Mira propped the damp clothes on the hastily made wooden rack and threw small bundles of tinder to feed the fire so they could dry quicker. Before Magic left, he gathered extra materials, so Mira took some to start a second fire for their clothes. With the way the fabrics were flung over it, she almost felt like she was hanging an animal over the fire. A spit to cook their next meal with.

Maybe it was because she could hear her stomach growling and feel the contractions of her abdomen as she fought to keep it quiet. Mira couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a decent meal to eat. In fact, she’d considered spearing a few rodents for what little meat they could give, but the mere thought of it turned her stomach.

She heard Magic return before she saw him, the sticks in the brush and brambles behind her alerting her to his arrival. He was dressed now in a thick hoodie with a set of denim jeans and a pair of dusty white trainers, his old clothes hung around his elbow.

Magic didn’t say anything as he approached. He stood there dumbly between two tiny ferns, eyes shifting between her and the fires. Mira raised a brow, also looking between him and the twin flames. “Something wrong?”

“No,” he said, tossing the bundle in his arms towards her. Mira scrambled to catch it as he seated himself furthest away from the heat of the fire. She laid the clothes over the rack, wincing at the sudden breeze that rustled through the leaves of the trees, emitting a calm whistle in its wake.

Magic coughed behind her and she turned in time to see him bundle his knees to his chest, head down to avoid the smoke as it swept over him in a pale gray cloud. When she moved to sit beside him, he scooted further away. Mira reached into his duffle bag, digging for the extra quilt he’d packed and moved to wrap it around her brother’s shoulders. He pushed that away, too, the minute it grazed his arms.

Mira sighed, holding the blanket in her lap. “You’ll freeze if you keep that up,” she said, motioning towards the fire with her chin.

“No, I won’t,” Magic mumbled. “I’m fine.”

“I can nearly guarantee that you’ll fall over like a dead quail if it gets much colder. Which it will. At night.”

She attempted to throw the quilt over him a second time. Still he waved her away and pushed the cover off roughly. “I’m fine. I don’t need anything.”

Mira lightly bit into her tongue, restraining herself from biting through it. “What happened to you?”

“Nothing!”

“Do not lie to me. You were fine before I left to swap my stuff out and now you can’t even look at me when you’re talking! What happened? Was it something I did?”

“Don’t you dare spin this around, Mirabellis,” Magic hissed, whirling to face her, one hand pressed against the soil so hard his knuckles blanched. “Ori’s feathers, I hate it when you do this.”

“Why are you being such a pain in the ass about this?!” Mira shouted, unable to quell the steady rise in her voice and the warm flush of rage in her skin. “Heaven forbid you answer any of my damn questions!”

“Because you can’t do anything!” His voice seemed to carry in the silence that followed. Birds shuffled around in the branches above, the rustling of leaves audible from their spying eyes. “You can’t do anything,” he repeated, as if Mira didn’t have the ears to hear him the first time he’d said it. “Quit treating me like an injured pigeon, Mira! I’m not a child.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Then don’t act like one! Simple as that!” Mira pushed to her feet, dropping the quilt at her brother’s side. “Take this. I made my pitch. What you want to do with it is up to you.”

And with that, she stomped away, aggravated and frustrated at her brother’s mumbled complaints, though she couldn’t make out any of his words. Let him sulk. He’d come around eventually when he found the words to tell her.

She walked as far as her tired feet would take her, through ferns, through patches of flowers and herbs, past a small colony of wild rodents until she found a flat rock to lay down on. The journey wasn’t too far—if Mira listened hard enough, she could hear the crackling of the fire between the twittering of birds and squeals of foxes. She kept herself occupied by counting the number of birds as they zipped over her in the sky. Every time she got distracted by the voice of the Beast in her head, she started over.

The furthest she got was seven.

Memories cornered her, picked at her brain, settled on her skin like the odd appendage of the creature guarding the woods.

Little Star, it crooned. Mira could feel it even now, yanking at her bag, holding her in place. The laughter in its voice that had bordered on sadistic pleasure. Why have you wandered from your creator? Has she betrayed you, too?

Stay with me, it groaned. There is work to be done.

Had she been a drinker, it would have made for a horrifying drinking game.

The worst of it, perhaps, wasn’t even the rickety voice of the Beast whispering in her ear, but the continued voice like a skipping record in Mira’s head that called itself her mother.

A voice, Mira knew, that didn’t exist, yet fooled her anyway, hopeful as she was.

She often wondered what her life would be like if she’d had anything of her mother’s; aside from her darker skin and pale eye—the eye Benji always said reminded him of her—or the ring on her finger that he’d specifically paid for to propose to Mira’s mother with, she didn’t have much to remember the woman who had brought her into this world. It was a useless thing to want and a fiction that brought her more sadness than it did hope, but she found her mind wandering to this when she let it rest for too long.

If she tried, Mira could still picture the bakery as it always was during the summer in honor of her mother’s birthday, heady with the scent of fresh bread and pastries, the soft crackle of the brick oven where the dough was cooked and the tiny bouquet of pink and yellow mirabellis flowers for which she was so aptly named. They were southern belles; widely popular in the marine port towns, they were often used in romantic displays of affection and sought after mostly during the summer, the only season in which they would reliably grow.

Benji sometimes teased her for being so like her namesake: stubborn as a mule and utterly unbearable when it came to her vocal hatred of colder weather. How she’d survived this long without a single complaint, Mira wasn’t sure. She just knew that, were her father here, it would have impressed even him.

Mira shook her head with a tiny laugh.

Now was not the time to be reminiscing. She needed to focus on the end goal, but even that was slipping through her mental gaps in her fatigue.

From her resting spot, she could see the blips of jagged rock poking out from the tops of the trees in the forest, a child playing hide-and-seek. Silver light glittered along its snow-covered peaks, the shadows creating a sharp contour along its edges.

They were far.

Hell, they were so far …

Mira knew without a shadow of a doubt that the walk from now to the mountains would be a hellish one. She wasn’t sure how long it would take to walk from one point to the next place they’d end up sleeping at or how much effort it would be just to get to the mountain’s entrance, but what Mira did know was that they’d need to travel carefully.

Preservation of food and materials would be key. Magic, if he got his own shit together, would be good at rationing out their berries since Mira sure as hell didn’t trust anything in this forest from this point forward. Not after the Beast.

Even that thought got her head reeling. She thought of the creature’s words, the anger entwined in it. The contempt. The vengeance.

What was this creature’s true relation to the others carved on the tree—the Spectacles, Daphne had called them. How had it gotten there? And why was it so wrathful?

Jovie better be able to explain this all, Mira thought with stubborn resolve. Sleep was starting to claw at her, twining its tendrils along her limbs and weighing them down. Her eyelids were starting to get heavy.

After everything we’ve seen, I won’t accept less.