Chapter Seven

I raised a hand to my mouth, stifling a cry.

Then my attention was stolen away from Alder’s strange transformation to the fireflies. At first, their pulsing light seemed normal, despite the sheer abundance of them, but their forms had flickered into something else. They weren’t just brief flashes of yellow light, but floating mist-like glowing spheres. Their bodies were translucent and shimmery in the moonlight reflected off the lake.

“Oh…my…God…”

Alder watched me, his gold eyes locked on my face, gauging my reaction.

As if he knew I’d freak out.

I did not disappoint, because at that moment reality came crashing down on me.

Even though I’d just been in a whole other plane of existence, there was a part of me that had been clinging to everything I’d just seen as some crazy dream. In a dream, I could just accept that Izzie turned into Beyoncé with wings, and we went on her world tour with centaur Justin Timberlake as he serenaded “Can’t Stop the Feeling” to me on top of the Eiffel Tower—totally not a real example.

Air caught in my chest, struggling to get out, but I couldn’t release it. I couldn’t do anything but stare at the scene before me.

I needed my inhaler.

“The fireflies…they…” I choked.

The strange beings floated and pulsed with multi-colored ethereal light illuminating the lake and its shore and the trees around us.

My chest heaved, but I wasn’t getting any air.

It was too much. Running into a spirit realm, finding my mother, seeing the field of fire, meeting this boy, and now even the freaking fireflies were changing. They were no longer insects but literal balls of light that seemed to be made of the same strange aura from the world I’d just escaped.

Alder’s silver brows furrowed in concern. He took a step forward and I took one back. “Briony, you need to breathe, all right?”

“No…duh….” I wheezed.

This doesn’t feel like my asthma. My lungs were clearer, better than they’d ever been. Superhuman lungs. But I still couldn’t get any air into them.

In three steps, Alder crossed to me and wrapped his hands around my neck. Suddenly air stalled inside my chest. Like he was controlling it somehow.

He held my breath. Literally.

In those seemingly long seconds, the balls of ethereal light retreated into the background, and the mountains and sky caught up with me, slowing under my feet and coming to a stop.

Everything came to a grinding halt.

After looking up into his strange eyes, I closed mine, and when I did, air flew through me again. Into my lungs, oxygenating them, then flowing out. Slowly. Deeply.

I could breathe normally.

“How did you do that?” I asked as he removed his hands from my throat.

Alder scanned my face. “Holding your breath stops a panic attack.”

“Well, sure, but not that. I meant how did you—never mind.” Out of all the things I had to ask him, how he had controlled my breathing didn’t even break the top twenty.

The “fireflies” continued their hypnotic dance, and my gaze bounced from looking at them over his shoulder back to his face, then back to them.

“Are you a spirit?”

He stepped back. “Yes.”

“Had…” I swallowed, struggling to organize my thoughts. My gaze dropped to the friendship bracelet. It was tight around his wrist as if he had grown into it. And by the appearance of the knots, I could tell he had even loosened it and re-knotted it a couple times. It was well cared for. “Had I known that before?”

Alder looked away, the tension leaving his body, and replacing it with defeat. “Yes.”

I took a minute to process that yes. Such a simple answer contained a world’s worth of implications and hidden meanings. I’d always longed to know what my missing memories had been, but now the pain of not knowing hurt like a physical wound.

“And did I know of these…” I gestured around to the floating lights. “These…” My voice climbed another octave, high and helpless.

The hole in my chest throbbed and ached with pain that now felt intolerable.

My missing piece.

It wasn’t just Mom leaving, or forgetting my childhood, that had created this void inside me. It was this world. It was Alder. It was the spirits in this valley.

It was the hidden world that my mother said only I had access to.

“Wisps,” he said softly. “They’re called wisps, and yes, you did.”

I backed up until I bumped into the trunk of a tree and then slid down the bark, my clothes catching on the rough texture before my backside hit the ground. Resting my head against the trunk, I stared up at the night sky. There were so, so many stars, even this early in the evening. It was strange that something so mystical and distant as the infinity of space was more normal to me than something that was five feet away.

Scrubbing my hand up into my hair, I tugged at the roots, gasping through the sob that I struggled to suppress in my chest. The stars grew blurry above me.

I’d lost this whole world, this amazing, luminous world—I’d lost it all. And somehow that was more devastating than anything I could’ve ever imagined.

“Wisps.” Their name passed my lips without much of a sound at all. My mouth merely formed it. Maybe it should feel familiar to me, but it didn’t. It was foreign and strange.

The pebbles of the lakeshore crunched underfoot as Alder-the-spirit knelt before me. I recalled his grip on my arm and the warm, solid hands on my face, checking my pulse, brushing my cheeks… He certainly hadn’t felt like a spirit then.

“Briony?” he said, his gaze concerned and yielding. His hand hovered above my knee, as if he wanted to touch me but didn’t dare.

“I forgot all this.” I dropped my hands to my face, covering my nose and mouth, and concentrated on breathing in, breathing out.

“Okay, you’re a spirit. These”—I gestured to the things that had once been fireflies around us—“are these spirits, too? How did they get here from the spirit world? And if you’re a spirit, how come you look like a human?”

Alder sat back on his heels, squeezing the space between his eyebrows. “This is going to be difficult.” Then he sighed and lifted his head to fix me with his unreal, gold stare. “Yes, you did travel to the spirit world, but the more accurate term for it is the ethereal plane. It is the boundary between two planes of existence—the physical plane and the astral plane. The physical is made entirely of matter, while the astral plane is made entirely of energy. So the ethereal plane is—”

“A combination of the two,” I said, thinking of the solid trees encased in magical energy.

Alder gave a tight nod. “And wisps are proof that this valley is connected to the spirit world. Places in the world that contain ethereal planes, like this valley, can’t exist without energy from the planes bleeding over—that’s the wisps.”

“So you’re saying they’re…spirits of pure energy?”

“Yes, mana.”

“Mana?”

“The aura that you saw. It’s what we call energy from the astral plane.”

“We?”

“Myself and other spirits.”

“Right. Okay, sure,” I muttered, lifting my gaze to the stars again. “So that creature I saw, with the clover growing out of its back, that was a spirit?”

“Yes.”

I was dying to know more about the little spirit squirrel—if it talked, if it had any powers—but I held back. That wasn’t what was important. I had to focus on rescuing Mom so I could learn more about my past and the night of the fire.

As a breeze picked up and whistled through the trees, I could’ve sworn I heard her voice echo softly, “You must unlock the gates by the sunset of the summer solstice.”

My nerves spiked, like I’d just forgotten a test I’d had to study for—yet a thousand times worse. I had less than a week to find these spirit gates and I knew absolutely nothing about them.

Focus, Brye.

“What are spirit gates, and how do I unlock them?”

At that, Alder blinked and stood, his mouth opening and closing. “Who told you about them? What spirit did you meet?”

“It wasn’t a spirit. When I fell off the cliff,” I said, suppressing a shiver at the fear the memory induced, “I met…my mom.”

“Your…your mother? But I thought she left you…left the valley.”

“Well, you’re half right. She did leave me,” I said, somewhat bitterly, “but apparently she never got out of the valley. She said that she can’t leave the spirit world and that the only way to save her is for me to open these spirit gates. Do you know what she’s talking about?”

Alder was already shaking his head before I’d even finished. “Brye, humans aren’t able to exist in the spirit world. That’s just not possible.”

I scowled, standing up, too. “You’re talking to a human who was there literally ten minutes ago.”

“You’re different!” he protested, raising his hands, palms up.

I wasn’t buying it. If I was going to help Mom, I had to figure out what made me “special” as she’d called it. Maybe I could use that to help her escape.

Besides, I’d come here to learn about myself. Who I’d been. And this was it.

“Are you aware of how ridiculous that sounds?” I pressed. “There has to be a reason, all right? Tell me!”

“It’s difficult to explain—”

“Is it because a dark wizard used a killing curse on me as a baby and I survived?” It was a joke, of course, but I did have scars.

Alder rolled his eyes, making a sound of exasperation in his throat.

“Am I actually a Jedi? A demigod? A lost moon princess? What?” I pushed, each question getting louder.

“It’s because of ME!” Alder exploded, throwing his hands up. A gust of wind blew around us, tossing my hair off my shoulders and scattering the wisps in every direction.

Breathing hard, Alder lowered his hands, while his chest rose and fell with each labored breath, and his eyes burned like the sun. “It’s because of me, all right?”

I was a little thrown off by the wind trick, but I could see from his pained expression that his anger wasn’t directed at me. It was at himself. “What do you mean?”

He sighed, holding out his hand. “Give me your hand. I’ll show you.”

Tentatively, I took a step toward him and reached for his hand. Then hesitated.

“Don’t worry,” Alder said quietly. “I’d never hurt you.”

Glancing at the bracelet around his wrist, I said, “Okay.” Then I placed my hand in his.

At first, I felt nothing.

Then I gasped, my fingers tightening around his involuntarily, reacting to the senses coursing inside me.

Pounding of deer hooves against hard-packed earth. Taste of mint and sassafras. Leaves brushing against skin. Scent of dogwood and elm.

The Smokies.

Alder dropped my hand. I was glad he did, because I wasn’t sure if I would’ve been able to. I was still trembling slightly at the intense rush of feelings. “What was that?”

“That,” he said, “was a healthy dose of mana.”

“Mana? As in the astral energy?”

“Yes, every spirit possesses it, but I have more than most, since I’m the only spirit allowed to walk in the physical plane. When we were kids, I couldn’t control it as well as I do now. Every time we played tag, or anytime we touched, you would absorb some of my mana.” He paused, looking off in the distance, seeing something I couldn’t. “Some days you had so much that it was hard to tell the difference between you and any other spirit.”

“So because I had the mana of a nature spirit, I was able to pass into the spirit realm?”

Alder nodded.

“Then how is my mom there now? Did she get mana, too?”

He folded his arms. “I never gave any to her. That’s why I’m saying she can’t be there.”

“Well, she was,” I snapped. Wasn’t she? It had been six years, and maybe I’d hallucinated that part while the rest had been real… No. If anything, she had been the most real.

“Look, just tell me how to open these spirit gates so I can get her out of there by the time of the summer solstice.”

Alder dropped his arms, his jaw tightening as he stared back at me. “Are you sure she said summer solstice?”

“As sure as I am that there needed to be a Black Widow movie. Why?”

“That’s when the boundary is the thinnest between the three worlds.”

“So you believe me?”

“It was never that I didn’t…” Alder sighed and cast his eyes skyward. After a few moments, he looked back at me in what seemed to be his cat-five intensity stare. “Brye, having this mana inside you…it’s dangerous. You should go. Let me try to find your mom myself.”

“No.” That came out a little harsh, but there was no way I was relying on a stranger to do this for me. I had too much on the line. “I’m not leaving here until I get answers. So while I appreciate your concern for me, I’m going to open these spirit gates myself.”