“I don’t want to talk about it,” I croaked and moved to slide off Kato’s back.
He shoved me back on with his wing and covered me from an oncoming bubble. “Ride up there for a while.”
“Why?” I asked. He’d made it clear before that he was not a beast to be tamed or ridden.
“Because you need it,” he answered quietly. “Let’s go, Rexi.” He turned in the direction of Sherwood Forest and ambled off the shore.
I buried my face in his fur, partly because I was cold and felt like I’d been drained of all my energy, but it was more to try and stop the tears from coming. It would’ve been easier to stop the suns from rising. It felt like little splinters stabbed inside my heart. Moony’s revenge maybe. I couldn’t get his voice, his face, or the taste of his ashes out of my mind. If I thought about it, I’d go mad, but it was hard not to, since to my eyes, the whole world still looked tinted in green flames. I wanted the world black, so I closed my eyes and sank into oblivion.
I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes again, I was on the hard ground instead of soft fur. The flames were gone, but the world hadn’t returned to the right color. The lake and giant flowers were all a muted gray. Rexi lay on the ground, curled up, probably passed out from exhaustion. I didn’t see Kato though.
My skin prickled with cold. And it was far too quiet. Not a single cricket chirped. Maybe they’d all been eaten by the ironwood trees. Turning in a circle, I tried to get my bearings to figure out if we’d reached the workshop yet. The forest was a short ways off, but a full-length mirror stood much closer, out of place.
I stared into the mirror, surprised this time by my reflection. A girl stared back at me. She looked lovely and innocent, and was dressed in long, white robes. She held the Book of Making and ripped out a page. It floated out of the mirror and onto the ground. The page was an illustration. A portrait of my parents. They didn’t look like themselves, dressed in foreign clothes in a seemingly foreign land.
Seeing them again made my chest hurt. I reached out to grab the picture to look closer, but the wind kicked up and stole it from my fingertips. I chased after it in a circle, the page whisking away like it was taunting me. I screamed my frustration into the sky.
The sky screamed back.
Kato crested a hill of wildflowers, but he wasn’t my cute little fluff ball anymore. He was a beast that could have swallowed the Emerald Palace whole. He reared back and roared again.
The ironwood trees shook in fear and the ground quaked.
With a crash, the mirror splintered into countless pieces. Each shard showed the white-haired girl, now grown into an evil empress.
Kato was drawing closer. His black claws gleamed, his eyes no longer ice blue but dark bottomless pits. There was no humanity left in him. He was flanked by flying puppies.
“I’ve found you, my pretty.” Blanc spoke from the mirror shards. “We are connected and you can’t escape us.”
I reached down to grab Rexi and run. Up close, I could see that she wasn’t sleeping peacefully. Her face stiffened in pain as red-orange tears fell. Before hitting the ground, they turned to swirling stones.
Blanc’s voice came again, soft and lyrical. “Once upon a time, there was wretched girl who brought pain and misfortune to all those around her. But you won’t have to worry about that anymore.”
The silver pieces of mirror melted and oozed together, forming the mercurial shape of the Gray Witch. “And the princess died unhappily ever after.”
The silver coalesced into a giant stormball and hurled itself at me. A shiny glob landed on my chest and spread. Its weight forced me to the ground. Nearly every inch of my skin was coated with the icy, silvery liquid. Then it spilled into my mouth.
I couldn’t breathe.
“After a one-hundred-year nap, I like to think of myself as a bit of an expert on dreams. For starters, you never want to die in one. That would be bad luck.”
—Sleeping Beauty’s Dream Dictionary
23
Dream a Little Nightmare for Me
A freezing chill spread throughout my body from within. Silver frost formed along my skin. The wound from the wishing star pricked and ached.
Right as a glittering icicle started to burst out from my palm, I bolted awake from what had—hopefully—been just a nightmare. My mind must have thrown together every fear I had into one nightmare, mixing Blanc and Griz together. But it wasn’t real, even though the cold followed me from the dream world, making me shiver. My palm really hurt too. A faint line of blood dribbled down from a puncture wound.
It was just a dream, right?