A Shade of Vampire 43: A House of Mysteries(52)

The Druid needed to be told of what I’d seen when I visited the tree—that I knew about the last Daughter’s hiding place.

The tree had come from the Daughters of Eritopia, and if they were as dangerous as Bijarki and the Druid had claimed they could be, then I needed to be on guard. I vowed not to visit the magnolia tree again till I had told the others. It just wasn’t safe.

Vita’s hand pulled again suddenly on mine, and I gripped her more tightly.

“Focus on my voice,” I called to her. “They’re not real. Keep hold of me.”

“Vita, no!” Bijarki yelled, at the same time that Vita tried to slide out of my grip. Our hands were becoming hot and slick with perspiration, making it harder to hold on to one another. I quickly grabbed her wrist as her fingers slipped from mine, holding on to her delicate bones, almost afraid that I could break them. I ignored my concerns—better an injured wrist than Vita breaking free and joining the shape-shifters.

Soon, her pulling stopped and it seemed like she’d come back to reality. Her arm went limp and the tension of my arm lessened as she moved closer next to me. I worried again that Field hadn’t made a noise, but his grip was still firmly in mine.

Slowly, the whipping of the sand seemed to die down. I thought I could see a horizon beyond the storm—hope that we would soon be leaving the sand behind. Sure enough, a few minutes later, all of us picking up the pace in a desperate need to escape the creatures and their taunts, the sands died down completely. We stepped out on to the same cracked red earth, finally freed.





Serena





I was relieved beyond words to finally escape the sandstorm. I had thought my experience in the swamp would have prepared me for facing the shape-shifters again—and in a way, it had—but their tactics were different this time, and far more insidious. At first, I had thought it was Draven calling to me, but then the voices had started speaking about Draven, and how, if I ever wanted to get home, to realize my dreams of Brown and the other Ivy League colleges I was so set on, I would need to leave him and my friends and follow them. I had found myself bizarrely tempted, even though I knew deep down what they were offering was completely illogical. They had also told me it was Draven himself who had brought about Elissa’s death and his father’s eventual downfall. None of this could have been true, but the shape-shifters did such a good job at painting Draven out as a cruel, vindictive demon that the moment we left the storm, I dropped his hand abruptly.

No one spoke for a few moments as we stood looking out at the horizon. The earth was the same as before—red and cracked, completely desolate, with arid sand brushing up against my bare feet as it was sucked into the storm behind us.

“That was intense,” Jovi said huskily, not looking at any of us as he kicked the ground with his shoe. His tone was bitter, and I wondered what he had been told in there. Draven looked no better than the rest of us—his expression was pale and haunted, and he looked out on the horizon with his lips set in a disgusted grimace.

I was confused about where we were. From the way Draven had spoken, I had thought we’d be out in the atmosphere of the planets somewhere, staring at them all in the distance, in the same way we traveled through the In-Between from the portal to the fae star. If the Daughters were guardians of Eritopia, why were they on ground level? Why were they on a star? I asked the Druid to explain, partly trying to distract him and refocus our guide on the matter in hand.

“This is all an illusion,” he muttered. “None of it is real. Not the desert, the sandstorm—they’re just protections created by the Daughters. I don’t exactly know where we are.”

“But our bodies are really here, right?” I asked, checking as I tried to gain an understanding of a land that was just illusion. “We’re not just back in the basement, dreaming or anything?”

The Druid shook his head with a smirk.

“No, we’re really here, it’s just that ‘here’ doesn’t exactly exist.”

“Right,” I replied sarcastically. That made zero sense.

“So, what do we do now?” Jovi asked. “Where do we find the Daughters?”

“We don’t, they find us,” Draven replied, moving over to a rock that jutted out from the earth—the only barrier I could see against the steady influx of sand that ran like an ocean along the earth. It provided a little shade from the intensity of the sun’s glare, and I went to join him, already feeling like my skin was burning.

“For how long?” I asked as I sat down.

“As long as it takes,” he replied, exhibiting a patience I didn’t share in the slightest.