That was my cue. I jumped off of his lap and changed back as quickly as I could, even though it hurt. As I slowly leveraged myself off the ground, wincing at the ache in my joints, Shade let out a joyful cry and jumped up, pulling me into his arms.
“Delilah, it’s really you?” He sounded joyful and yet still half afraid that I was an illusion.
“It’s me. We came to find you. We’re really here, sweetie. We’re here to take you back to your body. Do you know where you are?”
Shade shook his head. “No, I can’t remember much. What do you mean, take me back to my body?”
“You were sent into the Land of Wandering Souls when Yerghan the Blade stabbed you.” I glanced over at Nerissa. The sword she was holding suddenly vanished.
“I think I remember now. Someone was at the door and I opened it and… The next thing I knew my side was burning and then—and then it all goes gray.” Shade blinked, looking around. “So this is the Land of Wandering Souls?”
I nodded. “The Autumn Lord sent us here, with help from Camille’s healers. We need to go home, though. It’s too easy for us to get lost here. I brought our tickets back.”
I pulled out the talismans from my pocket—mine and Shade’s. Roz and Nerissa and Trillian closed in around us, holding their own talismans. I handed Shade his.
“Hold it tight and whisper ‘Take me home,’ and we’ll be able to leave.” I thought for a moment, and then said, “You go first. So we make sure that we’ve got you.”
Shade held tight to the talisman, closing his eyes. He looked tired, as though he had run a great race and stumbled in last. “Take me home,” he said, and then with a whistle of wind, he vanished.
I looked at the others. “Let’s hope he made it. I suppose there’s no other way to find out. Let’s get out of here.”
Holding tight to the talisman, I whispered the magic words, and everything faded from sight.
“DELILAH? DELILAH? WAKE up now. It’s time to wake up.”
The voice echoed through my thoughts, annoying me until I opened my eyes. I blinked as Perri stood over me, tapping me on the face.
“Stop that. It’s annoying.”
She laughed. “I’m really glad to hear you say that. It’s time to get up. And before you ask, Shade’s awake, and so are the others. You’re all safe.”
A wave of relief washed through me as I allowed her to help me sit up. My body felt stiff, and I wondered how long we had been out. I glanced over at the other beds, grateful to see everyone was awake, including Shade, who was propped up on some pillows. But his eyes were open, and he was smiling at me.
“Oh thank gods, you’re awake.” With a deep breath, I threw back my covers and started to stand. But as my feet hit the floor, everything vanished and I began to fall, toppling head over heels, in a freefall toward a quickly approaching river. As I landed in the water, I realized I was sinking, unable to breathe. I floundered, flailing wildly as I managed to come to the surface.
I struggled over to the shore, kicking and splashing as I managed to make my way through the white caps. Dragging myself up on the embankment, I rolled over, gasping for breath. What the hell? I had just been in my bed, and everything had been all right.
As I slowly sat up, looking around, I realized I was alone. Shade, Nerissa, Roz, and Trillian were all gone. And I was here, back on the banks of the river, by myself.
“Hello? Hello? Is anybody there?” I stumbled to my feet, a lump of fear growing in my stomach. I was wet, and cold. “Hello? Anybody! Answer me! What are you?”
The forest echoed with noises around me, but there were no voices, no one answering me. Growing more afraid with every moment, I crossed back over to the logs where we had sat. The fire was still crackling brightly.
Everything was there just as we had left it. But the others were gone, and I was alone. I reached in my pocket, looking for the talisman. Something must have happened and they had transferred over, but I hadn’t. But my pocket was empty.
“What? Where is it? What happened?” My voice echoed through the glade, but nobody answered.
Had I really returned to the hospital? I knew I had been there. Shade and Trillian and Nerissa and Roz were all awake, but then… Trying to stave off panic, I huddled by the fire to dry out. I was soaking wet, and it felt like there was still water in my lungs.
I decided to try logic. One: we had found Shade. We had been sent to the Land of Wandering Souls, we had fought a cyclops, and we found Shade. Two: Shade had been confused. We had helped snap him out of it. Three: I had given him his talisman. And we had all used ours. He went first, and then the rest of us. I vaguely remembered seeing Nerissa shimmer out of view, and then Roz and Trillian, and then I had woken up in the bed back in the laboratory. Four: Perri had been there. She had woken me up, she kept tapping my face. And then I saw Shade and I started to get out of bed and… I had fallen into the river.
The fire was starting to die down. Trembling, I grabbed another piece of wood and some more pitch kindling, and stoked the flames. I was still hungry, but the fish were gone and it was far too dark for me to try to catch one like Nerissa had.
Part of me wanted to get up and hunt around to see if anybody else had returned with me. But the light of the fire was too bright, and too welcoming to leave. The forest around me was pitch black now, and noises loomed on every side.
I scooted closer, holding my hands out to warm them. What could have happened? How had I ended up back here? It wasn’t like someone hit me with the soul-stealer sword. And it wasn’t like I hadn’t used my talisman. I remembered taking it out of my pocket along with Shade’s. I remembered holding onto it, and whispering—wait.
Had I really whispered those words? Had I actually formed the words to take me home?
Maybe I hadn’t! Maybe I thought I had, but something happened and I had dropped the talisman in the dirt and I fainted. Maybe I had started to shift over and something had stopped me and thrown me in the river?
I jumped up and headed over to the spot where we had stood, falling to my knees as I sifted through the grass, looking for my talisman. The ground was hard, so it wouldn’t have been buried. It had to be here. It just had to.
Another few minutes and my stomach clenched as I realized the talisman was really and truly gone. Could I have dropped it somewhere? Had something interrupted us, shortly before I went home, and the talisman had been knocked out of my hand? I needed to widen my search but I didn’t have a flashlight. I didn’t have anything where I could see in the dark.
“I just have to wait till morning. Once morning comes, I can figure this out. Dawn can’t be that far off,” I said out loud. Reassuring myself that I would be all right, I returned to the fire, but every noise and every movement in the bush around me made me nervous. Finally, I decided I’d be less frightened if I were in my panther form, and so I shifted shape.
Immediately, my perception changed. I scanned the area, able to see smaller animals in the bush. The fire frightened me, yet it was warm and so I snuggled down nearby, keeping enough distance so the sparks couldn’t pop out at me. The heat felt wonderful, radiating across my fur. As I lay there, alert and yet resting, I wondered if there was some way I could contact Greta. Maybe she would be able to help me. But if Hi’ran couldn’t come into the Land of Wandering Souls, could the Death Maidens?
That was a silly question. I had come into the Land of Wandering Souls. But I was still alive. Maybe that made a difference. Greta was dead, so maybe she wouldn’t be able to enter here. That brought up another question: if someone were sent here, and their body died, would their soul vanish elsewhere, or would they stay here forever?
My mind wouldn’t shut up, even in panther form, and I kept racing over possibilities, feeling as though I had had far too much caffeine. Camille could handle caffeine, but for me, it sent my mind into loop after loop, until it felt like my thoughts would drive me nuts.
I needed to focus on something p
leasant.
Jerry Springer.
Shade had bought me Jerry Springer tickets. We were going to go see the show in person. I focused on that, focused on anything I could that felt like normality. I had my wedding dress. It was beautiful, and it made me feel like a princess. The house made me sad, given what Yerghan had done to it, but Smoky would fix it. Smoky seem to be able to fix just about anything that was wrong. Camille had promised to send workmen to help him, and maybe we could expand the kitchen, or upgrade it. Marble countertops would be nice, or quartz. And I’d love to have a new refrigerator.
I kept running over the small stuff, the little things that were tangible, that grounded me into the reality back home. Now that Camille was living out at Talamh Lonrach Oll, I was planning on painting her study and enclosing the balcony so that I could sit out there without the mosquitoes bothering me. Shade and I would take what had been her bedroom, and I would turn the entire third story into a nursery and kitty playroom. That led me to wonder something else. When I did have the Autumn Lord’s child, would she be a Were at all? I secretly hoped that she would have the ability to transform into a cat. It would be so much fun to teach her about my private world that nobody else entered.
A noise from the forest startled me, and I turned to look. Gasping, I shifted back into my human form without thinking. There, walking out from between the trees, was my mother.
“Delilah? Delilah, what are you doing here?” My mother had golden hair like I did, and she was petite. But I remembered her with a smiling face, always laughing with us. Now, she looked angry.
“What are you doing here, Mother? You’re…”
“Dead? Well, that’s bright. Of course I’m dead. You didn’t think that I had magically come back to life, did you?” She not only looked angry, she sounded angry.
“I don’t understand what’s going on. You aren’t supposed to be here. I didn’t think anybody could be here who was dead. I’m not supposed to be here, either. I’m supposed to be back in Camille’s laboratory.”
“Excuses, always excuses. You never were too swift on the uptake, were you? I excused it when you were little, but I hoped you’d grow into your intelligence as you grew up. Apparently I was hoping in vain. I knew Arial was smarter than you were. I wish…it would have been better if you were the one taken and she was left.” She didn’t move to hug me, or even greet me. Instead, she sneered, turning toward the fire. “So, tell me what you’ve done with yourself. Have you at least made good use of your time?”
“I like to think so,” I said, hesitating a moment, my heart stinging from her words. She looked like my mother, her voice was the same as I remembered, but my heart screamed no, it couldn’t be her. She wasn’t ever this cruel. “I didn’t know that you were disappointed with me. I never knew that you wanted Arial to live instead of me.”
“She never had a chance, did she? And it was your fault, you know that, don’t you? She died at birth. She came out second, with her umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. Because you took so long to be born, she choked to death. Your father warned me never to tell you, but every day, every time I saw you, I remembered that you were the reason that she died.”
I pressed my lips together, horrified. Arial had never told me this.
“I’ve talked to Arial. She told me that Father made the choice. That he asked the Autumn Lord to help because you were dying in childbirth.” I was feeling confused. Who was telling me the truth? Had Arial spared my feelings out of pity? Had our father told me a lie so that I wouldn’t feel bad? The knot in my stomach grew larger, making it hard to breathe.
My mother let out a snort. “Well, it just goes to show. Arial thought about you, even though she’s the one who paid the price. I doubt if you would ever have spared her feelings that way. You always wanted things your own way, everything had to be just so because Delilah was so sensitive. You know Camille resented you. After all, she had to take care of you after I died. And you needed taking care of. Menolly was able to fend for herself. But Camille always had to stick up for you, because you refused to grow a backbone.”
“Stop! Please stop.” Ragged tears welled up in my throat, but I shut them down, feeling both humiliated and angry.
“Stop! Please stop.” Maria mimicked me, laughing. “I remember hearing you use those words so very often. The neighbor kids wanted to play and they would tease you, and you would whine and whine. Stop! Please stop. If you had stood up for yourself even once, they would never have pulled that crap. But no, as usual, you were the crybaby.”
Feeling like one big ball of raging shame, I clenched my fists. I wanted to hit her. I lashed out in the only way I knew how.
“You’re the one who abandoned us. You wouldn’t drink the nectar of life, so you died. Father was a broken man after you fell off that horse. You knew how much he loved you, but you wouldn’t even consider extending your life for him. Or for us. Camille may have had to take care of me, but she wouldn’t have had to if you hadn’t died. You didn’t love us enough to take a chance on living a longer life. You didn’t love us enough to stay with us.”
My words streamed out, hot and furious. Even in a haze of anger, I realized that they were truly how I felt. I blamed my mother for dying. I blamed her for falling off the horse.
She stared at me, her gaze hard and cold. “Do you really believe that?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t know what to think by now. I felt lost within myself, unable to form an answer. Panicking, I began to back away, and then I turned into Panther and loped off into the forest, leaving the warmth of the fire behind, and leaving my mother and past behind me.
I DON’T KNOW how long I ran, or how far I went, but finally I slowed to a walk. Everything around me looked unfamiliar. I could probably turn around and try to retrace my steps, except that I had no clue about which way I had come.
The encounter with my mother had left me shaken to the core. Had she really hated me so much? Had she really thought I was such a failure, even at such a young age?
Exhausted, I curled up on a soft bed of moss. I stayed in my panther form, because it felt safest, as I glanced up at the sky. Dawn was finally approaching, and I hoped that with the sunlight would come some sort of clarity.
My stomach rumbled and I realized I was hungry again. But I stayed where I was, trying to understand what had transpired. My mother shouldn’t be here. That much I knew. The dead could not walk in the Land of Wandering Souls. Therefore, if I followed that train of logic, it wasn’t my mother I had been talking to. And if not Maria, then who?
A little voice inside whispered, Maybe you were talking to yourself. I started to brush it away, then paused. What had Hi’ran said about the Land of Wandering Souls? About our worst fears being embodied out here? If so, maybe that was the case with my mother. Was I really so terrified that she would be disappointed in me? Did I think she considered me a burden, a failure even as a child? Was I afraid that I was a failure?
And following that train of logic, did I blame myself for my sister’s death?
The thought had never entered my mind before, and the discussion with my father and Arial some time ago had put me at ease. But perhaps…just perhaps…hidden deep inside was the fear that I had been to blame. Because it came down to that Arial had died and I had lived.
I couldn’t imagine what my mother had been through, losing one of us. She and Father had kept Arial’s presence hidden. Neither my sisters nor I had known about her until a few years back. And if I blamed myself for Arial’s death, did she, perhaps, somewhere in the depths of her subconscious, blame me?
Feeling like my entire foundation had been rocked, I laid my head down on my paws, closed my eyes, and fell into a deep sleep.
“DELILAH?” THE VOICE was soft in my ears.
I blinked, squinting to see Camille kneeling beside me. I let out a soft chuff, but I didn’t change back. Remembering what had happened, I couldn’t help but wonder if this was really
Camille, or maybe another fear come to haunt me. I shifted, raising my head, waiting.
“I’ve been searching for you. This is a frightening place, I’ll tell you that much.” She glanced around, shivering. “They didn’t want to let me come, but I told them if anybody could find you, it would be me. Come home with me. We need you, sweetie. Shade needs you. He’s so afraid now. He thinks it’s his fault that you’re trapped here. Come on, Delilah, come home with me, please.”
I realized that she was doing the same thing with me that I had with Shade. But was she truly Camille? Finally, I stepped away from her and shifted back to my human form, slowly this time so it wouldn’t hurt. As my body lengthened and stretched, rising upright on two feet, I let out a long sigh and realize that it felt like I had slept for days. Maybe I had. It was impossible to fathom how time ran here in the Land of Wandering Souls. At least I knew where I was, though.
“How do I know it’s you? How do I know you’re really Camille?”
“You can ask me anything.” She looked worried now, her brow furrowed. The crown on her head looked heavy.
“But anything I ask you, I already know the answer to. Unless…” I paused. If I asked her something she didn’t know, but that I knew…she shouldn’t be able to tell me if she was truly Camille. “Before Menolly was born, do you remember a camping trip that we went on with Mother and Father? Where I was lured into the water?”
She frowned, looking confused. “Not offhand. I don’t know…” She bit her lip, staring at the ground.
“So you don’t remember it?” If she was a figment of my imagination, she would probably recall it right away.
“I’m sorry.” She shook her head. “I don’t think I remember anything like that. Unless… No, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry.”
Relieved, I smiled at her. “Don’t be. I didn’t even remember it until this trip. If you had told me that you remembered, I’d think you were a figment of my imagination. So how do we get out of here? And…did I come back the first time?” Now I was confused again. “I remember waking up, then stepping out of bed and then somehow falling back into the river here.”