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“Atta, no!” The cry was guttural, rife with pure agony.

Lights began flickering in the fog. Blue, like the hottest part of the flame.

Wills-o-the-wispshe heard her own fragmented mind say.Corpse Flames.

She darted further into the fog, chasing one. Breath heaving, she pulled out a vial of black salt and ran harder.

A piercing scream filled the misty night, and Atta spun to face it, face the faeries she couldn’t see.

Teeth bared, she uncorked the vial. The screeching came again, like a banshee bent on escape.

Atta clutched the vial in one hand, the book in the other, and stomped forward. She could still hear Sonder’s anguished cries for her to stop, but he wouldn’t be able to reach her. The Faerie Wood had already swallowed her up, gnarled branches tangling behind her, impassable.

She paused, the old, twisted hawthorn in her sight.

Keep coming, daughter of many worlds.

Atta obeyed, a peculiar, terrifying calm washing over her.

She approached the hawthorn, opened the book, and read the last tale, the one they’d never gotten to.

The one of a maiden in search of more for her child. In search of magic and a world where purity and adventure were gods. A world that did not exist past a lie. A trick of the light. An illusion of the Fae. A lure.

The maiden found out the truth too late.

When the last word rolled off her tongue in the language of the Fae, it began to rain, a mirage of light and smog materialising before her.

The door.

Come through, too many voices sang—one within her lungs.

She stepped forward, the forest holding a collective breath, the Hawthorn Grove of Murdoch Manor peeking through.

But Atta had another vial. Around her neck. It had been there for weeks. She saw it in a dream, this moment. It hadn’t made sense then. But now it did.

She pulled the cork and tipped the contents into her mouth. It burned her throat, made her eyes water, and her stomach heave. But she kept it down and walked forward through the door.

Sonder

His voice was raw. He’d bellowed for her, screamed for her to stop. But he couldn’t get to her.

You buried her under the wrong hawthorn.

It had taken him too many minutes to understand. To grasp the gravity of her statement.

His mother had called the Fae to Dublin. He didn’t know how, but he knew it was the truth in his bones. And Atta had figured out how to make it stop.

He’d left the others fighting for Imogen’s life and ran around the house, shouting for her, searching for her, but when he saw the missing book from her room, he knew where she’d gone.

Sonder thought his head would explode, his heart would beat out of his chest, his lungs collapse. He’d been lost in a wood that was not his own for what felt like an indeterminate amount of time.

“Atta!” he bellowed again, his voice cracking, all used up.

And then the world exploded in white just before aBOOMshook the earth, knocking Sonder to his knees.

He covered his ears and closed his eyes, nearly blinded by the explosion.

AnotherBOOMcame before the sounds of crashing stones, trees cracking, glass shattering, branches falling, the world being destroyed. His world.