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My glare is met with one of his own. “Who are you calling little? Maybe you’re projecting. I bet your dick is small. That would explain your pissy attitude.”

“Maybe you two should fuck and get it over with,” Carver growls.

Drake wrenches his gaze from mine and gives his vinculum-mate a strange look, whereas I stare at my tutor like he’s lost his damn mind.

“I’d rather die,” I admit.

Drake says nothing.

“Then if you’re done acting like fucking children,” Carver scolds, voice piercing through my bravado, “I’d like to get started. Or are you two going to run away with your tails tucked between your legs?”

“Fine,” Drake bites out.

I pick at a loose thread on my combat boots. “Do I have a choice?”

“Not really,” Carver admits without apology.

Exhaling harshly, I shake my head and mutter, “Fine.”

“Good. Drake,” is all he says before the world warps and twists, the colors spinning and blurring together until I’m no longer sitting on the floor of the pit.

Cold seeps into the soles of my feet. I’m standing barefoot in a snow-filled meadow that stretches for miles and miles. There should be nothing but the snow, but against all odds, hundreds of poppies defy nature, stretching toward the sun as if it were early summer. Their crimson petals are stark against the infinite white.

Everything else, even the trees at the edge of the horizon, is hibernating for winter. I glance at the flowers, eyebrows knitting.

The flowers are hauntingly beautiful.

I shiver and take a step, bending to brush my fingers over one of the flowers to see if it’s real. The petal is soft, almost silky, and my fingers come away wet. Snow, maybe? I withdraw my hand, only to find it stained with red. My gaze moves back to the flower, eyes widening as that violent color leeches from the petals drop by drop. It splatters onto the ground like blood until the poppy is a vivid white—almost the same color as the snow.

It’s still beautiful. Absolutely breathtaking.

{{Take it,}} a voice in my head whispers, deeper and a little rougher than the one I normally hear. Something about it is familiar.

In that moment, something possesses me, and I reach out, pluck the flower, and bring it to my nose, breathing deeply, only to find myself wanting. It doesn’t smell like anything.

{{Turn around.}}

I do as the voice asks, spinning around with the flower clutched in my grip. A speck appears in the distance. No—a gash of darkness.

I tip my head. What is that? I take a step to investigate, but there’s no need. It comes toward me, morphing from a pinprick of pitch to a large circle that pulses and blooms, growing bigger and bigger.

My mouth parts as the circle splinters and breaks into a million fractals, branches shooting out of the darkness, spearing through the air like a gnarled tree. They overlap over and over and over until twisting and morphing into larger versions of themselves, until the spaces in between stitch together. My heart thuds in my chest so hard it hurts, but I can’t stop watching as the now-impenetrable wall of black inches closer, rising so high it climbs up the sky.

My breath catches. I tilt my head, watching as it curves over me like a giant wave of night and comes back around until I’m standing on a lone strip of ivory snow, the poppies on either side of me bleeding out. That beautiful vermilion pools around me. Something deep within me grieves. As if the color leeching from them has also leeched from me, and now I’m missing part of myself.

The ache is so familiar.

The darkness on either side of me presses in, vibrating with energy as it comes a little closer.

The powerful hum of magic doesn’t terrify me; it’s the complete absence of anything at all. Almost like the surrounding darkness is a black hole threatening to consume me.

It inches closer still until I’m face-to-face with nothingness.

There’s nothing but me and the void.

{{Step through it.}} There’s that voice again.

There’s nothing compelling me to move. The words are a mere suggestion, but I dig my heels in all the same. A bone-deep terror—like that of prey about to die—twines around my wrist and ankles. One step in either direction would spell my ruin.