Tossing him a grateful smile, she jumped through. They sustained a few scrapes and cuts, but it was nothing dangerous.
Hours they’d walked, and it was on the tip of Aeric’s tongue to ask her if they were close but the land began to shift and something about the place made him wary, alert. It was quiet, almost unnaturally so. It was only in the absence of noise that one noticed the loudness of silence.
Then something he couldn’t imagine happening, was. The sun was setting, then it was rising, setting and rising, over and over. And he stopped walking, staring at a day gone mad. Night and day, night and day, day and night. Over and over and over, the orb rotating so quickly through the sky he lost track of its many revolutions. Lissa stood beside him, with brows gathered.
“What’s going on?” He whispered and she shook her head. “I do not know, but we are close.”
When they finally started walking again the sun was where it’d been before the madness began. Shaking his head, he realized he’d never understand Wonderland.
There were no crickets chirping or birds singing. The grass was high and waving at knee level and ahead there were curls of steam.
“Is that water?” he asked.
Lissa nodded. “Do you see the bushes all around?”
She was right, there was thick, bushy overgrowth surrounding the fog of steam. “Yes.”
“Those are forget me bushes, don’t touch them, it steals memories.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Have you been here before, Lissa?”
“No.” She shook her head and started forward again.
Following close, Aeric sensed that something wasn’t right. Lissa said she didn’t know this place, but she moved as one who did. There was a very small trail, one easily missed unless you knew where to look for it, that led safely through the ring of forget me nots.
At the center of it was a large pond that glowed a silvery lavender in the dim light of the setting sun. And beside it was a large beech tree.
Running to the tree, she inserted her hand into a knot of wood no bigger than a fist and pulled something out.
“Here,” she turned with a smile. “I found it.”
Blinking between the netting in her hand and her smiling face, a horrible sinking feeling slunk through his stomach. “You’ve been here before. How did you know where the net was? You’ve never seen it, and yet you led me straight to it.”
“I don’t know,” she said it slowly, haltingly, and the smile she’d been wearing disappeared. Thick frown lines scrawled upon her forehead and she shook her head. “I’ve never been here before.”
“No.” He shook his head. “You have been here. Lissa, I could never have found this. It’s too hidden. What aren’t you telling me?”
Her shoulders slumped when he snatched the net out of her hands; the sick wash of betrayal overcoming him again. “Why are you lying?”
There were tears swimming in her eyes now. “I swear I’m not. I don’t know how I knew how to get here, I just…knew. I saw threads of blue and I followed it.” She spread her arms and took a step toward him. “Aeric, please, you have to believe me.”
“Threads of blue. Lissa, there haven’t been any scraps around, I’ve been studying the trail the whole way.”
“I promise, Aeric, I saw it.”
Something large rustled through the bush behind him. Twirling, knife at the ready, Aeric expected to see Chrysalis jump out at him.
But there was nothing. “Lissa.” He turned. But she wasn’t where she’d been just seconds ago.
She was now to the left of him, and it was Lissa, but she wasn’t looking at him the same. There was fire in her eyes and a rumbling growl emanated from her throat.
She looked like a wild woman with all the scratches on her arms and chest. Brambles were stuck in her dark, dark hair.
“Lissa, what are you doing?”
“I’m not, Lissa,” she spat and then laughed and the sound chilled him to the marrow.
His brain kept trying to compute what it was that he was seeing. It was Lissa, but it definitely wasn’t her.
And then there was a spark of a memory in his brain, one that was now so obvious in hindsight he couldn’t believe it’d taken his mind so long to figure it out. The first day he’d fought Chrysalis she’d appeared to him with black, black hair and electric blue eyes. The smudge he thought he’d noticed under Lissa’s eye last night was now a dark bleeding heart in the exact same spot.
“No,” he breathed, shaking his head, knife gripped lax in his hands. “No, it can’t be.”
Wind rammed at tree branches, bowed thick trunks. Aeric covered his eyes as dirt and debris slapped his face, fighting hard to stand his ground.
Chrysalis stood in the center of the swirl, calm and collected. Nothing touched her, not even the wind. She was controlling this, she was controlling all of this.
“Lissa, stop, what are you doing?” he snapped, refusing to accept that he was right, to believe that she’d managed to fool him in that way. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
She laughed. “You already have, man.”