Scare the living crap out of me yes; surprise me no.

“Guinn?” I prompted, when she didn’t answer after a moment. “Guinevere?”

“There’s something wrong.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know yet; stop talking!”

I stopped talking. But it was considerably less enchanting to sit here in the dark, with sweat dripping down my back and strange insects buzzing in my ears. There were some with natural bioluminescence, like fireflies only larger—the size of beetles. They gave off a soft blue light that wasn’t enough to illuminate much, but it added to the weird.

I’d seen a few of them before, but our light sources had mostly drowned them out. But now, as my vision adjusted, I could see them everywhere. They were flitting through the air, trundling over the ground, and lighting up piles of leaves, providing a dim, ambient sort of illumination that would have been strangely pretty, if I wasn’t tense as all hell.

I wanted to prompt Guinn again, but she was prickly, which… yeah. Didn’t really blame her. This was way more than she’d signed up for.

Join the club, I thought, glancing around. And hoping against hope that whatever she was sensing was Mircea or Pritkin, heading for us through the trees. Because they should be, right?

Mircea had been right there when he’d pulled me in before; I’d literally appeared beside him. Of course, I’d pulled myself in this time, but still. I would have expected to have found him by now, or at least to be able to hear him in my head.

But I couldn’t, which was why we’d been stumbling around, trying to zero in on his location. He was here; I could feel him, like a warm glow in the back of my mind. But I couldn’t contact him and that worried me—a lot.

He’d been able to communicate even stoned half out of his mind yesterday. And by now, whatever the dark mages had put in that potion bomb should have worn off. Yet I couldn’t even tell if I was getting warmer or not. For all I knew, we were walking around in circles, lost forever in a leafy maze…

Until we were eaten by hungry roots, I thought, as another one inched towards me.

“Cut it out!” I said, and slammed a knife down through the bastard thing, pinning it to the forest floor.

Before stopping and staring, because I hadn’t brought a knife.

“Take cover!” Rhea yelled, as more knives clattered against a shield that I guessed she’d thrown up, because I sure hadn’t. And I didn’t think that Guinn had, either, since she’d just hit the dirt beside me.

“In the tree,” she panted.

“What tree?” I said, looking around wildly. We were in a forest; there were a thousand trees!

“That one!” she pointed. “Over there.”