Page 38 of The Midwinter Mirror
Grimlet dives off my shoulder and flies straight through the mirror. I hold my breath, but a few seconds later, he’s back. “Mirror worked. Clever witch.”
Wow, I can do this. I reach out and squeeze Zayne’s hand. “Are you ready?”
“Fuck, no.”
But we both straighten our shoulders, and together we step through.
And come to an abrupt halt.
This new world punches the breath right out of me.
I blink, but it doesn’t help. Everything here is too bright, too sharp, like I’ve stumbled into the inside of a diamond. Ice spires spear the sky, each one taller than the church steeple back home, their surfaces rippling with warped reflections. Some of them are me. Some of them…aren’t.
The air slices through my lungs like knives. It smells of nothing, tastes of nothing, but it’s so cold it makes my teeth ache. My boots crunch on a ground that looks like glass but feels like stone, and every sound echoes, bouncing back too loud, too close.
And then there are the mirrors. Dozens of them, freestanding, half-buried in snow, hanging in the air like someone forgotto attach them to a wall. Each one shimmers faintly, showing flashes of faces that vanish the second I look too long.
I hug myself tighter. This isn’t just cold—it’s wrong. The whole place feels hollow, like the world itself is holding its breath. And on the horizon, a figure stands perfectly still, waiting.
Khazim.
The Hunter.
Chapter 15
Follow the Hunter
Zayne
The Hunter is silhouetted against the snow. I can’t make out his features from here, but I know he’s watching us. Then he turns slowly and walks away.
“Come on,” I say, grabbing Holly’s hand again. I like to touch her. We head off, with Josh and Grimlet on my other side.
He’s walking fast, but not so fast that we can’t keep him in sight. I suspect he wants us to follow. We just have to hope that he’s leading us to the children.
A little voice niggles inside me—why? But we don’t have much choice; this place appears vast, and we have no clue where to find Tansy and the others.
“Hold on, Tansy,” I mutter. “Don’t give up. We’re coming.”
I consider shifting, but I need to keep my wits about me, and while Raze isn’t stupid, he tends to act on instinct rather than insight. So, I trudge on, following the dark figure. We seem to go for hours. Maybe he’s leading us away from the children. Maybe he’s keeping us busy because he knows they’ll die if we don’t get them out of this place soon. And he wants them to die. I mean, this guy used to get his kicks hunting humans for fun.
But I don’t know what else to do but follow right now.
The silence is the worst part.
Not the cold. Not the endless ice cutting into the sky like broken blades. Not even the twisted mirrors that keep throwing my own face back at me—older, younger, contorted, sometimes not even mine at all.
It’s the silence.
Because if the kids are here, if Tansy is here, I should hear something. A cough, a cry, a goddamn shuffle in the snow. Christ, I want so much to hear some sign that we’re doing this fucking right. But there’s nothing. Just the crack of our boots on ice and the low hum of magic vibrating in the air, like the whole world is a heartbeat away from breaking.
Holly walks beside me, her breath fogging, her silver hair catching the weird light from the ice. She looks fragile here, like the place is trying to swallow her whole. And part of me wants to wrap her in my arms and fly her straight back to Elderfell. But I can’t. Tansy’s here. The children are here.
They have to be. Because I suspect if we’re too late—if I’ve already lost Tansy—then this frozen hell won’t just be Khazim’s prison. It’ll be mine. And Josh's, Grimlet's, and Holly's. I can’t let that happen.
I spread my senses wider, reaching with the basilisk’s instincts. And there—faint, so faint—a cluster of heartbeats, thready and weak.
“Got them,” I mutter.
