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I shrugged. “People call it different things, I guess. Times change.”
“Okay,” she said, understanding what I was trying to say now. “So, there’s magic around Halloween?”
“There’s always magic,” I said. “Around All Hallows’ Eve—Halloween—it’s different. It becomes unstable, it grows and bends. And sometimes, people slip through the cracks.”
“Does it happen a lot?” Lorraine asked.
I shook my head. “It happens every couple of decades. The last time it happened was about fifty years ago.”
“Oh, wow.”
I nodded.
We stepped through the trees, and the lake lay sparkling and blue before us. On the far side, sprites and druses lay in the sun together, drinking in the rays.
“Oh,” Lorraine breathed. “They’re so different.”
I tried to see my world through her eyes. The sprites had green skin that looked almost a little transparent, with long hair and voluptuous bodies. They were almost always naked.
It was a beautiful sight to behold. Everything about the vale and the magic here was beautiful. My heart constricted. Would I miss this place when I left?
I shut down the thought right away. I wasn’t going to second-guess myself.
“Do you look like that in your natural form?” Lorraine asked.
I chuckled. “No, I’m a drus. We’re not green. When I’m in my natural form, I’m in the tree.”
“Show me,” Lorraine said.
“There isn’t much to see once I’m there,” I said. “That’s where I was when you ran past me that night.”
Lorraine blinked at me, and I saw her going back in her mind’s eye. The fear that she’d felt flickered across her features for a second before her eyes widened.
“I thought I tripped over the roots of a tree or something.”
“Technically, you did,” I pointed out.
Lorraine shook her head. “This is crazy. I should be freaking out about the fact that you’re some kind of shapeshifter and I’m stuck in this magical realm, but I’m not. I’m just…” She trailed off, and I waited for her to finish.
“You’re just what?” I probed when she didn’t keep talking.
“I get now why I can’t reach out to my sister. Do you know where she is?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t tried to find her.”
“Would you be able to?”
I hesitated. “I’m not supposed to.”
“I just want to see if she’s okay. That’s all. I get it if I have to be here for a while longer.” She didn’t really get it, but I wasn’t planning on going into that if I didn’t have to. “I just want to know that she’s still alive and Oscar didn’t do something to her, too. I’m sick with worry about her.”
Her green eyes were pleading, her face filled with worry.
“I can show you, but we have to stay in this realm,” I said. “We can’t go into the human world.”
“It’s weird that you can’t go there but I came here,” Lorraine said. “That seems backwards.”
“Yeah.”
