Chasing Midnight - A Cinderella Retelling (Once Upon a Curse Book 3) Read online

  I do, then secure the straps across my chest and waist. Outside the window there’s nothing but endless gray, dark and foreboding. Inside, there’s a darkness too. Half of the flashing colors I saw before are out.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, funny thing. There’s an old human saying, what goes up must come down, and I might’ve forgotten about the down part when we left London.”

  “Huh?” I furrow my brow.

  The prince is gripping the steering handles so hard his fingers have gone pale—well, paler. Yet it’s the thin stretch of his lips that concerns me the most. “Most flights between the UK and America these days go between London and Boston, since the US government moved there after Washington, DC, vanished off the face of the planet. So, I put the flight route coordinates in for Logan International Airport. But, well, we’re flying a stolen jet—and not just any stolen jet, but the private plane for the royal family, so we can’t exactly land in such a public spot. The army would be on us in seconds. I’ve already been fielding calls from ground control requesting our flight information, but I shut down the comm system, so hopefully they won’t be able to track us so easily.”

  “What does all of this mean?”

  “Well, New York City, which used to be one of America’s biggest cities, has been under the control of magic for the past decade. The entire area north of the city disappeared in the earthquake, replaced with rural farmlands. That means it’s flat enough to land a plane. When you pair that with the fact that there’s not a lot of tech in place because of the magic, it’s the ideal spot for an undercover landing. The queen who was in control was killed a few weeks ago, and her magic is gone, so we won’t lose power. I was quite chuffed thinking it was the perfect solution to our problem, until…” He trails off with a wince.

  “Until what?”

  “Until we started to run low on fuel and flew into this absolutely rubbish storm. I can’t see anything through the windows, and I shouldn’t land blind, but we’re running out of time. I thought if I dove beneath the cloud coverage it’d be clearer, but now we’re getting hammered by the wind.”

  “Wind?” I perk up.

  “That’s why we’re bouncing so much—” He breaks off as we drop again, clenching his teeth as his neck muscles strain with the force of combating the storm. Rain pours like a waterfall down the windows, blurring the view, and across the sky lightning flashes. “It’s better to fly over storms or around them, but I don’t think we have enough fuel. We have to land, and soon.”

  “I can help,” I blurt.

  He cuts his gaze to me. “How?”

  Instead of answering, I breathe deep, stretching out with my magic, sensing the Mother’s power in the air all around us. “Which direction wind is best?”

  “Headwind. Coming toward us.”

  I nod and lift my palms as the magic beneath my skin sizzles with energy. Instead of building a storm within my chest, I reach out for the storm on the other side of the glass. It’s chaos and raw might, attacking with all the Mother’s fury. There’s no way to dispel it, but I can focus it. I spin the winds lashing us from both sides, directing them toward the front of the plane, and push the electric currents of lightning farther away. There’s not much I can do about the rain except urge it to slow, to calm. I send the warm glow of the sun into the clouds, willing them to thin with the increased heat. Focusing my magic in the area surrounding us, I create a moving eye in the center of the storm.

  “It’s working,” the prince murmurs into his microphone.

  We stop jolting quite so much.

  The prince slowly relaxes his grip and leans back in his seat as his gaze flicks from the windows to the control, back and forth, in constant motion. It’s barely dawn, so the light is soft, hardly strong enough to filter through the clouds. As they break apart, subtle splotches of green pepper the monotonous gray. The numbers flickering before my eyes decrease rapidly. Twenty-five thousand, then twenty thousand, then ten thousand. Is that how high we are? I gulp, keeping my focus on my magic, trying not to notice how very small the trees look on the ground so far below.

  “Nymia, I need your help.”

  I nod, unable to find words through my clogged throat.

  “I need you to monitor a few things for me so I can focus on the landing. You see these numbers here?” He points to a screen flickering with a few rows of numbers. “Just keep an eye on them and let me know if any of them change drastically.”

  “Okay.” He turns away, but my hand acts of its own volition, reaching out to grip his forearm. Prince Frederick turns back to me. “You have done this before? Right?”

  He just winks, then shifts his gaze to the window.

  I want to throttle him, but seeing as he’s the only thing keeping this invention from tumbling out of the sky, I refrain. I’m not sure I even blink as I stare at the numbers, making sure they remain steady. All my other focus is on keeping the magic strong and keeping the storm calm. With so many distractions, I don’t have time to look outside, to notice how close we are to the ground, how far—

  “Ahh!” A scream pops out before I can stop it as we slam down, then bounce into the air, then land again, rolling and rumbling and shaking so hard my teeth chatter. I grip the sides of my seat, but it’s no use. I jerk this way and that, hardly able to see as my face whips around. As quickly as it came, it’s over. We stop.

  “Bloody hell.” The prince releases a loud breath. Then he unbuckles the straps, jumps to his feet, and grips my shoulders. “We made it!” He unclips my restraints and pulls me to my feet, then hugs me against his warm chest before I have time to protest. “We’re alive!”

  I smile against his shirt. Something about his tone is infectious, and when he starts to jump up and down, I jump right along with him. Then we stop and he lifts his palms to my cheeks, pulling away to stare into my eyes.

  “You were brilliant.”

  Before I can say anything, he pulls me toward him and presses his lips to my forehead, then holds there for a second as the tips of his fingers dig into the edges of my hair. When he leans back, there’s a fire in his eyes, one that matches the burning of my skin. It’s hungry and wanting, hooded with all sorts of desires, as he sweeps his gaze around my face as though memorizing every detail. He pauses on my forehead, and the edge of his lip quirks, making me wonder what the magic is doing beneath my skin, which of my secrets it’s giving away.

  “We’re alive!” Ella shouts.

  The prince drops his arms and turns just in time to catch her. He pulls me in and the three of us hold each other close. My body teems with an excitement I hardly recognize, a percolating warmth that sinks so deep I buzz with the heat of it. I haven’t felt this way in years, since before I woke alone in a field of faerie-made flowers, to a new world run by humans. I haven’t felt this way with anyone but Aerewyn.

  The thought stills me.

  How can I feel this way without her?

  Worse—with her captor?

  I spin from Ella and the prince, ripping myself from their embraces, and suck air into my lungs. After a moment, I feel their stares on my back. Their curiosity is so thick it impedes from all sides, pressing in on me.

  “Nymia?” Ella’s voice is cautious. For some reason, the sound makes my chest twinge.

  “The journey isn’t over,” I answer, then straighten my spine and turn back to them, chin raised. “We still have a long way to go before it is. We shouldn’t be celebrating yet.”

  Or at all…

  The prince’s shoulders fall, but he nods. “She’s right.”

  “How far do we have to go exactly?” Ella asks cautiously, turning to look up at me.

  “Hold on,” I murmur and call on a little bit of magic, using it to transform my flower-made ball gown into something a little more comfortable. The deep-sapphire skirt becomes a slim pair of pants, while the indigo bodice stretches to a looser long-sleeve shirt, complete with a hood to cover my face should the need arise. As soon as the
petals lengthen and stretch, the envelope I’d tucked against my stomach slips out and falls to the floor.

  “Me next!” Ella demands with wide eyes.

  But the prince kneels to the floor, fingering the white slip. “What’s this?”

  I snatch it out of his hands, then whip Ella’s clothes into a similar fashion to mine before sliding the papers out. Carefully, I splay them across the floor.

  “These are the documents Omorose gave me before I left,” I explain, pointing to each page as I go. “This is a map of the United States as it is now, a map of the mountains where Omorose is waiting, and a little bit of money. These are our identification papers, with an official government seal. We were supposed to take a boat from London to Boston, then a train from Boston to Denver, before proceeding the rest of the way on foot. But now…” I shrug.

  “I forgot they rebuilt the railway,” Prince Frederick mutters, pressing his fingers against the map. When he finds my gaze, calculations whirl in the blues of his irises. “How much do you two know about the damage the earthquake caused?”

  Ella scrunches her face. “It was…bad?”

  I just shrug.

  “In the UK, it was bad. We lost Glasgow completely, half of Greater Manchester, and a slew of other smaller towns when the worlds merged. A new landmass rose, connecting Ireland to Wales, which caused a diplomatic nightmare. But London was untouched, and so was Edinburgh, which meant most of our government was unaffected, and a lot of our big businesses. The only magic that popped up on our radar is a halo the satellites still can’t pierce all the way up in the Scottish Highlands. We leave it alone and monitor the blacked-out region to make sure it’s not spreading, but for the most part, we forget it’s even there. Basically, we were lucky. But in the States, it wasn’t just bad—it was catastrophic.”

  I gulp at his dark tone and follow his gaze to the map, watching his fingers move across the black-and-white page.

  “When the earthquake struck, they lost New York, Atlanta, and Dallas to the magic, along with a handful of other less populated areas. Washington DC, Seattle, and the entire state of Florida vanished off the map completely, not to mention the acres and acres of other areas wiped away in the blink of an eye and replaced with the lands of the magic world. They lost a third of their population—at least that’s the closest estimate—and most of their infrastructure. But the real issue was the loss of leadership. Their entire government vanished, along with most of their big corporations. In the chaos, Texas seceded from the union. Then two months later, wildfires started in California because of the dry summer, and without the fire brigades and local authorities to step in, Los Angeles practically burned to the ground. A few weeks after that, hurricane season came. Without Florida to help act as a blockade, Georgia, the Carolinas, and a huge portion of the Gulf Coast were flooded. A lot of nuclear reactors were damaged all across the country, making huge swathes of land uninhabitable, and everybody who survived moved inland. Boston became the new center of government because it was their biggest port city left untouched on the east coast. On the west, San Francisco came out mostly unscathed, so they focused on rebuilding the train line between those two cities to connect the two coasts—one side being the government hub, and the other the business one.”

  “Where’s New York?” I ask, scanning the map. “You said that’s where we landed.”

  “I’m guessing we’re somewhere around here,” he says, pointing to a spot near the top right edge of the map. “So if we keep heading north, we’ll eventually run into the railway tracks. And hopefully, once we do that, we can sneak our way onto a train, which should, assuming we don’t get caught, take us all the way to…” He slides his finger almost across the entire map, then looks up, meeting both of our eyes. Ella’s face enlivens with the coming adventure, but my chest hollows. “Denver.”

  I’ve never wished for a faerie portal more.

  Covering that massive distance—it’ll take days, if not weeks.

  The blood oath tugs on the strings of my heart, crossing time and space to connect me to Omorose. As long as it hums in the distant corner of my soul, there’s nothing else I can do but keep going, slow and steady, for as long as it takes to bring Ella home. It’s almost a relief, in a way, to be able to ignore the decision mounting before me. I fear it will be an impassable peak by the time I’m finally able to face it.

  I sigh. “Where do we even begin?”

  The prince stands, twists the latch, and pushes the doorway open. The steps drop to the ground below, revealing the scene waiting outside—the new dawn after the storm. Brilliant rays carve through the clouds, illuminating a giant field in splotches of chartreuse and evergreen. Pink streaks stretch across the sky. The trees beyond are haloed with the barest hint of gold. As the gentle call of songbirds fills the silence, the scent of fresh grass hits my nose, easing the tension from my limbs.

  “We begin the same way every journey begins,” Prince Frederick says, nudging his chin toward the door. “By taking it one step at a time.”

  Then he marches into the light and down the stairs. Ella bounds after, leaving me alone for a moment. I gather the papers, staring at the map for one more prolonged moment, before shuffling everything back inside the envelope.

  The prince is right.

  Dwelling on the inevitable won’t accomplish anything, so I shove the oath, and the magic, and even Aerewyn to the back of my mind for another time. Then I do what he suggested—take a deep breath, lift one foot in front of the other, and carry on.

  Turns out walking isn’t really the ideal form of travel. For one, it’s slow. For another, it’s exhausting. Hardly a few hours in and every part of me aches. We’ve passed a few dirt roads where the path is clearer, but the prince told us to stay away. Not even half an hour after we left the flying machine, more jets rumbled overhead and we dove into an outcropping of trees for cover. The human army tracked where we landed, and they’re looking for us. Cars zoomed by, cutting down bumpy paths that were never made for them. As long as we stay out of sight, they shouldn’t be able to find us. My only solace is in being surrounded by the wilds. After my days in the human city, it’s restorative to breathe fresh air, to feel the Mother’s magic all around me.

  The prince guides us forward using something called a compass. He says it leads him north, and if we keep marching in that direction, we should hit the train tracks eventually. He took a few other items from the plane before we left—human medicines, snacks, and various other essentials, as he called them. It’s amusing to me the things humans think they need to survive in this new world. They’ve forgotten all the gifts nature can provide—they’ve forgotten how to live in harmony with the earth, instead of at war with it.

  That fact becomes more and more clear to me as we pass from lands that used to belong to my world into the lands of the prince’s world. A meadow filled with wildflowers is interrupted by a series of poles connected by thick black wires. I step off grass onto a cracked gray road with faded yellow stripes painted down the center. The wildness takes a different shape. Stone buildings are overrun with vines and they half crumble to the ground. Wood rot fills the air, along with a stench I can’t quite place, something acrid that burns my nose. Broken-down cars line the street. Beneath my feet, glass crunches from their shattered windows. But I notice something else when I look at the ground—a single yellow flower breaking through the destruction, its petals tilted toward the sun. The sight brings a slight smile to my lips, because no matter what, Mother will always survive.

  “What happened here?” Ella murmurs.

  “You’ve lived in London for too long,” Prince Frederick responds softly, kneeling to brush a bed of moss growing across a fractured sidewalk. “This is what a lot of the world looks like now, abandoned towns overrun by the passage of time. After the earthquake, our whole way of life changed. Roads were destroyed. With the electricity issues, no one wanted to fly. Long portions of train tracks disappeared, cutting the railways into disconnecte
d sections. Trade was impossible, let alone getting basic necessities to the people. Any grocery shops that survived the earthquake eventually ran out of food. People swept through their supplies. And when those two sources ran out, they needed to abandon their towns to find other places to survive. People moved to cities that were less affected by the earthquake, to places where the infrastructure made life possible, or to farmlands where they could grow their own food. We’ve been rebuilding for the past ten years, but it’ll take a long time for the world to recover what was lost, if it ever does.”

  While the prince talks, I keep walking, drawn by a dark spot that’s caught my eye. A sticky black sludge spills from the barrel of an overturned truck, puddling into a pool on the road and slinking between the cracks. It’s the source of that smell burning the back of my throat. The closer I step, the more my eyes begin to water. My chest stings as though poisoned by breathing it in. My soul wilts. Heart thudding, I bend down to press my fingers to the bit of exposed dirt.

  I’ve seen this before.

  In my dreams.

  A brown-black substance staining the surface of the ocean. Fish floating belly-up, suffocated by the contaminated water. Birds drowning from covered wings made too heavy to fly. Plants browning. The air growing too polluted to breathe.

  “Don’t touch that,” the prince says, bending down to grab my arm before my fingers sink into the poison.

  I look up at him. “What is it?”

  “Oil,” he says, unconcerned. “Probably a tanker that overturned during the earthquake.”

  “Has this…” I trail off, shaking my head, disbelieving. I always thought my nightmares were just that—imaginary, pulled from my own fears, a twisted reality. The priestesses always said they were a gift, premonitions from the Mother. What if they were? What if they were visions of a world—just not my world? “Has this ever been put in the ocean? Spread across the sea?”

  An expression of shame passes over the prince’s face. “Not on purpose, but there’ve been accidents…”