Page 41 of By the Moonbeam and the Mist
But no. No dark, fathomless energy seized my mind when Steeler craned his neck to look back up at me, all traces of that smug playfulness drained away. Blood trickled like crimson tears from the cut on his shoulder.
“Well,” he rasped, “that wasn’t very nice of you, was it?”
I didn’t get a chance to respond. Didn’t get a chance, because one second, I was staring down at him, and the next he was—gone.
Just gone.
The sundew whipped this way and that, screeching their confusion. The flytraps shot downward, snapping at nothing but air. The nepenthes jiggled, suddenly howling with fury at their lost prey.
A pair of sturdy hands grabbed me from behind, ripping my knife from my grip and flinging it across the room.
“But I think this will be punishment enough,” Steeler whispered through my hair.
And ribbons of darkness seemed to tug on me from every direction as he dragged me into a rich, inky expanse of nothing.
CHAPTER
15
It was like no darkness I’d ever experienced.
Not like the cloak of nighttime or the bottom of a lake or even the pitch-black of dreamless sleep. It was pulsing and whirling, yet empty and endless at the same time. Filled with far-off lights that didn’t quite reach us—wherever we were. Wherever we were going.
Because as much as I twisted and thrashed in Steeler’s grip, he was definitely succeeding in taking mesomewhere. I felt the world whiz by with each step, and nausea clamped down tight in the base of my throat as if we were whooshing through the air in a carriage.
And suddenly,Iwas clinging tohim, terrified he’d drop me into this abyss. Terrified this had just been an elaborate way of murdering me, of dumping me in a wasteland of darkness so that nobody would ever find my body.
A whimper actually left my mouth—
Just as Steeler wrenched us through a hole in the darkness and I landed on my hands and knees on solid ground.
It was still dark here, but… stars. God, yes, those were stars winking through gaps in the clouds above us.
Rain pattered my head, and waves of smooth gray pebbles stretched in every direction beneath me. The crash of the ocean pulsed to my right, where a single abandoned lighthouse climbed toward the sky at its edge. To my left, I could just barely make out the hazy outline of a jungle towering on a far-off cliff.
“Where are we?” I panted.
As soon as the words left my lips, however, I folded over and began to retch.
From the corner of my eye, I saw Steeler lurch toward me with his hand outstretched. I flinched, and he yanked himself back. Waiting. Wary. As if I were some kind of wounded animal.
Which, maybe I was. Because I couldn’t stop dry heaving until Steeler murmured, “Breathe in and out. The nausea will pass—”
“Don’t you dare tell me what to do,” I spat over my shoulder.
The idea that he was trying to console me after dragging me through… through whatever tormentthathad been—it seemed to snap my body out of it. I scrambled up to face him fully, a stark breeze from the ocean lifting up the hem of my dress.
Steeler raised his palms. That cut I’d made on his shoulder was still oozing blood, and now that we weren’t in a dark room, I could make out the pinprick wounds all over his wrists and hands, and the holes in his pants where the nepenthes had drenched him with poison. The burnt skin beneath.
Yet he didn’t seem worried about himself. He was still observing me as if I were wounded and depraved, and he answered my question with words as smooth as the pebbles beneath our feet.
“We’re still on Eshol. Just a little bit north of Hallow’s Perch.”
“North of Hallow’s Perch,” I repeated, feeling my jaw drop for a second before I snapped it shut again. I didn’t doubt that we were still on the island—past the lighthouse and horizon of seafoam, I could see the faint shimmer of Eshol’s protective dome. But…
If we were truly this far north… well, Hallow’s Perch, I knew, was about three hundred miles from the Esholian Institute. And by the angle of the moon slathered in a thin film of rainclouds overhead, I knew it wasn’t even half an hour past the time I’d been in the boys’ Wild Whisperer parlor, playing mini pentaball with my friends.
Which meant we’d traveled hundreds of miles in minutes. Seconds, maybe.
