Page 21

Behind the door was nothing dramatic. Just a blank stone wall, and carved into the center of it, the same three symbols we'd been staring at all night.

Queen. Witch. Guardian.

Carol explained it simply enough. I touched the Queen symbol. Zelda touched the Witch. Kai, jaw tight, touched the Guardian. Carol slotted the Wayfinder into the center of the wall.

WHOOM!

The wall didn't open.

It disappeared. Simply wasn't there anymore, stone giving way to something that had no business existing behind the back room of an 80s-frozen laundromat.

The Between wasn't Hell. I want to be clear about that, because I'd braced for fire and brimstone and got something so much stranger instead. No sky. No sun. Just mist, pale and endless, and a stone path that seemed to hang suspended in permanent twilight, going nowhere and everywhere at once. Doors appeared in the distance, faint outlines that vanished the second I tried to look at them straight on. Gravity felt subtly, unsettlingly wrong, like the ground wasn't entirely sure it wanted to hold me.

There was no sound at all.

"Well," I said. "This is unsettling."

"That's your contribution?" Zelda asked.

"I haven't had enough coffee for existential geography."

Kai tried to step through first.

Same wall. Same nothing. He bounced off it, same as he had in the tomb. I already knew it would happen, and it still made my chest hurt to watch it again.

"The Guardian has to keep his hand on the Wayfinder," Carol said, looking at me with those glowing green eyes of hers. "If he lets go before you and Zelda return, the passage closes."

"For how long?"

"I don't know."

"Excellent. I love an exact science."

Kai didn't hesitate. He never did, not when it mattered, and I hated and loved that about him in roughly equal measure.

"I'm not standing outside the danger, Love," he said, settling his hand flat against the Wayfinder like it was the simplest thing in the world. "I'm holding your way home."

I was not going to cry in front of the Baba Yaga in an eighties mini skirt. It didn’t matter that I had known her for centuries. I simply was not going to cry.

"You chose this?" Kai asked, quietly, just for me. The crown's Magic required choosing. He knew that better than anyone standing here.

I looked at the passage. At Zelda, waiting. At him.

"Yeah." Then, because it needed saying out loud, to him and to me both, "But I'm also choosing to come back."

"Good." He kissed me, quick and fierce, like he was trying to press the memory of it into both of us before I even stepped through. "Because I refuse to marry anybody else."

"You better not."

Chewy made a valiant run at the threshold the second my back was turned and got bounced clean onto his rear end by a small, apologetic little puff of Magic.

"RUDE,” he sniffed before licking his butt.

"Stay with Kai," I ordered.

"I don't take orders."

"There are tacos in the car."