Bran shrugged. “She’s my familiar. She thinks and feels at me. It’s not words, more like emotions.”
Cillian didn’t know how that would work. “She always did have strange eyes.”
“You’re still taking this fairly well.” Bran tugged against Cillian’s grip, and he belatedly let the other man go. “I thought you would protest.”
“I think even if we were kids, I’d have believed you if you’d given me a chance.”
Bran opened his mouth, but whatever he was going to say was drowned out by Jupiter’s rapid-firecawing. Bran sighed, turning toward the door. “She’s getting impatient.”
Cillian pulled on his backpack, then shouldered his rifle and followed Bran out of the cabin. Jupitercawedagain from her spot on the torn-up dirt path before dropping a sprig of blue-colored flowers at their feet. Cillian stared at it. “I’ve seen those before.”
Bran shot him a sharp look as he knelt to retrieve the flowers. “Where?”
“By the cabin we found the surviving hiker in.”
Bran stood with the flowers in his hand, turning them over between his fingers. “These are Otherworld flowers. I found one clutched in my mother’s hand at the morgue, and the Fae lord had a garland of them wrapped around his antlers. Did you tell Mac about the flowers?”
“Why would Mac need toknow?”
Bran shrugged and pocketed the flowers. “He’s a guardian. They’re families who patrol the forests and mark the encroachment of the wyrding when it arrives for a witch to handle. In the olden days, they also helped divert attention from covens so people wouldn’t see we were witches.”
“So he knows? About you and your family?”
Bran turned away and started walking. “He’s always known.”
A flash of anger hurtled through him, but Cillian stuffed it down. Secrets were meant to be kept, and he couldn’t be mad that Mac had kept this. “What now?”
Jupitercawedand flung herself into the air, flying through the trees. Cillian watched her go and wasn’t surprised when Bran followed after her. “We find the wyrding.”
Cillian didn’t look back as they walked away from the cabin, the forest alive with the sound of insects and birds up with the sun. He gripped his rifle tight and kept an eye on their surroundings, looking deep into the trees that surrounded them. He’d always had a healthy wariness for the forest, but now he knew what horror called its shadows home. There was no unknowing what had happened last night. That Bran had lived his entire life knowing what clawed itself out of the woods however often would have given Cillian nightmares as a kid.
The rising sun chased the shadows away until it didn’t. Jupiter flew toward a distant shadow between the trees that might have been mist on any other day, but Cillian knew better now. The fog drifting between the trees wasn’t burning off, casting a pall over the hill they approached. Jupiter alighted on the leafy branch of a massive oak tree up ahead, its trunk split down the middle from what might have been a lightning strike. The cavity widened closer to the ground, like a black hole against a living trunk.
Flowers bloomed around it, but they weren’t any flowers Cillian had ever seen in a field guide. Tiny, vibrant crimson blossoms attached to thin branches that curved outward from the hole seemed to beckon them inside. Ice-white tulip-shaped flowers clustered at the base of the trunk and the gnarled roots there that dug into the earth and the mound behind it. Dripping from the jagged edges was the same sort of black sap he’d seen on the tree from yesterday.
They came to a stop in front of the oak tree, the space they stood in cold and the area quiet. Cillian reflexively looked over his shoulder, squinting through the thin fog, but saw no lights floating through the trees. The lack of them didn’t ease his worry any.
“This is the wyrding?” Cillian asked.
“The edge of it.” Bran looked up at the branches and raised his arm over his head. Jupiter launched herself off the branch and flew to him. She flapped her wings hard to break the dive, her claws reaching for his forearm. Bran moved his arm to take her weight, bringing her up to his eye level. “Lead the way?”
Jupiter preened Bran’s hair for a couple of seconds before he tossed her into the air again. Instead of flying up, she flew into the shadows within the tree, the tips of her wings brushing against some of the crimson flowers hanging down. It swallowed her whole, and Cillian worried about her crashing, but Bran didn’t seem concerned about Jupiter. About this place, yes, but not her.
“Why not burn it?”
“We’ve tried. It always comes back. This isn’t the first way into the Otherworld we’ve found over the years, just the newest. Jupiter tracked the lights here last night after they left the cabin. She couldn’t the other night because she was helping me see straight while I made a potion to get rid of my concussion.”
Cillian’s hand twitched with the need to touch Bran. “I didn’t know you were that hurt.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Bran’s expression was resolute in the dim sunlight coming through the lingering fog. “Ready?”
He didn’t want to be, but Cillian still followed Bran through the strange flowers and into dark shadows held within the massive oak tree. His feet sank into something that clung like mud once inside that cavity, and Cillian could only hope it was just that and nothing else. He didn’t need to crouch, the carved-out space large enough that he wouldn’t be able to touch the sides if he stretched out his arms. Even with the flowers, it smelled…rotten.
The lip of the hole had hidden a large cluster of softly glowing mushrooms that protruded from the inside bark of the tree close to the ground. Bran crouched before them, hands already sinking deep intothe mass. Cillian watched as he pried the mushrooms apart, clawing them free, revealing a pulsating hole beneath them, somehow edged with more flowers giving off an eerie blue light. Bran glanced back only once before he wedged himself into that hole that shouldn’t exist. Cillian crouched behind him, snagging the back of Bran’s T-shirt with his hand, not wanting to be separated.
Cillian ducked his head, gritted his teeth, and pitched himself into the impossible, following Bran the same way he’d done as a kid. Vertigo hit almost immediately. Through the swirling ache in that eerie blackness, he thought he heard a voice whisper at the farthest range of his hearing, distant and lyrical, calling to him with a terrifying sense of knowing.
Welcome home.
