Page 35 of The Queen's Box

Maybe she should turn back. The thought pushed and nudged.Maybe she should.Maybe that’s what being grown-up meant: making deliberate decisions, scientifically tried and true, instead of being impulsive.

She thought of Ash, who’d never believed in her, and her resolve strengthened. Funny what an excellent motivator spite could be.

She thought of Serrin, and her heart swelled even larger. Spite could nudge her forward, but love was a hundred times more powerful. For Serrin, she would cross not just mountains but worlds.

A half-memory came to her, a velvety voice looping around her:He’s wasting away.Except, no, that wasn’t it. Wilting? Withering?

Willow couldn’t remember if Severine had spoken the words aloud or if Willow had only felt them, but she knew that Serrin needed her. Not like Ash needed her to fail. Not like her father needed her to behave.

Serrin needed Willow the way he needed breath. Warmth. Light. Willow needed Serrin in all the same ways, plus or minus infinity.

So she walked. And walked. Sometimes she stopped and leaned forward, pressing her palms to her quadriceps and breathing in deep. Then she walked some more, more slowly, while craning her head up at the darkening sky. She still felt exhausted, but in a brave sort of way that made her proud. Also?God, the sky was beautiful.

She had no idea if she was on the right road to Lost Souls. She hadn’t exactly had time to ask for directions. But the air here tasted older. The trees watched more closely. This had to be the way.

She crested a small hill and paused. In front of her was an enormous boulder spray-painted with white letters as jagged as teeth: “R U LOST OR R U FOUND?”

A creepy feeling whispered across the back of her neck. She turned around, but slowly, apprehensively.

No one was there. Just her.

She approached the boulder and brushed her fingers over it, half-worried that doing so would slingshot her into the flattened, sideways world she’d started to think of as the in-between. It didn’t. Her dimensions stayed predictable. Her feet stayed raw and tender, especially the webbing between her toes where the leather thong of her sandals dug in.

Her Jesus shoes, as her mother called them.

Her mother, back in Atlanta. Her father, no doubt fuming.

R U LOST OR R U FOUND?

Willow half-laughed because it was one more impossible question. Was she clever or foolish? Crazy or sane? Magic or delusional?

A bull goose looney if I ever did see one,the woman from the antique store had said. Was Willow a bull goose looney?

“Sometimes I see things,” she said aloud. She listened to see if anyone would answer—anyone or anything. A breeze rustled through the trees, and she felt an airlessness in her chest that made her smile.

She slipped off her backpack, then turned around so that the seat of her jeans was pressed against the boulder. She kicked off her sandals, flattened her palms against the boulder’s rough surface, and jump-hop-scrambled to get to the top, using her bare foot to propel herself the last foot and a half.

From her high-up perch, she felt queenlike and savage.

She was nineteen and all alone in what was surely the most isolated mountain range in all the world. Her feet were bare, she could smell her own stink—not awful, just sweaty—and a pokey part of the boulder dug into her butt. She shifted to get more comfortable.

“Sometimes I see things, and I think they’re true,” she told the trees and the rocks and the slowly looming shadows. She leaned back against her palms. The wind caught and lifted her long blonde waves. “And sometimes—okay, once—I. ..” She paused, catching her lower lip between her teeth.

There are cracks between the worlds,whispered the unknowable voice.You slipped through one.

Willow’s heart gave a funny flop. “There are cracks between the worlds,” she whispered, “and sometimes—well,onetime—I slipped through one.”

An owl hooted, and the sun sank lower behind the mountains. The sweat on Willow’s lower back and beneath her arms cooled and dried. She shivered. It sure got dark fast up here on the mountain. The sky was the color of a plum now, with only a glimmer of gold radiating dimly from the far reaches of the horizon.

If there was a bear out here . . .

There wouldn’t be. But if there was... it could stand ten feet away from her, and she wouldn’t even know it, not until it snuffled and huffed its hot honeyed breath.

Bears didn’t eat humans.

Bears killed people sometimes, but they didn’teatthem.

“Yay, I won’t be a bear snack,” Willow said weakly.

---