on her side of the car.)
(Tell Liam to stop touching me please.)
(I will turn this car around!)
(Do you even know how to ask our driver to do that?)
(…No. But I have an app for that.)
I barely contain a laugh—the tricky thing about having amusing conversations entirely in your head. If our driver thought we were strange and entertaining before, he’d really lose it if we all started laughing for seemingly no reason at all.
Maybe because he’s thinking the same thing, Liam decides to start a new conversation out loud. “I was going to give this to you earlier, by the way,” he says, leaning over and digging into the brown paper bag at his feet. “But I didn’t get the chance.”
The way he says that last part basically translates his message to: I was going to give it to you at breakfast, but that ended disastrously before I could, so here we are.
“I found it at this random little shop in the village square.” He withdraws his hand, and then unwraps the tissue-paper-protected figurine that he’s retrieved. It’s a small little lizard carved out of wood and painted in brilliant shades of turquoise and grey.
Because of course it is.
“Oh, you’re hilarious.”
He grins. “I thought it had been awhile since I reminded you of your finest hour.”
The lizard thing is a running joke between us. And the finest hour he’s referring to is the moment it all started: two years ago, when I’d woken up in the dead of night because I felt something crawling on my leg. I’d screamed. Obviously. And then, when I’d seen what it actually was—a damn lizard— I’d screamed even louder, tripped my way out of my bed, gotten tangled in my covers, and smashed my head into my dresser hard enough to knock myself out.
Because, confession time: reptiles of all shapes and sizes freak me out.
I want to toss all snakes into a fiery inferno.
I won’t go into any body of water if there’s even the slightest chance that I might spot a turtle bobbing its creepy little head in and out of its shell.
And freaking lizards. I do not like the way they move. I do not like the way they dart their eyes around. I want to cringe at the thought of that weird little neck pouch thingy that some of them have going on—seriously, what is that?
All of this, of course, Liam finds hilarious. He was the one who’d reached my room first that night, expecting to find someone murdering me. I’d come back to my senses while in his arms, and after I’d told him what had made me knock myself out, he’d laughed for at least a solid minute before finally agreeing to hunt down the creature responsible. Then he’d insisted on releasing it outside instead of killing it, and I’ve never really forgiven him for that.
Ever since then, he likes to surprise me with dumb little lizard-themed gifts like this. I have a small shrine of them in my room—stuffed, glass, metal. All in my closet. So I can shut them out of sight, because just looking at them gives me the creeps.
This newest one is exceptionally creepy, with its black eyes made of shiny, thick dollops of paint. I shiver and squirm as Liam insists on walking it up and down my arm. I’d snatch it and fling it out the window, but I know it’s more than just a silly gift—it’s a peace offering. A reminder of all our silly inside jokes and all our good moments that vastly outnumber these past few uneasy days. So instead I bare my teeth at him in the closest thing I can manage to a smile while that thing is touching me.
“I hate you so much,” I say, lovingly.
“I know you do.”
I lean my head into his shoulder and sigh, and he finally takes that gross thing off my skin.
Our taxi pulls to a stop outside the small castle-like visitor’s center a few minutes later.
After Liam does his best to freak me out with the carving a few more times, and gets several more laughs out of it, I finally manage to grab the lizard and bury it deep in the corner of one of my bags, next to the stolen lockbox and the key it holds. I direct him to the visitor’s center to procure a map, and Carys goes with him while I take care of paying our driver and unloading the bags.
“Seems like the two of you made up,” Soren says, yawning as he comes around to help me with the bags.
I shrug. “We never stay mad at each other long. He gets too bored when he isn’t able to tease and torment me for his own amusement.”
I think I see something like jealousy flash in his eyes, but I tell myself I imagined it.
He says nothing else, only gives me a small, sleepy little smile as we finish piling our stuff out of the trunk.
I take a deep breath through my nose, sling several of the bags on my shoulder, give our driver a friendly little wave, and then start toward the visitor’s center. My steps are quick and determined. Soren has to jog to catch up with me.
“We can still talk to each other, you know,” he says. “And I promise I’m not going to jump you and force you to make out with me just because we’re standing within a few feet of each other.”
“I’m just trying to focus on our mission. And nothing else.”
“As am I.”
Before I can express my doubts about this, we’re rejoined by Carys and Liam. Carys is waving the map I asked for. It has several red stars and circles marked on it, apparently thanks to a particularly helpful visitor center employee.
“The people here are incredibly friendly,” Liam says, casting a look back at that center.
“He means the girls here are incredibly pretty,” Carys corrects. “The chick that gave us this map was doing some hardcore flirting. She was being more than just friendly.”
Liam sighs. “This beautiful face is a burden sometimes.”
“Is it possible to cause permanent eye strain from rolling them too much?” I ask. “Because if so I’m sending you my doctor bill.”
He elbows me in the side, and I laugh, happy that we’re all back to our semi-normal interaction with each other.
That happiness doesn’t last.
We make it maybe halfway to the trailhead we plan to take into the forest before I sense something odd. Carys and Liam both stop too, listening intently and taking deep breaths of the air, tasting it and studying it for a moment. The three of us exchange a look.
“Magic-blood?” Carys guesses, frowning.
“There was a hint of this scent back at the inn, too,” Liam says. “It was faint, though—not from anyone recent, I didn’t think. But this is definitely the same scent. Definitely a sorcerer.”
“We’re being followed?”
“Kind of surprised it took them this long to catch up with us, to be honest,” Liam says, his gaze sliding to Soren. “Magic leaves a trail, right? Your kind can sense the energy you leave behind every time you use a spell, is what I’ve always heard.”
“To an extent, yes,” Soren says, calmly ushering us toward an outbuilding behind the main visitor’s center. “But there are ways you can cover your tracks, which I’ve been trying to do. So they shouldn’t be able to
pinpoint us exactly, and we can do other things to throw off their search.” He throws a glance over his shoulder, makes sure no one is watching us, and then directs us into the weedy bit of yard behind the building.
“Are there snakes in Romania?” I ask, nervously eyeing the overgrowth he’s stomping through. “I’m not afraid. Just asking for a friend.”
“There are like ten different types,” Carys says.
“Cool. My friend will be thrilled. She loves snakes.”
Carys gives me a wry smile, then takes my hand and pulls me fearlessly into the brush and out of sight of anybody who might happen by.
Soren has already started doing those ‘other things’ to throw off our pursuers; his appearance is changing again. I watch, still mesmerized by this increasingly-familiar magic, as his hair grows shorter and darker, while his skin pales to an ivory complexion that makes his newly-blue eyes seem incredibly vibrant. I still prefer the green, but I wouldn’t say this looks bad.
He turns to me next, but I’m hesitant. “You were already exhausted earlier, from doing those neutralizing spells,” I point out. “You keep this up and you’re going to end up passing out.”
“The alternative is being easy targets,” he says with a shrug.
I can’t think of another decent protest fast enough to stop him from going to work.
He’s quick and efficient with his spells, even though I can see the fatigue steadily creeping and taking a more commanding grip on his features.
Soon, I have long tresses of silvery blonde hair and eyes a similar goldish-green of Carys’s natural color, while Carys bares a striking resemblance to that red-haired chick who was in The Breakfast Club. She keeps running her fingers through her hair and over her face, and pressing them against her skin like she expects it to give way like its some kind of hologram.
“This is so…fascinating,” she says.
“You mean weird,” Liam says.
“No, I mean fascinating. We shift and change in our own way, of course, but only into one thing, really. Still, I wonder how similar the elements of our different transformations are? When you break innate magic down to its most basic components, there’s really—”
“Friendly reminder that we’re being pursued by dangerous sorcerers,” I interrupt. “And I really don’t want to go back to prison, nor do I want to be tortured again anytime soon, so can we focus, please?”
She nods, somewhat begrudgingly. Then she redirects her intense focus to Liam, who’s standing with his arms folded across his chest, still looking like his normal self.
“I plan on shifting as soon as possible,” he says in response to our pointed looks, “There’s no sense in him wasting his energy… illusioning me or whatever.”
“You won’t be able to do that until we’re way deep into the woods,” Carys says, “and even then, it will depend on whether or not there are any normal people hanging around that might witness you.”
Soren cracks his knuckles, blinks several times and then closes his eyes, obviously trying to keep the last of his focus from slipping away. “It isn’t going to hurt,” he says.
Liam exhales a defeated breath. “Fine. Just do whatever you have to do.”
“Make him ugly,” Carys suggests, “so he’s not burdened with that beautiful face he was so distraught over earlier.”
The corner of Soren’s mouth quirks, and, just for a moment, he doesn’t look so tired. He looks like the powerful, confident guy I met outside my prison that night—even if those basic features have changed again.
I look away, studying the trees instead.
When I look back, the last of the magic is done. Liam appears older, his warm brown eyes hardened to the color of stone, and his wide, easygoing smile sharper looking with the absence of his usual dimples. And his scent is different, too, just like mine and Carys’s. It makes the wolf in me desperately uneasy.
He examines himself in a shiny scrap of metal that’s serving as patchwork against the back of the shed. “As I suspected,” he says, rubbing a hand of his now-slightly-stronger jawline. “It’s impossible to make me look ugly.”
“Whatever,” Carys says. “Your eyes are creepy.”
I nod in agreement. “You look like a guy I’d give a fake number to.”
“Well I’m not really into blondes,” he counters, “so I probably wouldn’t ask for your number anyway.”
“The woods are waiting,” Soren reminds us.
The air quickly turns solemn again as we trek our way across the broken pavement and into those woods—though we try to keep up some of the chatter, at least, so that we look like average backpacking college kids on a European road trip or whatever.
The scent of the following sorcerers only grows more obvious. Part of it is because the wind has picked up, whistling in from the south and carrying the scents of the visitor’s center with it, too. This is unfamiliar territory, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where anything is coming from—whether those magical scents are still at the visitor’s center, or if they’ve followed us into the woods. We leave a twisted path full of decoys just in case, with Soren pausing every half mile or so to trek off in another direction and perform spells meant to lure our pursuers toward those spell’s energies instead of toward us.
We walk as fast as we can without seeming weird, heading deeper and deeper into the trees—to a section of the forest that the pretty visitor center lady forcefully scribbled out with her red pen, warning us not to go that deep without a local guide. Local guides who are apparently in short supply, because even they don’t like going there.
It’s at the edge of this ominous area that we see the first evidence of the local tradition Carys told me about earlier.
There are mirrors all over the place.
Ornate and plain ones; rectangular and circular ones; some propped against rocks and roots, others tied and hanging from the trees. There are a few that look like they were hanging at some point, too, but now they’re lying on the ground, cracked or in pieces.
And then Liam adds to those broken ones, accidentally bumping his backpack against a too-loosely-tied one and sending it plummeting to the ground.
“Oops. That’s bad luck, right?” he asks, nudging the shattered mirror with the toe of his shoe. “For some reason?”
“In most cultures, yes,” Carys says. “The belief is generally that the mirror reflects the soul, and so to break a mirror is to break part of your soul. Parts of which will then be trapped in the mirror shards. Though you can heal said soul and restore it by grinding up the broken pieces so they don’t reflect anything, supposedly, if you’re feeling particularly superstitious.”
“Interesting,” he says.
But for a supernatural creature, Liam has always been decidedly un-superstitious, so the mirror and its pieces stay where they all fell.
“Yup,” Carys agrees. “And so is this—” She picks up a mirror framed in a garish border of fake gold, and she holds it up so Liam and I can see ourselves—our actual selves, and not the illusions Soren created for us.
“A properly-made and ritualistically-blessed mirror can’t lie.”
“So the locals believe these mirrors are somehow containing whatever evil is here?”
“Reflecting it back into the woods,” she says, nodding. “Apparently whatever evil is in here doesn’t like what it sees in the mirror, and won’t cross this makeshift wall of them.”
She continues rambling off the facts and folklore she knows about mirrors, but my attention has started to drift toward Soren. Without so much as a comment about broken mirrors or souls, he’s already crossed through all those mirrors and put at least fifty feet between himself and them. Like he’s avoiding his own reflection. Or avoiding letting us see that true reflection.
I should have expected as much, I guess; I already knew he hadn’t shown me his true appearance since we met.
Still, this extra effort to avoid it makes me uneasy.
Carys and Liam are caught up enough
in their own conversation that they don’t seem to notice his strange behavior. I don’t say anything for the moment, because the four of us are getting along as well as we ever have, and I don’t want to mess that up if I can help it.
But I do find a small, folding compact mirror, and I discreetly slide it into my back pocket.
Then I jog casually after him. The other two catch up, and at almost the exact moment they reach us, a second mirror crashes to the ground.
The sound of it cracking echoes eerily through the quiet forest.
“More bad luck,” Carys mutters. And the fact that she looks anxious about it—when she’s usually the most rational one among us—chills me to the point that I can’t get the goosebumps on my arm to settle, no matter how hard I try to rub them away.
“It was just the wind,” Liam insists.
“Mirrors falling and breaking on their own is worse luck than you breaking one. It supposedly means that someone among you is going to die soon.”
“Not it,” Liam and Soren and I all say, almost in unison, and Carys looks unamused as the three of us share a quiet laugh.
“This place is giving me the creeps,” she says, “let’s just get this search over with.”
“We haven’t seen any humans for miles,” Liam says, stretching, and wiggling his fingers in front of him until they start to shift into black claws. “And I’d feel much more comfortable searching as a wolf.”
“Probably faster, too,” Carys agrees, and after a hesitant glance around and a few sniffs at the air, she joins him in transforming.
The two bound circles around Soren and me for a moment before streaking deeper into the trees, one on either side of the increasingly-overgrown path we’ve been traveling on.
They don’t go far—at least not at first. I can hear them crashing through the brush, and for several minutes I occasionally catch glimpses of them; Liam’s white fur is particularly easy to keep track of.
But eventually, something must catch their senses, because they both slip out of sight, leaving me with only my sense of smell and hearing to keep a general idea of their location.
I run a hand over the hilt of my sword. I try to hold in a sigh, but I don’t quite manage it.
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