And while they said nothing more for a long while, I was certain their own hearts were speaking in the silent language of wolves.
After several minutes, Stephanie finally pushed back and looked between us. “Your time here is short. You must find Savannah’s shard and get out.”
“How do we locate it?” I asked.
“I can feel it,” Jaxson said. “It pulls on me in the same way I can feel you pulling on me.”
A deep and twisting sense of betrayal strangled my throat. I couldn’t feel anything.
Was it because I’d chained my wolf? Was I so completely cut off that I couldn’t feel a fragment of my own soul, even while Jaxson could?
“Which direction?” I croaked out, unable to hide the hurt in my voice.
He gestured into the featureless woods. “That way.”
“Your shard will be roaming with the ghost packs,” said Stephanie. “There are many, but in this place, they’re mostly wolves from Magic Side and nearby. She’s part of my pack.”
Trying to put on a brave face, I adjusted my jacket and zipped it against the chill. “Okay, let’s go get her, then.”
“We must proceed cautiously,” Stephanie said. “Wolves aren’t the only creatures that roam these woods. Your life force will attract many things that lurk here.”
Great. Lots of monsters in the underworld, and we were the only snack for miles around.
There were no landmarks to measure our progress, only endless pines rising from the mist. It flowed around us as we walked, hanging thick and low around our legs.
“Is the whole underworld like this?” I asked Stephanie.
“No. It’s as diverse as the land of the living.”
Fantastic. We wound up in the extremely creepy part.
After twenty minutes, a loose stone broke from the roots beneath my feet, and I stumbled.
Something didn’t feel right about the stone—it was too angular. I bent over and fanned my hand to brush away the unnaturally thick mist.
Half a brick. I picked it up. It was yellow and crumbling, bearing a diamond-shaped maker’s mark with the letters CHI above BRI.
A Chicago brick?
Were we walking through ruins of a building? I tried to fan away more of the haze, but that wasn’t effective—it just curled back around.
“Was there something here once?” I asked Stephanie, who was patiently waiting for me to get my ass in gear and stop playing in the mist.
She looked back without emotion. “A building. Perhaps a home or workshop. When the building died, it chose to come here.”
“Buildings die?”
“All things die, even places. Once, it was full of life, people, hopes and dreams and morning work routines. You two are the only things here that haven’t died. The trees, the animals, even the mist—all are dead.”
The mist?
I imagined the way that the fog in the woods around Belmont burned off as the sun rose. I’d never thought about it being a thing that died.
“You said that the building chose to come here?”
“There are many afterlives. We all choose one way or another.”
That left me with a burning question: why had my soul chosen this place?
Eventually, the mist began to thin as we moved into rolling, forested hills. I wasn’t sure how long we’d been traveling. Time was as formless as the fog around us. There was little sunlight punching through the gray sky, but it was impossible to tell if it was changing its position or if we were.
The loremaster’s warnings echoed in my mind:
Time is not the same there.
Do not sleep, and do not stay more than a day.