Page 3 of The Void

“How do you know there’s a leak?” Selene had asked.

“Because that is how our parents escaped,” Lucas said.

Hearing the gravity of the situation had caused Mia some concern. But her heart had skipped whenever she saw Lucas or trained with him over the next few weeks.

How many other men had caused her body to instantly react in her life? None. So she’d done what she could to keep him at arm’s length. She was afraid to get too close to anyone outside of her family for fear they would judge or use her.

Mia had learned to live with her gifts with help from her family. For the first ten years of her new life with her powers, she’d remained at her family’s secluded home just outside of Atlanta and had trained every day, learning all about the djinn’s history and all the myths surrounding them.

On her sixteenth birthday, she and her parents moved back to the city. She attended school for the first time in her life. It was a private school, but she’d finally been around other kids her own age.

Because of her family’s gift, and the knowledge of said gift, the Lis, all of them, were very wealthy. Each member that passed on assured that wealth was kept within the family.

It wasn’t often that a family knew exactly where they had come from more than ten millennia ago.

The Lis had come from Kòngbái, or as Mia had started calling it, the Void. It was a planet—or a realm, depending on which family member you were talking to—far, far away. The place sat empty now, destitute, void of everything.

Once, long ago, before the Li family had traveled to Earth, Kòngbái, had been thriving with life. There had been large cities, technology, and even some sort of space travel, which had been recorded in the archives that her family kept in their private vault. It was housed in a massive underground cavern on the other world, safe from any prying eyes on Earth.

Each year, on the anniversary of the reckoning, the day she’d come into the djinn powers, she would travel with the elders to the cave. There, each of them would read through the family’s histories in search of… well, at this point, she didn’t know. Maybe they were just reading for pleasure?

She’d always grown bored on these travels. At first, when she was still a child, she had enjoyed the few hours of downtime from her studies. When she’d grown older, she’d just found the old dusty cavern tedious.

She was forced to be there since only djinns had the power to go between realms or worlds. It was her duty to keep up the traditions.

It was also her duty as djinn to help others in their fight to save humanity. And that is how she had found herself standing at the gates of hell with her new friends in the first place.

The massive gates had been spectacular and extremely scary. They stood more than a hundred stories high with black spikes on either side of the opening. They had been more impressive than anything Mia had ever laid eyes on in her lifetime, either on Earth or in the Void.

Along each spike, snake-like creatures twisted and turned, opening and closing the gates as the shadows of souls passed through them silently.

Seeing that had caused a shiver to race through her. She hadn’t feared death since witnessing her uncle’s all those years ago. He’d passed peacefully and, in a way, still willingly lived within her, all in order to pass the family gift to her. As she would do one day in the very distant future.

So when the three witches, or fates, had zapped her back to the Void against her will, at first she’d shrugged it off. At least she could return home. Hopefully, Scott, Lucas, and Selene had gotten the rest of the information they needed about how to fight Moros and win.

But when she had tried to return to her family’s home, nothing happened.

Now she stood in the middle of the desert on the Void—Kòngbái—the home of her ancestors, alone and stranded.

It wasn’t until she started walking that she realized she was no longer wearing the worn jeans, sweatshirt, and tennis shoes that she’d been wearing when they’d left her family home in Georgia to travel to hell.

Instead, she was wearing the same soft blue silk dress she’d worn as a child. Now, however, the dress seemed to fit her perfectly.

It wasn’t the first time she’d appeared in the dress here. When she traveled to this realm alone, she remained in her own clothes. But when she brought her family members on their yearly trip, she appeared in this same dress.

Why was she wearing it now?

Why couldn’t she return home?

Glancing around, she groaned at the two bright yellow suns hanging high in the sky. If she was stuck here, the first thing she’d have to do is find water or shelter.

Mountains surrounded the desert on all sides of the sand like a ring, circling it like a protective barrier, as if the flat sand was being held in place by the higher peaks.

In the hundreds of times she’d been here, she’d never once traveled beyond the sand. The family cavern was somewhere high up in the mountains, but when she’d needed to travel there, she and her family members always appeared directly inside the cave.

If she’d lost her ability to return to Earth, had all her other powers gone too?

She closed her eyes and concentrated. When she looked down at her hands, she smiled at the furry black paws that sank into the hot sand.