Rising Silver Mist

by Olivia Wildenstein

  Cruz placed his free hand against the back of the locker. The circle slashed with irregular lines flared on his wrist.

  I simply had time to think, the key to the portal, when my body was sucked up as though through a giant straw and funneled through an opening that wasn’t supposed to accommodate a human body and yet stretched widely, viscously around me like a warm mouth.

  Part II

  Neverra

  33

  First Sight

  I didn’t close my eyes as I went through the portal, not that there was much to see, but there was much to feel. It was like penetrating jelly that didn’t stick, dark jelly that absorbed all the light. I half-expected to hear a slurping noise, but there was no noise.

  Just impossibly thick silence.

  When my head broke the gummy surface, noise didn’t return. My shoulders pierced the top of the portal, and the hush grew deeper. The jelly slid off my chest, my waist, my thighs, my legs, and finally freed my feet, before hardening beneath my soles.

  Only my pounding heart and rapid-fire breaths shattered the endless silence surrounding me. I looked down and gulped. I was standing on a fisheye lens no thicker than the blade of a knife that magnified the inside of the boathouse.

  Slowly, I lifted my chin and stared around me. A breeze blew strands of black hair around my face. It smelled like snow and metal and mud, yet there was no snow, no metal, no mud. At least none that I could see.

  I pressed my hair behind my ears.

  Thick-trunked trees circled around me like silent sentinels, roots so far below and crowns so far above me that it was impossible to tell their size. Vines as large as tunnels spiraled around the great trunks. I squinted when movement caught my attention. Dark dots scuttled up and down the vines like shield bugs, except they weren’t insects, they were people. And they were looking at me. Staring.

  Thousands of them.

  I backed up, and my foot hit air. I flailed, gasped, but Cruz caught me and tugged me back on the manhole-sized portal.

  “You know how to make an entrance,” he said.

  I clamped my mouth shut so tightly, my teeth bit down on my tongue. I tasted blood. Blood and fear and weakness. My ribcage ached. My muscles trembled as I faced the bewildering immensity surrounding me.

  Birds glided around my mirrored lily pad.

  Not birds.

  People.

  People were flying.

  Hundreds of them!

  Circling Cruz and me like buzzards scenting a carcass.

  I shuddered again. Cruz’s hand tightened around mine. Was he scared I would leap to my death instead of facing my new life? If that was his conclusion, then he didn’t know me well. I might’ve been a lot of things—trusting, stubborn, dithering—but not suicidal.

  I looked at the faeries sailing lazily through the air, trying to spot a familiar face. Not a single one struck a chord within me. Was Ace among them?

  I inhaled a sharp breath that went down like an icicle as one faerie rose before me and reached out. The searing fingertips skimming my arm made me jolt backward. My back hit Cruz’s hard chest.

  “Tell them not to touch me!”

  “They’re curious. Most of them have never left Neverra. Never met a hunter.”

  I crouched and scraped at the surface of the portal that was no longer gelatinous, but hard as glass. “Take me back,” I said urgently. I kept digging. One of my nails caught on the edge and ripped. “Take me back!”

  “There’s no going back. Not for a while.”

  He reached around my waist and yanked. His arm, like a claw, hauled me off the only piece of solid ground and dangled me like a field mouse over a void that seemed to stretch forever. Instead of flying me downward, Cruz flew upward, into a band of clouds so thick I felt them around me, a cloying ocean of spider webs. The silken threads clung to the exposed skin of my neck and face and hands, wrapped around my ankles.

  With my hands, I brushed them off. I quivered as more encased me. Swiped my palms over my cheeks faster, wishing I’d worn a face mask and a helmet.

  “The mist will vanish once the sun warms your skin.”

  The mist.

  This was the infamous mist! Which meant…which meant the Woods’ castle was close. We broke through the cottony layer of mist, and there it stood, rising behind a carved pink marble arch that could accommodate the passage of a hundred people holding hands.

  Beyond the arch sprawled a courtyard of buffed white stone that glimmered like rock salt. Massive pillars, made of the same polished stone, held up a vibrant hanging courtyard as vast as the cherry fields surrounding Holly’s house. Turrets covered in moss spiraled to points on which rested pink-veined spheres that looked like solid chunks of rose quartz. The few doors I could see gleamed gold, and windows sparkled like cut diamonds. Twin waterfalls coursed down the castle’s white stone walls and filled two shallow basins at the center of the overhanging garden. The water gleamed silver and lavender in the brilliant sun.

  Lavender. Because the sky was purple. Not blue.

  Faeries twirled around us. They didn’t try to poke or prod me, but they flew so close I could feel their fiery breaths on my forehead. Goosebumps coated my body like the mist had earlier.

  We landed on the stone terrace. Roots from the overhanging garden poked out of the dirt that magically hovered over our heads. Lianas with glittery flowers swung like a beaded curtain from the ceiling of packed soil.

  “Linus asked to meet you before the ceremony tonight.”

  I flung my gaze to Cruz’s face. “Linus?” I choked.

  “Linus Wood. Ace’s father.”

  “I know who he is.” I shivered as dread hardened my shoulder blades. Around us, other faeries had landed.

  I startled when I recognized two of them. They were Lily’s friends, the ones I’d seen back at Astra’s the day Stella tried to feed me a mallow-spiked cupcake.

  One had dyed pink hair, and the other a glossy brown mane that hit her exposed hipbone. All the faeries wore clothes, but the fabric was gauzy and pearlescent, revealing curves and bulges. Thankfully, they weren’t transparent in the places that mattered.

  Cruz was still holding on to me. Part of me wanted to pluck his fingers off my arm; another part was thankful for his touch. Until that part remembered it was his fault I was in this strange land in the first place. He tugged on me, and although I followed, I shrugged him off. Close, but no longer touching, we walked through the crowd that parted around us.

  I stared around me as we passed a set of colossal golden doors and entered a large hall with a distant, vaulted ceiling. It was lined with those diamond-cut windowpanes which refracted light over the white stone floor.

  Ahead of me loomed a raised dais. And from that dais rose a tree with translucent amber leaves. A seat was carved in its trunk. A man with thick, strawberry-blond hair topped with a gold wreath sat in it.

  The infamous Linus Wood.

  There was something of Ace in that face. The chalcedony-blue eyes, the golden skin, and the chiseled square jaw. But where Ace’s handsomeness blazed off him, this man’s beauty was as cold and hard as the floor beneath my feet.

  As I approached, his calculating gaze swept over me, from sneakers to snarled hair. Next to him stood two women. One of them was his wife—I recalled her name from the article I’d read on Ace and Angelina: Addison—a former actress and model with shoulder-length blonde hair, unmoving shiny red lips, and large gray eyes that seemed vacant. The other one was Ace’s fiancée, Angelina, an oval-faced, dark-haired beauty with cleavage that rose alluringly out of a silver bra. Her long fingers, fitted with more rings than most people owned, stroked her bare, rounded midriff incessantly. She stood as close to Linus as his wife did, perhaps closer, her upper lip hiked into a small, repulsed smile over her very white and straight teeth.

  “We finally meet, Catori Price.” The boom of Linus’s voice made me jolt and grab onto Cruz.

  When I realized I was clinging—again—to the faer
ie who’d ruined my life, I let go and put some space between us. He might’ve been the lesser of two evils, but he was still evil.

  Linus glanced at his wife. “She’s pretty, isn’t she, Addi?”

  Sluggishly, Addison’s face tipped down toward her husband, and even more slowly, she nodded, but her eyes were unfocused. In college, I’d been around a lot of stoners, and that’s how Addison Wood struck me, as a woman hopped up on some drug that decelerated her body’s responses.

  Linus grinned wolfishly at me. “I hear you will be joining our family.”

  I didn’t answer. What was there to answer?

  “We are very excited to meet a real-life hunter.”

  “Half-hunter,” Cruz corrected Linus.

  Linus flapped his hand as though that wasn’t important. “Where is my son? Ace!” His voice reverberated in the enormous throne room. Hushed whispers swarmed around me. “Ace?” he bellowed again, but was met with silence.

  “Would you like us to fetch him, Massin?” a golden-eyed guard asked.

  Linus flapped his hand again. “As long as he’s here tonight, there’s no need. After all, he knows the girl.” His gaze swept over me again.

  My shoulders locked tight, and a bead of sweat traveled down my spine. A burst of churning air blew against my clammy cheeks, whipped my hair in a frenzy. I looked up and almost ducked when I saw the smooth underside of a black leathery wing brushing the air over my head.

  There was a dragon.

  A real-life dragon.

  I stared around me, half-expecting to see people fall to their knees and scream, but people barely even blinked at it.

  My heart held so still I thought it would shatter if someone flicked it.

  The black-scaled dragon landed softly on the stone floor and tucked its fibrous wings alongside its body. The large body shimmered, and then its edges blurred and shrank into a lithe, human body.

  A woman clad entirely in skin-tight black leather replaced the dragon. Her cropped hair was as black as Cruz’s, her eyes as green as his. Which made sense. The—what had Borgo called her?—draca was Lyoh Vega, Cruz’s mother.

  The woman who’d killed my lookalike Ishtu eons ago.

  Her eyes narrowed as she studied me. Did she see Ishtu? She approached us, touched two fingers to her son’s forehead. He bent his head.

  “Blessed be the skies that brought you safely home, my son,” she told him, before lifting her fingers off his forehead. Her hand traveled toward my head.

  I jerked backward. My heart stammered and spun, and my brand flared to life.

  Lyoh’s eyes traveled to my hand. “I thought the girl was bonded to you?”

  “Why in Neverra would you think such a thing, mother?”

  “Patila saw a V.”

  The name conjured an image of the ebony-skinned faerie I’d met in Ruddington, the one who’d seared my fingertips.

  “There have always been two Vs, mother. Ace beat me to her.”

  Why was he lying?

  Lyoh studied her son, then her gaze traveled over my face again. She lifted her middle and index fingers again, and although I shied away, the tips met my forehead. “May truth line your heart, Catori.”

  A little shock of electricity zapped through me.

  “Yes, I am quite terrifying. But only to those who seek to wrong our world.”

  I jumped as I realized she’d just read my thoughts.

  “Do we have your blessing, mother?”

  A smile tugged on one side of her mouth, and my throat went very dry. My tongue darted out and moistened my lips.

  “You are a lucky girl, Catori. Our kind does not usually mix with undesirables. But since you are also part Seelie”—gasps rose from the assembly—“I cannot outright refuse a union between you and my son.”

  Dread drained the blood from my face, suctioned it out of my extremities. I shivered.

  As though feeling the terrible chill racking my body, Cruz sidled in closer to me. “Let’s not overwhelm my fiancée in her first hour among us. Linus, may we be excused? Catori and I have much to discuss before the ceremony tonight.”

  Linus leered, then fluttered his fingers, his wreath winking in the faelight. “Of course. Of course. Enjoy your discussions.” Laughter rang through the assembly. “See you at sundown, Cruz…Catori.” He kissed his index and middle finger and held them out to me, then rose, and trailed by Angelina and Addison, disappeared behind his tree-throne.

  “Mother.” Cruz inclined his head toward his mother, whose eyes had arced back down to my hand, to the faint white lines of the W.

  She backed away from us. Cruz took my limp arm, spun me around, and tugged me back through the throngs of people. When we arrived at the edge of the stone terrace, he scooped me up and dove off, then darted like one of my arrows toward the copse of giant trees.

  I clung to his neck, fear knocking into me each time he winged around a trunk. We went so high, I expected my ears to pop, but they didn’t. Maybe, like the sky’s color, the air pressure was different in Neverra. At least the air held oxygen like the air back home.

  Home.

  It already felt so far away.

  Three stories from the crown of a tree, our flight slowed. One last swoop, and we landed on a small wooden porch with no railing. Clearly, faeries had no fear of falling. I didn’t let go of Cruz until he’d walked far enough from the edge of the landing pad. When he set me down, my legs threatened to give, feeling more like gummy worms than solid muscle. I reached out for the wall of rough bark in which was carved a door. He pressed his fingertips against the wood and pushed it. The door swung heavily.

  Wordlessly, he led me inside the dark hollow that brightened as he stepped inside. There were no lamps, yet the vast space was bright. The wall opposite us was one large panorama of sky and sun and floating palace.

  I approached the window, and my eyes that had managed to stay dry slickened with tears.

  Trapped.

  I was trapped.

  Like a baby bird that didn’t know how to use its wings. Unlike the baby bird, if no faerie magic coursed through my veins, I would never learn to fly.

  I thought of the bird I’d healed at Holly’s when I was small. I remembered how her hand had closed around mine as I’d held it, how a smile had creased her face when I’d opened my palm and the broken bird had writhed, alive again. Had I done that? Or had Holly?

  What the hell was I? And how the hell would I find out trapped within a tree trunk?

  “You should rest, Catori.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut to press back the tears before he could see them. “Can your mother read minds?”

  “Only when she touches you.”

  “Good thing I wasn’t thinking of my changing brand when she did.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “Why did you lie to her?”

  “That is none of your concern.” His green eyes settled on the mist floating below the palace.

  Arms folded, I turned toward him. “I’ll be your fiancée soon. Am I not allowed to know your secrets?”

  “Someone will come to dress you an hour before the ceremony.”

  “I thought you and your mother were close now.”

  “Which leaves you many hours to relax.” He extended his hand. “Give me your phone, so I can text your father that you arrived in Rwanda safely.”

  I stared wide-eyed at him. “It’s barely been one hour.”

  “Not on Earth.”

  I dug my phone from my windbreaker. The screen was scrambled, the pixels blinking strangely. Ace hadn’t lied. Phones really didn’t work here.

  I handed it over.

  When Cruz started toward the door, I asked, “You’re leaving me alone?”

  He twisted around. “Would you rather I stay?”

  “No.”

  A groove appeared between his eyebrows. “Then I will see you tonight.”

  When the door of the apartment swung shut behind him, my body gave an involuntary shudder. I stared
at the space around me, a vast canopy bed made up of crisp white sheets, bookcases filled with leather-bound books. I picked one at random and read the title: Plantae. I flipped through it. There were pages and pages of text, but none of it was in English—Faeli, I supposed. The blocks of text were interspersed with etchings of strange plants. Some of them resembled familiar plants with long stalks and wide leaves, but some were unlike anything I had ever seen, made of feathers or dotted with star-shaped berries. I flipped through the rest of the book, then replaced it and wandered through the rest of the apartment. I discovered a bathroom made of wood and rough gray stone.

  I turned one of the knobs in the shower. Water hissed through hidden pipes before finally spurting out. I reached out with my palm, but yanked it away almost immediately. It was freezing.

  I searched for another knob, but there wasn’t another one, and then I remembered: made of fire. Why would faeries need warm water?

  I exited the bathroom and wandered through the living room that consisted of four large armchairs centered around a circular fireplace—hazardous inside a tree. Then again, humans built wooden houses with working fireplaces.

  I returned to the window. The farthest I could see was where the mist licked the bark of the skytrees. Calimbors. The word Borgo had taught me hit my brain like a smooth rock skidding over a pond. My mind rippled with more memories, then associated those memories with the facts I’d gleaned from Lily and Ace.

  In my perch, I felt like a rock climber dangling on the side of a cliff. My purchase on my new world seemed tenuous at best, but at least Lily, Borgo, and Ace had given me tools to use.

  After a long while, I turned away from the window, shrugged out of my windbreaker, kicked off my sneakers, and climbed onto the bed. I didn’t think I could sleep. Not in a strange bed with adrenaline spiking my blood.

  What if Cruz returned?

  What if faeries crept up to the window to peek inside?

  What if…

  I yawned.

  34