Dirt covered his face. His eyes, teeth, ears—everything felt gritty, as if he’d gone through a sandstorm.
His mind was fuzzy. He remembered jumping but not landing.
There had been wind. A fierce, howling wind he thought would rip him apart and a searing pain that made his whole body shudder uncontrollably. And then … God, why couldn’t he remember? Had he actually survived the fall off the building? Had he passed out from the pain? Luc had seen it happen on the field—a guy from another team who got his shin kicked in so hard the bone broke through his skin. He’d fainted, and Luc didn’t blame him.
He rolled over onto his back despite the screaming in his muscles. He rubbed the sand from his eyes, then felt around for a lump on his skull. He must have cracked it. Really hard.
In the sky, two identical suns were sitting next to each other.
Double vision was a sure sign of a head injury—Ty had been out for a month after a bad hit gave him a concussion last year.
Very slowly, Luc raised his hand in front of his face. One hand appeared in his field of vision, but overhead, two suns still blazed on opposite sides of the sky.
What. The. Hell.
He pushed up onto his elbows carefully. Every inch of his body hurt, as if he’d been thrown off a building. No, not thrown—jumped. He slowly stood up, taking deep breaths to counteract the pain. His legs were weak, and he stumbled a few steps before regaining his balance. Behind him, his shadow, or shadows—two of them?— trailed across the sand. They fell in opposite directions and had a stretched look to them, the way shadows do when the sun hangs low in the sky.
Luc blinked several times to clear his vision, but two shadows remained. He was oddly reminded of early-morning soccer practices, of endless drills across the field as the sun started to rise—and how his shadow would dribble the ball alongside him, long and distorted, as if it belonged to a man eight feet tall.
Had he been dumped in the Black Rock Desert? No, this body of water had to be the ocean, which meant he must be somewhere along the shoreline. Yet there were no boats in the water, no people on the beach, not a sign of life anywhere.
And Christ, it was sweltering, like running an oven in a heat wave.
Something tugged at the back of his mind—some deep fear he couldn’t name. Something was wrong, even more wrong than the two suns. He pinched the inside of his arm, feeling the pain wash over him, but he didn’t wake up. No, not dreaming. Maybe he was in a coma.
Maybe you’re dead.
He inhaled and tried to quell the rising fear that tightened his chest. He couldn’t be dead because he didn’t feel dead. He hurt everywhere, and the sand scratched his eyes and sweat beaded on his skin.
Dead people didn’t sweat like this.
So if he was alive, then where the hell was he?
To his left, cliffs rose, sheer and jagged; a purplish-blue sky swelled above them like the taut belly of a balloon. The cliffs ran alongside the beach, parallel to the ocean, trapping him on this small strip of sand.
He fumbled for his phone, but the screen was blank. It must have been water damaged.
“Hello!” he shouted.
His voice echoed off the rocks and bounced down the beach. No one answered. He slowly turned around, dreading what he already knew he’d find. Behind him, more of the same: endless miles of cliffs and sand and ocean.
Panic welled up again and this time he didn’t try to fight it. Hours earlier, he’d thought his night couldn’t get any worse. Wrong.
He saw something glinting in the sand. His pulse sped up. A few feet away, the blade Corinthe had thrown at him lay half buried in the ground. He spun around to see if she was there, too, then crouched and carefully extricated the knife from the sand.
Had she somehow brought him here? Had she dumped his body, thinking he was dead, and bolted? Maybe she had brought him here by boat. …
The idea brought his gaze back to the water. He watched the dark surface of the ocean and felt a prickling at the back of his neck. It wasn’t right. The water. It didn’t move right. He’d spent enough time on the bay to know that water rippled, even if there was no wind.
His feet felt weighted with lead as he stumbled to the edge of the ocean. The water wasn’t dark blue at all; it was black. And it just sat there, a giant puddle of inky darkness. Shadows undulated beneath its surface. They almost looked like … eels.
Millions and millions of eels.
Luc backed away quickly, a shiver of fear sliding down his spine, despite the cloying heat.
“Looking for something?” a voice said from behind him.
He swung around, clutching Corinthe’s knife. A useless move, since he had been in a total of zero knife fights before and had no idea what to do with it.
A woman stood a few yards away from him. She was barefoot on the red sand and wore a long white dress. Her hair was as black as the ocean and hung nearly to her waist. She didn’t appear to be affected by the heat at all. Her pale skin practically glowed under the sun’s light, and the shadows she cast stretched long and narrow behind her, giving her an eerie air.
She smiled at him. Her teeth were very pointy; one was so sharp it looked like a dagger. And her eyes—like looking into a pit of tar, inky and bottomless. They completely unnerved him.
Luc couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d seen her before. That same anxiety flickered through the back of his mind—there was something he should see or remember—but it dissipated when he tried to focus on it.
“Where did you come from?”
His voice was hoarse and raw. He swallowed against the dryness. In the sand he saw his own footprints, but around her there were none. He took a step backward.
This seemed to amuse her, because she laughed. The sound, not entirely pleasant, was quickly suctioned away by the heavy air. “That’s not important. All you need to know is I’m a friend. And I came to tell you: Corinthe is responsible for your sister’s current … predicament.”
Luc felt his stomach seize up. Jasmine. “What—what are you talking about?” he stammered. “What do you know about my sister?”
The woman tilted her head and stared at him almost with pity. “I know she’s in trouble,” she replied softly.
“What do you mean?” Luc was losing it. Blood pounded in his temples; he could hardly hold on to the knife, his hand was sweating so badly. “Where is she?”
“She is imprisoned in the Forest of the Blood Nymphs,” the woman said evenly. “Because of Corinthe, she’s in mortal danger.”
Luc felt as though someone had punched him in the chest. “The Forest of the … what?” He shook his head. This had to be a nightmare. Or everyone around him had suddenly gone insane.
“Of the Blood Nymphs,” the woman said.
“Who the hell are you? Is this some kind of sick joke? Where’s my sister?” Luc instinctively raised the knife until the blade was pointed directly at the woman’s throat. He hoped she wouldn’t see that he was shaking ever so slightly.
But she just tipped her head back and laughed. When she looked at him again, her black eyes seemed to devour the light reflected in them.
“You can’t hurt me. And you don’t scare me. I told you—I’m a friend. We can stand here and play games or you can go after your sister. Either way, it makes little difference to me.”
Luc felt as if he might pass out. His thoughts were spinning in dizzying circles.
“How do I find her?” he asked, practically spitting out the words.