Page 86 of Broken Shadows

Aiden stumbles over his words when he finally climbs to his feet, point a shaky finger at me. “You ate Evie?”

“No, IamEvie.”

Aiden’s jaw slacks. “You’re not her!” Aiden’s cry echoes deep into the chasm of the woods and my eyes widen.

“What the fuck?” I say, stepping backward.

“Your words are changed in his point of view,” he explains and looks around.

His hand is back in mine, but his fingers are furry now, and all too warm and twitchy. My eyes drift upward, and I notice Gomez, who disappears into the branches above.

My eyelashes flick up as I watch his wings curl around his body in an attempt to get out of the thickening fog surrounding us.

A chill creeps over my body, my breath coming out in a puff of smoke as I turn to look at Lorcan and instead discover a spider the size of a human, the creature’s body glistening with tiny brown hairs.

I drop the creature’s leg and scream, and the spiders looks at me, taking me in with those black, soulless orbs. Clicking erupts from its mouth when it drags the top of its leg over my forearm, its sticky threads grazing my skin in a sickening, gentle caress.

Heat burns through my legs as I turn and run into the dense woods, the tall, blue grass feathering my thighs.

My feet ache as I navigate the uneven, mossy mattress below, littered with rocks. Webs stretch across the path ahead, strands of ghostly threads caught in the dappled light, and I divert into taller grass.

Fuck, fuck, fuck!

Tick, click, tick.

The spiders clicking sounds through mine and Lorcan’s bond, halting me. My breaths come in ragged bursts, my lungs aching with each breath of icy air.

Lorcan! Lorcan!

Bile bites the back of my throat, and I slowly stand. A tickle glides over my shoulder. I shiver under the chill wrapping me when the tickle turns tangible, gliding down my arm.

A scream tears from my dry throat, echoing through the clearing as I notice the body gift-wrapped with web, suspended between two gnarled branches.

Threads surround me, caught between the gray, cracked bark of the trees, glistening with the promise to ensnare me if I get too close.

Suddenly, I’m the fly.

I pivot again, ducking under a web, my stomach gliding against the feathery grass. I grab a branch, the bark crumbling, turning into sticky blood oozing through the gaps in my fingers as if the trees are people, bodies even, and I realize that like the other trials, they probably are. Souls who never got out of here.

Click. Hiss.

My eyes flick upward to the source of the sounds—gigantic spiders, their spindly legs curling inward as they descend from threads of web toward me.

“No!”

My mind races, adrenaline coursing through my veins when I run again, the woods blurring around me.

Wait.

This is a hallucination.

His words from earlier come back to me with ease. That’s all it is. A fucking hallucination.

It’s not real. Not real.

I clamp my eyes shut.

“Not real,” I yell this time as more clicking sounds through our bond. “Not real. I am not afraid.”

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