Corinthe’s heart skipped a beat when the dancer began to slow. She watched in fascination. Where would it point? To home, or to Luc?
She closed her eyes and imagined the soft moss and the twilight air buzzing with fireflies, the smell of flowers in the Great Gardens, the stone statues that jealously guarded the river that flowed into all time.
No. Corinthe wanted to go home, but to be accepted there required one thing: killing Lucas. She focused on him instead—his black hair, the square jaw, the way he’d held her waist when they were both knee-deep in the water.
Her eyes fluttered open and the winds lessened. She felt more stable as she willed the ballerina to find him. It slowed to a stop, finally pointing to a coil of greenish-blue mist. It wound its way to the right and Corinthe leaned in that direction. The howls began to recede; the pounding in her head began to ease.
The ground solidified under her feet. The mist ebbed, until it swirled around her legs like a lazy cat. She cautiously moved forward as the fog dissipated, searching for the right doorway. Thousands of worlds connected at the Crossroad, and if she chose wrong, she might be lost forever. He might be lost forever. Lucas.
Humans entering gateways and traveling the Crossroad between worlds went against the very laws of the universe. Only Messengers and Executors were allowed to travel them. One thing was clear: it was her fault Luc had gotten away.
But the coil of mist still hung faintly in the air, and she could detect his human smell—something slightly spicy but soft, like cloves. The dim outline of trees took shape in front of her. Soon she had cleared the mist, and she found herself in a forest. The air felt thick and warm and humid on her skin. Almost instantly, she began to sweat.
Corinthe had seen the world of the Blood Nymphs on the great stone maps in the garden of Pyralis, which depicted the whole layout of the universe. The stones, like the universe itself, would constantly shift and morph, but she knew each world had a different relationship to the center of things.
She didn’t know exactly where this particular world existed, only that it was far from Pyralis Terra. It was dominated by forest, and beyond that, an endless mist.
The other Fates had told stories: wisdom collected through the ages from the marbles, from the whispers that reached them through the Crossroad. The Nymphs who lived here were parasites, and they were very protective of their forest. Of this forest. They nested in the branches of the living Salix babylonica trees and fed off the blood of the sentient creatures.
The sister tree of the Salix babylonica grew in Humana. They called it the weeping willow, as though the suffering of their kind could be felt even across the worlds. She brushed her fingers through a curtain of wispy tendrils so thin and delicate they looked like they might break off with only a gentle pull. The branches stirred, moved closer to her touch. A stem curled around her wrist, tugging gently, as if the tree wanted to play.
Corinthe knew better. While the trees appeared to be victims of the Nymphs, they could be as cruel as their bloodsucking masters. She slowly reached for her blade and remembered too late that it had disappeared into the void with Lucas.
She disentangled the vine carefully from her wrist and took several steps away from the tree. Angry hissing filled the air and the tree shook, the ends of its branches lashed out like whips. A high-pitched whine sounded behind her. Corinthe spun around.
Nothing.
Over her head, perched among the vast canopy of branches, which barely allowed any sunlight to penetrate, dozens of Blood Nymphs were watching her, their skin different shades of blue and green, so that they blended perfectly into the shadowed branches.
The whine sounded behind her again. This time when she swung around, a Nymph stood only a few feet away.
This one was pale yellow and virtually transparent, with spidery red veins crisscrossing the surface of her skin. Her flowing hair matched the color of her skin. Her eyes were slanted and lacked eyelids; they were like amethyst marbles. The Nymph hummed again, a sound that reminded Corinthe of the whine of an enormous mosquito. It made her skin crawl.
Above them, the others joined in, and soon the air filled with a crescendo of high-pitched echoes. The noise made pain blaze in Corinthe’s head. The trees swayed as if dancing along to their song.
“I’m not here to harm you. I’ll be quick.” Corinthe hoped that the Nymphs could not smell her fear. They fell silent again, watching her. Did they know what she was? Could Executors even perform fates here? Could she defend herself, if she needed to?
In Humana, Corinthe was an Executor. Here, though, the lines were blurred. She had never harmed another living creature of her own will, didn’t even know if she could. The ramifications could be catastrophic. She had lost a single marble and had been banished to Humana for it. What kind of punishment might the death of a Nymph, an unfated killing, bring?
Several more pairs of glowing amethyst eyes peered down at her through the canopy of leaves. How many were up there, watching her, waiting?
Corinthe backed slowly away from the Nymph, glad that it did not follow. Then she quickly ducked down a pathway. The Nymphs would still watch her, but Corinthe was more worried that they would find Luc before she did.
Females who wandered into this world might end up as the Blood Nymphs were—parasites, killers, transformed into the pale, evil creatures with their sharp teeth and lidless eyes. But males? Males were teased, tormented, and bled slowly, skin pierced by sharp teeth in a thousand different places. Then they were fed to the trees.
She pushed on, faster now. She had to find Luc before something happened to him. He had to die by her hand. That was what the marble had shown. Her knife.
There was no other way to interpret it.
Her fate depended on his.
If she did not find Luc, if she did not kill him the way the marble had indicated—the hand, the knife—she would never be allowed to return to Pyralis Terra. Just thinking about her home sent such a strong wave of yearning through her that she almost stumbled.
Dozens of paths spiraled in different directions, dead-ended or changed orientation suddenly, only to curl around and return to where they had started. If Corinthe got lost in the mazes, she would be unlikely to find her way out and would be left to the fickle impulses of the Nymphs.
Corinthe stopped and closed her eyes. A light breeze blew tendrils of hair across her neck, and a burst of a sweet, exotic scent filled her lungs. The acrid harshness of Humana began to fade from her thoughts, and her old senses returned, sharpened. A subtle pattern emerged in her mind and she followed it, eyes still closed. Sounds filtered through the canopy: soft calls of birds, the rustle of leaves and the creak of old branches, the gurgle of the Nymphs feeding somewhere over her head. She didn’t dare glance up. She didn’t want to see what could not be unseen.
A lingering aroma of cloves, out of place among all the sweet smells of flowers, guided her down a narrow pathway to the right. The trail led deeper into the trees, the sunlight all but swallowed by shadow and fog. Several times Corinthe had to stop and backtrack when the scent faded, but she always found it again. Her tracking skills were rusty, but the more she used them, the easier it became.
A low hissing stopped her. The sound was lower, quieter than the calls of the Nymphs. She peered through a tangle of vines. A dozen enormous, translucent flowers grew in a circle in the middle of a sun-filled clearing. The flowers looked almost like guards, standing with their backs to one another. There was nothing like them, even in the garden of Pyralis, where every flower in the known universe grew.