Page 73 of Hunted

“Tell her what?” Tallin asked.

“That we are going with her. We are going to Arcadia.”

“I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

Helen looked down at the little Winter Sprite and grinned. She then regarded her sisters. “Our babies are in trouble,” she said. “They need our help.”

Pepper nodded. “I know,” she said, and she produced another little booklet from within her cloak. She opened it to reveal a full set of magic sigils of all kinds. “That’s why I always carry these, as well. For emergencies.”

Helen took Pepper’s arm, who then took Evie’s arm in hers. “Arcadia is a cruel bitch,” Helen said, as the three of them advanced on the portal. “But if she thinks she’s going to hurt our children, and that we are going to sit idly by while it happens, she’s sorely mistaken.”

“I haven’t gone on an adventure in a long time,” Evie said. “This is exciting.”

Her voice lingered in the air as the three witches—and Tallin—stepped through the portal, disappearing into a bright flash of light.

A moment later, the portal was gone… as if it had been waiting for them to step through.

* * *

Arcadia

Travelling between worlds was disorienting.Much more so than the kind of teleportation magic my grandmothers had at their disposal. Still, the transition from one icy field to another was less difficult to manage than the last one had been. There was no retching this time, and only a minor twist of the stomach.

Already the air smelled different, here. Colder, but not in an uncomfortable way. Fresher.Cleaner. Wherever we were, it was night, and the moon was out—only this one was full instead of a crescent. The field we were in was mostly flat and snowed over. I spotted a hill nearby, but I couldn’t pick out any landmarks from here.

Behind us, the portal we had stepped through continued to shimmer and glow.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” Valerian said. “We are back in Arcadia, in the Winter Kingdom at least.”

“I don’t recognize this place.”

Valerian shook his head. “Me either…”

I looked over at him. “Why do you say that like it’s a bad thing?”

“I like to think I’m pretty well travelled. There are very few places in the Winter Kingdom I haven’t gone.”

“There’s a hill over there. Maybe we’ll see more on the other side of it?”

Valerian nodded, then started to walk. We left the portal behind us and made our way toward the hill, climbing it as we reached its base. I realized something as I was walking, though. The air didn’t quite smell… all the way right. There was something about it that felt strange to me, maybe a littleoff.Like milk that was beginning to sour but hadn’t quite soured fully.

The more we walked, the more time we spent here, the more I started to worry that something was wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. It wasn’t just that the air didn’t smell right all of a sudden. The mountain ranges off in the distance seemed alien to me, but that was nowhere nearly as alarming as the trees—or lack of trees—around us.

The higher we went, the further I could see… and the more I saw, the tighter the knot in my stomach grew.

It wasn’t that there were no trees… it was that the trees had all been cut down. All that remained of them were stumps, covered in snow. I couldn’t help myself. I started to run up the hill, racing to get to the top and dreading what I was going to find when I got there.

It was enough to bring me to my knees, panting, breathing heavily.

Hacked up tree trunks, as far as the eye could see. An entire forest wiped out, not a single tree left standing. It wasn’t that the mountains were different or alien, it was that I had never seen them from this angle before, because the last time I was here, this was a forest. And not just any forest, either.

This was the forest of the Moon Children.

Their home.

The sacred place that hid the entrance to their grove from the outside world.