Fine. If she wanted to play, I’d play, but the next time she wouldn’t catch me unawares. I would lie in wait, study her from the shadows, determine her weaknesses, and then I would strike. But it couldn’t be quick. I needed to re-prove my worth to my clade before they turned on me entirely, for a Prime was worthless on his own.
I took in her bright smile with straight, white, blunt teeth. The way her hair swished from side to side as she walked, her hips swaying to the same rhythm. I noted the way she was more keenon the Daemon female than her own kind, and how the Humans followed her but still kept their distance.
If I could have smiled in this form, I would have, because I had just found my in.
Soon, I would challenge her, and I was going to win.
Chapter 12
Oswald
‘The Unity Trials have been initiated. Your task: earn the clue, find the portal. Succeed and survive or fail and perish. The First Trial had commenced.’
Bright light shone through my closed eyelids. I didn’t want to open them, but I knew I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I had to find Junie.
I squinted as I cracked them open, blinking rapidly as my eyes adjusted to the intense light. I sent my healing magic there to help ease the way, sighing in relief when I was finally able to open them fully and take in my surroundings.
I was standing in a meadow, the tall green grass waving in the slight breeze, interspersed with white, pink, and yellow wildflowers. Enclosing the meadow were tall trees with leaves of a variety of colours, ranging from the typical green and autumnal oranges to unusual pinks, blues, and purples. They looked like flowers themselves, and if it weren’t for the textured bark I could make out on the trunks that were also in strange shades, I may have believed them to be so.
‘Oz!’
I snapped to attention. I would recognise my best friend anywhere, and he sounded panicked. Tracking the source of his voice, I found him picking his way through the tall blades of grass in my general direction, frantically scanning our surroundings. Enid trailed behind him like the loyal little puppy she was, though I was glad to see both of them were okay. Mostly. Enid was still favouring a bloodied arm, and I could seethe gash even from here. I would need to heal that before it got infected.
‘Oz.’ Another voice. Closer. Deeper. The strange sound, like rocks grinding, clued me in that it was the purple dude from before, and I turned to my right for confirmation. Sure enough, there he stood, dark hair curling around his impressively large horns that, with a closer examination under the brighter light of the sun, I realised were textured rather than smooth.
I wished Junie were here. She would have gotten a kick out of all these mythological creatures suddenly appearing out of nowhere.
My heart clenched with worry.I’m coming, sis.
‘Who even are you, man?’ I asked him, my anxiety over losing Juniper and whatever was going on here manifesting as anger. I didn’t mean to take it out on him. Truly. He’d tried to help after all, but I could also tell he wanted to fuck my sister, and since he was a complete stranger as well as an entirely separate species, I wasn’t so cool with that.
I was, however, reluctantly okay with letting him tag along if he continued to make himself useful. I figured the more the merrier when it came to trying to survive this place and whatever else the gods decided to throw at us. What did that disembodied voice say again? Oh, yeah.Fail and perish.No thanks. I’d rather go withsucceed and survive,thank you very much.
Hawthorne and Enid finally caught up, both of them eyeing up Tinky-Winky over here with a wariness, though I might have seen a flicker of interest behind Enid’s eyes before she turned her gaze back towards the man she was really after. I could practically see her heart beating through them, begging him to reciprocate her love even though he never would.
Barf.
‘What is this place?’ Thorne asked, taking in our strange new surroundings with a keen yet awed eye.
‘Apparently, it’s the first trial,’ I replied, picking apart the words I’d heard upon my awakening.
‘Right. But what the fuck are these Unity Trials anyway? Why are we even here? And where are Juniper and the others?’
‘I don’t know, but I intend to find out. Let’s go explore, see if we can find that clue so we can get the hell out of here.’
‘Oz,’ Tinky-Winky called my name again, and his demanding tone had me spinning on my heel to glare at him. Instead of meeting my hot-headedness with his own, he merely looked at me with a patient expression, his arm extended as he pointed towards the treeline.
No. That wasn’t quite right. There was one tree in particular that stood taller than the rest, towering over them all. Its leaves were a mismatched conglomeration of every colour of the surrounding trees, its bark also a collection of the colours we’d already seen. If I was correct in my deductions, this single tree had given life to all the others surrounding it.
And did it just… move?
My instincts screamed at me. Whatever this place was, whatever life forms called it home, there was no way to know what we would find. They could be gentle, or maybe we were already being hunted. Who’s to say the trees weren’t carnivorous, and we’d just been dropped right into their trap?
We weren’t on Earth anymore, that was for sure. And from the confused and wary looks on the other races' faces, it was clear we weren’t in a realm familiar to any one of us.
Oh, shit. How could I have missed it before? TheUnityTrials.Fivesupernatural races, four of which were previously believed to be either myths or long extinct. The new Fae symbol Junie had translated in the tomes. It was all connected.
Fate was leading us. But why?
