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We’re in a small clearing with forest extending over hills in every direction. Shit. This is not the wood I chased a fox into. My eyes shoot to the moon, the one that held a different phase before I entered this forest.
A shiver skitters through me. I point in the direction where Colleen, Charlie, and Jeremy Olk should be. “Where did they go?”
“They went nowhere. It’s us who did the traveling.” He drops his gaze. “When you climbed the stone, and I caught you from the fall, we passed through the curtain of the Veil to this place.”
I point to the trees. “But I saw the same leaning stone?”
He shakes his head. “Not the same one. Many Veil forests are marked with such stones.”
The more I look around, the stranger the landscape becomes. Huge trees with multiple curving trunks twist high into the night. There’s no movement to the air. No night wind. The full moon illuminates clouds that seem frozen in the sky. Ambient sound is nonexistent in this stalled reality. Our voices are the single break in the silence.
I should be raging at him. What he’s done is nothing short of a bizarre abduction. I close my eyes for a long moment, but there’s no fear in my gut.
“Where are we, Sion?”
He lowers himself onto the damp grass, back against a tree trunk. He beckons me to join him. I go as far as the large flat stone in front of him and sit.
“Are you ready for more drabs of truth?”
“No drabs—everything.” There must be an explanation aside from the fact we exist in a fantastical dimension where only Sion, me, and what did he call them, Veil Sprites, have presence?
The moment I think of the Veil Sprites, warmth prickles inside me. With inexplicable certainty, I know they create the heat.
A flurry of questions blows through my mind like the beginning of a winter snowfall. “Why aren’t you limping? What do you mean we traveled? Who’s himself you were talking about, and what curse?”
Sion’s eyes glaze as he fiddles with his hair. With minimal thought, he blurts, “Himself is Finnbheara, the one who sent you to me.” My silence causes him to lean closer. “Finnbheara, High King of the Connacht Fae, the Good People.”
“I know who he is. How does he know who I am?”
He thrusts a hand inside his jacket sleeve and madly scratches. “He makes it his business to know.”
My throat is so dry, I barely eke out words. “You’re a Faerie.”
He rubs a hand across his mouth, shaking his head. “No. I’m as human as you, but also a Veil guide, a wanderer as I said before and you’re meant to be my—” His gaze catches the moon as if the word he seeks might be etched across its surface. One finger rises in the air. “Partner.” Suddenly, he kneels in front of me. “Have you ever been awake, but the world around you changes? Things happen that ought not to be happening surrounded by a wee shimmer of color?”
My dream flashes.
I nod.
“It’s the Veil showing itself to you. You’ve been dipping a toe into it your whole life.” He spreads his arms. “Tell me, love, are you frightened? Does this feel wrong?”
Can this be true? Were the fantastic images within a prismatic shell that I’ve seen as long as I can remember this Veil playing with my mind?
Oddly, I’m not frightened. Inklings of alarm melt away. Fingers clutch my grandmother’s charm hanging around my neck. Is the absence of fear the strength it promised?
Confusion pecks harder at my brain. Here with Sion, I haven’t felt this at home in my skin since the last day Máthair and I worked together in the greenhouse. I search for sense in the strangeness, but it’s out of reach.
“Not wrong exactly—different.” I study his face and those eyes that see me now. “I can’t find the words yet, but it doesn’t feel wrong. You don’t feel wrong.” I tap a finger on the back of his hand. “Why don’t you feel wrong when all you’ve done since we met is make me want to smack you?”
He stiffens on the defensive. “It’s you’s been taxing me since you walked into the Druid’s Cave with your wobbly courage.” Sion’s shoulders collapse, and he stares at the ground instead of me. “I was sure Finnbheara chose a weakling to help me, a fraud to mock my failures.”
Slowly, his chin rises, and those green glass eyes capture me in their gaze. “When you spoke with the ghost girl, my faith caught fire. I began to believe the Veil called the right one home.” He grabs my upper arms, breath hot across my face. “Eala, as I said, there was no little girl at Charleville Castle. No missing parents. ‘Twas a spirit who recognized you have the sight.”
His hold grounds me as each new shard of mystery threatens to break me apart. “Sight?”
“What’s invisible to others is visible to you. A gift from Finnbheara.”
“Finnbheara’s gift was to show me the spirit of a dead kid?”
