She nestled into him, scarlet and hot.

“Do it again,” she whispered.

Rafal chuckled, touching her face, and slowly Sophie opened her eyes to the world.

The first thing she noticed is that the Blue Forest was no longer blue.

She pulled away from Rafal, windswept and dizzy, and staggered forward from the tower, anchored in the middle of the forest.

The Blue Willows had rotted to black husks. The once-weatherproof blue grass was now urine yellow, cracking and breaking under her feet. Bracing from the wintry breeze, Sophie crawled through diseased, fallen trunks in the Turquoise Thicket, her nightgown catching on cancerous fungus and mold. Worst of all was the stench: an acrid, acid reek that made her eyes water and grew stronger the deeper she went into the Forest. By the time she reached the Tulip Garden, a stinking ashpit of amber and brown, she’d covered her face with both hands, barely able to stand straight. She looked back for Rafal, but couldn’t see him.

Sophie gasped a shallow breath and plowed forward. She had to get out of here.

She shambled into the Fernfield, desperate to find the North Gates and stopped short. The ferns, once thigh-high with lush, cobalt fronds, was a wasteland of dead animals, swarming with roaches and flies. Under the jaundiced sun, carcasses of emaciated rabbits, storks, squirrels, and deer littered the dirt in front of the sealed gates, as if they’d all tried to flee and failed.

Then she heard a familiar hissing.

She raised her eyes to dozens of black spiricks, coiled around the gates, flicking red tongues. Sophie shrank from the flat-headed snakes with deadly barbs through every scale, that once prevented anything from getting into the School for Boys, and now prevented all the animals from getting out. Sophie slowly looked up at the School Master’s tower in the distance, looming over the Blue Forest like a landmark in a demented park.

Sophie’s heart sagged. The Blue Forest had once been the school’s kitschy backyard, a safeguarded replica of the deadly Woods. She smiled, reliving her liveliest moments here: running circles around a rabid stymph in the Blueberry Fields while Agatha berated her; seducing Tedros in the Thicket with couture Evil uniforms; her heart pattering as the prince leaned in to kiss her over the Blue Brook. . . . Then her smile slowly dissipated as other moments from the Forest came back too. Tedros rejecting her in the Shrubs when she didn’t save him in a Trial; Tedros in the Blue Willows, looking so betrayed as she reverted from Filip’s body; Agatha and Tedros recoiling from her in the Pine Glen, before they’d tried to send her home. . . . Soon the bad memories overwhelmed the good and as Sophie looked up at the Forest, it turned a shade blacker and bleaker before her eyes.

“It likes you,” Rafal drolled, coming up behind her.

Sophie spun. “What? I did that?”

“You did all of this,” he said, scanning the whole dead Forest. “You and me together.”