A human seer and an elven prince have one thing in common: a missing sister.
Seraiah's dreams have a habit of coming true, but when all her dreams turn into nightmares, she fears for her sister's life. Each nightmare is a little different, but they...
Seraiah blinked slowly, not entirely trusting her eyes. Perhaps it was her mind playing tricks on her after not getting enough sleep. But no, when she looked again, it was the same.
The stranger who stood before her looked so much like Sterling. He had the same silvery gray hair, eye shape, and those pointed ears.
The dark-haired girl had the same ones.
Sterling had always assumed they were a birth defect passed down from Mama. Both Mama and Sterling had kept them hidden beneath their hair, so others wouldn't notice them and comment on their odd shape.
The longer Seraiah stared, the more similarities she picked out, down to the way he held his head with a slight tilt to the right, chin jutted out.
Confident. Proud. A little defiant.
She wasn't close enough to make out the color of his eyes, but she would bet they were the same stormy gray. He wasn't Sterling's twin exactly, but the resemblance was uncanny.
"Who are you?" Seraiah whispered, more to herself than to him. Her step-mother had never mentioned anything about having a son, but the man who stood before her could only be Sterling's older brother.
The corners of his mouth lifted slightly. "I'm not sure you would believe me if I told you, but I will answer to Kai. Kestrel is right; we need to be moving. There is a lot of ground to cover."
He lifted his hood again, shrouding his face in shadow, and moved off into the trees after the other girl.
Seraiah hesitated. Did she trust these strangers who still hadn't explained the reason they were so willing to help her?
She thought about Sterling, alone and afraid somewhere far from home. It was enough to get her moving, propelling her forward after the others.
It didn't matter if she trusted them. Right now, they were her—and Sterling's—only option.
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The underbrush kept grabbing at her skirt.
Seraiah cursed under her breath as she untangled her hem from yet another thorny bush. Kai and Kestrel were a short distance ahead of her, able to move much more quickly than she was. After some not-so-gentle tugging, the bush released her hem, but not before leaving a long red scratch on her hand for Seraiah to remember it by.
Now free, she hurried to catch up, nearly tripping over a rock buried in the snow. It was hard to see in the gloom with the trees pressing in around her. Their boughs, heavy with snow, blocked a majority of the early morning sunlight.
"Can you at least try to be quiet?" Sterling's look-alike snapped. "We don't need every living thing in the area to know our location."
Seraiah responded with a glare. It wasn't her fault she wasn't as used to traipsing through forests as he apparently was. He also had the advantage of not wearing a wool dress that caught on everything.
