Chapter 121: Through The Portal (I)

Elara:

My head was throbbing when I finally woke up. It was the kind of dull, heavy ache that made it difficult to remember where I was or how long I had been asleep.

For several seconds, I didn’t open my eyes. I simply stay there, vaguely aware that something beneath me was moving. Or perhaps I was inside something moving. There was the faint vibration of an engine beneath my body, the occasional shift of the vehicle as it traveled over the road, and the soft hum of tires against pavement.

Something warm was curled against my chest and shoulder, its weight familiar enough that even through the fog in my mind, some instinctive part of me recognized it.

My eyes fluttered open slowly, and it took several seconds for them to adjust to the dim light inside the car. The first thing I noticed was the passenger seat beneath me. The second was the dark window beside my head, reflecting faint streaks of passing lights against the glass. But the third thing made my entire body freeze - white fur, tiny ears, and a familiar fluffy tail.

I stared down at the warm creature curled comfortably in my arms, and my breath caught painfully in my throat.

"Crazy?" I whispered.

His eyes opened lazily, one at a time, and he looked up at me with the most unimpressed expression imaginable, as though waking up on my chest in the middle of the night was somehow my fault. For one heartbeat, I couldn’t move. Then my hands flew around him, pulling him tightly against me.

"Oh my God." My voice broke immediately. I buried my face into his fur, squeezing him so tightly that he made an offended little noise. "You are alive."

My eyes filled with tears all over again, but these weren’t the same tears from earlier. These were tears of relief. Pure, overwhelming relief. I kissed the top of his head repeatedly, my fingers trembling as I checked his ears, his face, his tiny paws, almost as though I needed physical proof that he was really here.

Crazy eventually shoved one paw against my chin and complained, "If you are planning to suffocate me to death, I would like to formally object."

A laugh escaped me through the tears, broken and shaky. "It was indeed not you in that box."

"Obviously," he replied with the air of someone deeply insulted by the suggestion. "Do you honestly think I would allow myself to be replaced by a less attractive version of me?"

I hugged him again, and this time he didn’t protest. Instead, he settled his head beneath my chin and remained unusually quiet for several seconds before muttering, "You cried enough to drown a small village."

My smile trembled. "I thought you were dead."

His ears flicked, and his usual sarcasm softened just slightly when he said, "I know." Then he rested his head against me again. "That’s why I didn’t complain about the hugging."

It was only after I had convinced myself for approximately the hundredth time that Crazy was actually alive that I finally looked toward the driver’s seat.

Jasper was driving. It was nighttime, and the road ahead was mostly dark except for the occasional pools of light from streetlamps and the glow of the dashboard illuminating the sharp lines of his face. I blinked at him several times, trying to make sense of how I had gone from sobbing in his arms at my dorm to apparently sleeping in the passenger seat of his car with Crazy curled against me.

"Jasper?"

He glanced at me briefly before returning his eyes to the road. "You are awake."

I looked down at Crazy, then at the unfamiliar road outside, then back at him. "Where are we going?" I asked, surprisingly calm despite the absurdity of waking up in a moving car in the middle of the night.

If this had been anyone else, I probably would have panicked. But somewhere along the way, Jasper had earned a strange kind of trust from me. I trusted that he wouldn’t hurt me. I trusted that if he had taken me somewhere without telling me, there was a reason. I simply didn’t understand what that reason was.

Jasper was silent for a moment before answering, "Somewhere I should have taken you a long time ago."

I frowned. "That’s not exactly an explanation."

"I know." He didn’t elaborate.

I sighed and looked out the window again, deciding I could wait until he was ready to explain.

We drove for what felt like another twenty minutes before Jasper suddenly turned onto a narrow road surrounded by darkness. There were no buildings, no city lights, and no obvious signs that anyone lived in the area. Then, almost as though it had been hidden by magic until we were close enough to see it, a single house appeared ahead. It stood alone in the darkness, modest but strangely beautiful, with warm golden light glowing through its windows.

Jasper parked outside, got out, and opened my door before I could even reach for the handle. "Come," he said simply.

I carefully climbed out with Crazy still in my arms and followed him toward the house. The moment we entered, a woman in her thirties appeared from somewhere deeper inside. She had an alert expression, as though she had been expecting us, and she immediately looked at Jasper before her gaze shifted toward me.

They exchanged a few quiet words that I couldn’t quite catch, and then Jasper said, "Make it quick. We don’t have much time."

The woman’s expression became serious as she nodded and moved toward an empty section of the room. I watched in confusion as she lifted both hands and began weaving magic through the air.

Light gathered between her palms. Runes appeared, one after another, spinning slowly in a widening circle until the empty space before us began to distort. The air shimmered. Then the center of the circle darkened, stretching into something that looked impossibly deep despite being suspended in the middle of the room.

My eyes widened. I had read about portals in books, but I had never actually seen one.

"Jasper..." I barely managed to say his name before he reached for my hand. I tightened my grip around Crazy with my other arm, but before I could ask a single question, Jasper pulled me forward.

The world around us warped into light and darkness as my foot crossed the threshold of the portal.