With my newfound awareness, I could feel the weight of his footsteps. I could feel the snow and moss tamp beneath his boots. His presence was heavier than the others’, harder and stronger. Darker. I scoffed. “Barely.” Turning to Coco, trusting Beau and Célie and even Jean Luc to protect my back, I said, “It doesn’t feel like Morgane. It feels familiar, yes—almost familial—but it also feels like me. I . . . I think I trust it.”

She nodded once in understanding. But how could she? I hardly understood myself. Though I implicitly trusted the wholeness of this magic, the purity, I felt much like a rowboat at sea. The ache in my chest kept building, pulling me adrift. Dragging me beneath the current. “Then do it,” she said firmly. “Do it quickly.”

Closing my eyes, ignoring Reid’s vehement protest, I spread my awareness outward, farther and faster than before. There. A mile north, beneath the infamous bridge, a river crashed into the ocean. With the wave of my hand, the water solidified to ice, changing state of matter. The white pattern burst, and my friends and I dissolved into shadow.

With our first steps on the bridge, my body attempted to rematerialize, limbs accumulating and dispersing with violent shudders. Except it wasn’t my body at all. Gritting my teeth in concentration, I glanced down at my unfamiliar, disembodied hand. The Maiden’s hand.

“Shit.”

My whisper floated in the darkness as said hand dispersed to shadow once more. “What is it?” Coco asked sharply. I could just see her shadowed form beside Beau’s, though the finer details of their appearance—such as the expressions on their faces, the gleam in their eyes—had been lost to the enchantment. Now they simply appeared pieces of night darker than the rest. Human-shaped shadows. None would notice us unless they looked, and even then, the smoke obscured all traces of moonlight. We were near invisible.

“Nothing. I just—feel weird.” Though incorporeal, my head still swam at the magnitude of power before me. At the sheer breadth of it. How had my mother withstood this? How had it not crushed her? “It’s too much. It’s like I can’t breathe.”

“So don’t,” Reid offered.

If I’d had hands, I might’ve strangled him. Perhaps I still would’ve tried if I hadn’t looked up, past the gatehouse, to the empty expanse of mountain all around the Chateau. I blinked slowly, unable to believe my eyes. Where before a mighty forest had prospered, now only rocks and dirt greeted me. “Where are the trees?”

Someone bumped into me from behind. Jean Luc. “What do you mean?”

“The trees.” I gestured to the rocky incline above us, forgetting he couldn’t see me. “There used to be trees here. Trees everywhere. They covered this entire mountain face.”

“It’s true.” Reid’s heavy footsteps stopped beside me. “I remember.”