When I woke, Kellis was staring down at me, a worried look on her face. Kellis was always worried about me lately.

It isn’t as if I try to do these kinds of things lately. 

They just sort of keep happening. 

“W-w-what day is it?” I asked. My mouth was so dry. 

“Thursday.”

It definitely hadn’t been Thursday when it had happened. Tuesday. I think it had been Tuesday. “Are Cass and Coty ok?”

“Better than you.” Kellis was fussing over the blankets. “They both woke yesterday. Neither of them had any answers, either. So…”

“Let me g-g-guess…Cormac Jareth has the questions?”

“Spot on. What exactly were you doing out there?”

“Gardening. We were just…gardening.” I just looked at my sister. 

I definitely didn’t know anything more than that.

Unless…the attack may have had something to do with what we were searching for regarding the Goddess?

But no. That didn’t make sense, either.

“Th-th-they were after Cassandra. I could feel it. But I c-c-couldn’t feel why.”

Kellis settled next to the bed. I finally looked around and figured it out. “Healer’s Hall. Again. Where are Cass and Coty?”

“Cass is with the dhan. She is extremely upset about what happened to her baby sister. I can say that I understand her reasoning. You have to be more careful, Jumena. If I was a human female, I’d be getting gray hair from all of your adventures, lately.”

“I am not exactly ad-ad-adventurous, Kellis. I just…they didn’t come for me. They came for Cass. Coty and I…and Cass…we stopped them somehow.”

“But how?”

Wasn’t that the million dollar question? “I-I-I don’t know. I don’t know at all…”

I told them that when they came to question me again. Of course, it was Cormac Jareth and Aodhan Adrastos…and this time it was the dhar himself and Theo.

Of course, it was Theo.

It was almost always Theo and Cormac when things went wrong in my world.

Perhaps they were the curse now plaguing me?

I looked at the dhar. I have spoken to him before, of course, as Theo’s secretary, but now…

There was a look of anger in his eyes that had me shaking. “I do-do-do not know why they came when they did. But they were after little Cass. I could feel it.”

The dhar’s face tightened. With worry, of course. And I understood it.

Cass was his female’s only sister, after all. And just twenty-two years.

Monsters should never have come for that girl.