“I was thinking we were going to die,” Eleanor snapped.

The hedgewitch huffed. “Well, you didn’t. And now we’re all stuck here until you recover.”

“Where is here?” Otto asked, looking around at the anemic woods. “I mean, a forest, obviously. But what world?”

The hedgewitch gave a long-suffering sigh. “I’ll go and see if I can find out,” she said. “Don’t go anywhere without me.” She turned on her heel, stalking down the road.

Pip squinted after her. “Your mom’s kind of terrible.”

“Says the girl whose mom tried to ritually sacrifice us,” Otto pointed out.

Pip shrugged. “I said terrible, not evil. There’s a difference.”

Eleanor sank down onto the squiggly end of a root and stared out at the forest. Pip sat next to her. She wrapped her arms around Eleanor, resting her chin on Eleanor’s shoulder. Otto sat on the other side, leaving a bit of distance between them, but that was a sign of how much he cared about her, too. She’d started to feel overwhelmed when both of them hugged her at the same time, like she was getting claustrophobic. So now they took turns.

Eleanor stared straight ahead, eyes focused on nothing. A stranger was in her mother’s place. And the same thing was going to happen to Pip. To all of them. It was all too much. If she thought about it for even a moment, she was afraid she might break apart.

“We’ll find a way to get her back, you know,” Pip said. “We’ll stop Mr. January. And the Stories. And we’ll go home and everything will be great.”

“Since when are you an optimist?” Otto asked, lightly teasing.

Pip scrunched up her nose. “Ugh. It’s Jack. The warrior, I mean. It’s not even a little bit cynical. It’s constantly convinced that we can save the day and live happily ever after.”

“How dare it rob you of your doom and gloom?” Otto asked, and Pip chuckled.

“What about you?” Pip asked, squeezing Eleanor’s shoulder. “Feel anything changing?”

“I don’t know,” Eleanor said. “I can’t open the road, but if I really concentrate there’s this sort of . . . shimmer.” It was like a hum in the air—but also like her fingers were brushing against strings that were threaded between everything. There was one running between Pip and Otto. She wasn’t sure what it was, except that it was strong and bright and loud. But when she tried to reach out, like she had when she opened the road . . . nothing.

She sighed.

“You probably just need to rest,” Otto reassured her.

“It feels like trying to work a strained muscle,” Eleanor said. She rolled her shoulders.

A strange sound came from the direction where the hedgewitch had vanished. A metallic scrape, and then a cut-off yell. Eleanor was on her feet before she fully processed what she’d heard.