Outside, before, I had almost expected to hear them: his mother’s sharp voice, the neighbor’s muttering.

  Inside now, I couldn’t even picture them anymore.

  Matt’s room was empty. Not abandoned, but empty in a way that felt wrong.

  The bed was unmade, the sheets still bearing the shallow impression of a body that had slept there. Matt’s clothes lay draped over the back of a chair. A coffee mug stood on the desk, long cold, a faint ring dried into the wood beneath it.

  The air still carried Matt’s scent beneath the stale dust, faint now, as if the room had been holding its breath for too long.

  My gaze drifted over the room, cataloguing absence. It had been used right up until the moment it wasn’t.

  Then I saw the note pinned to the wall above the desk, held in place by a familiar glint of metal. My breath caught before my mind caught up.

  A hairpin. White Flower’s hairpin.

  I stepped closer.

  The paper was of a different quality, clear at first glance. It was a piece of paper from Dreamland. On it, drawn in crude strokes, was the outline of a white flower with uneven petals, the stem bent, almost broken. Beneath it, a few lines of writing.

  Come pick him up. You know where to find me.

  The letters dug into the expensive paper, pressed too hard.

  I knew that handwriting.

  Araxa. White Flower’s milk sister.

  She had always carved her letters like this.

  An old image surfaced: White Flower’s memory. A dark-haired girl bent over a desk, pressing the quill so hard it nearly tore the parchment.

  I could almost see her writing this note.

  If you dare.

  I felt the sneer in those strokes. I saw the vicious smile she would grow into, even back then already lurking at the corners of her mouth. She had always been like that.

  Another line followed. Smaller, almost like an afterthought:

  But I know you won’t. You’re a coward.

  My fingers tightened before I realized it, my claws digging into my palm.

  And at the bottom, one last sentence made the hair on my neck rise.

  Besides, he’ll hate you soon enough anyway.

  For a moment, the room seemed to tilt.

  I pulled the hairpin free from the wall. The instant it touched my skin, something shifted. Mana stirred... no, answered. A thin, unfamiliar resonance crawled along its length, sharp and invasive, like a splinter under the skin.

  This hadn’t been here before. White Flower’s hairpin had always felt inert.

  The one she had forgotten in the forest.

  Or… left there.

  The thought struck me hard enough to make me still. Maybe she hadn’t forgotten it at all. Maybe she had left it on purpose.

  And I—idiot that I was—I had picked it up, pocketed it, and kept it.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  I hadn’t told her.

  I’d even given it away.

  I swallowed hard. This was how she’d found him.

  Araxa hadn’t stumbled onto Matt by chance. She’d followed the pin. The magic signature had been awakened and twisted into a beacon. How had I not felt it?

  Slowly, carefully, I turned it over in my fingers, reading the echo it carried now. The trail led to the middle of the room and ended abruptly.

  My gaze dropped to the floor.

  A crumpled, half-burned sheet of paper lay near the bed, half-hidden beneath it. I knelt and picked it up, already knowing what it was: a portal paper.

  It was spent. The magic had burned through. The surface was scorched with the faint geometries of a completed spell. Whoever had used it hadn’t bothered to destroy it properly.

  I closed my eyes and let my mana sink into the residue. The image of the spell was still there, the runes fragmented but readable.

  I exhaled slowly. Even if the main runes had burned away, the fractals remained. That was enough to reconstitute the spell.

  Araxa hadn’t just taken Matt.

  She had invited us to follow.

  It would be rude not to accept.

  I poured mana into the runes. They lit one after another, slowly forming the outline of a portal.

  But it demanded more mana than I expected. I kept feeding it, more and more, until even my own pathways began to glow. Only then did the portal finally unfold.

  Was it because I was inexperienced, or did portals always require this much mana?

  I tilted my head, slightly surprised it had worked. Then, without a second thought, I stepped through.

  For a heartbeat there was only white light and cold air rushing past my skin. Then the world settled.

  I stood in a field.

  It looked almost too innocent. The grass was high and wind-bent, stretching toward the edge of a dark forest. The two suns had just risen and lay warm over the land. Birds sang in the trees behind me; others circled lazily above. Somewhere in the distance, livestock shifted and lowed.

  Not far from where I stood rose a large farmhouse, old but well-maintained. Smoke curled faintly from a chimney. A fence enclosed a wide yard.

  And in that yard stood a woman. She was facing away from me, hands resting lightly on a wooden gate, her posture relaxed. She wore a white dress, pale hair braided over one shoulder.

  White Flower.

  No.

  The illusion was good. Very good. The mana weaving it was subtle, old runes woven into complex patterns.

  I pursed my lips in surprise. Annoyingly, it was a better spell than anything I could weave. She could rival White Flower in this.

  It mimicked White Flower’s posture and the faint glow clinging to her skin. But the wings gave it away.

  I chuckled softly. She couldn’t fly with those illusions.

  She must have felt me the moment I stepped through the portal, yet she didn’t turn. The air felt heavy with mana.

  I tried to identify her, but the answer came back wrong. Still, I could feel her level hovering just under one hundred.

  I huffed as I approached, my eyes narrowing on her silhouette.

  Was this the woman who had forced White Flower to live a fugitive’s life?

  This ends now.

  Capturing Matt was a bridge too far.

  Then I saw him.

  Matt.

  Naked. His wrists and ankles bound to wooden posts in a giant X. His head hung forward, but he was still breathing. A shallow but steady breath.

  My mana tightened, runes already forming instinctively to dissolve the bindings before I even realized it.

  I took a step forward.

  The air changed. The field suddenly felt denser. My mana stalled and the bindings resisted.

  My eyes widened.

  I let my perception expand properly.

  Layers of magic filled the place. In the air. In the soil. Even in the wooden posts.

  The whole area was a minefield.

  Araxa turned to look at me.

  “And who,” she asked softly, “are you?”

  For a moment I considered giving her a clever answer. But I was too angry to bother.

  I let my mana answer for me. Deadly spells began forming around me.