Free Silver (Wicked Woods #3) by Kailin Gow Page A

to think that I wouldn’t find it at al , but now I have, and it’s everything I had hoped to get back to.”
    “Back to?”
    “Oh, wow,” Jake said. “It’s true?”
    “What’s true?” Briony asked. As usual, it seemed that there were so many things other people had not told her.
    “That Aunt Sophie is actual y from Palisor.”
    “But that can’t be right, can it?” Briony asked. She turned to Aunt Sophie. “Can it?”
    Aunt Sophie shot Jake an annoyed look, but then turned back to Briony with a sigh. “Yes, it can be true, dear.
    It is. This gate is my whole reason for being in this town.”
    Briony tried to make sense of it. “But if you’re from over there, doesn’t that mean that you aren’t…”
    “Human?” Aunt Sophie paused. “I wish there were time to explain, Briony. I real y do. For now though…” she looked up. “It’s here. It’s time.”
    Briony fol owed the line of her great aunt’s gaze, and saw the great form of the dragon gliding towards the clearing. She saw the others staring up at it again as its golden form came lower and lower. They scrambled back to give it room as it touched down with the lightness and agility of any bird, but at least one set of eyes was elsewhere.
    “It’s open!” Aunt Sophie cal ed out, sprinting for the gate. “Quick, al of you, fol ow me. We might only get one chance at this.”

    Aunt Sophie leapt for the gate with an agility that belied her age, and just for an instant, the mists seemed to clear. Beyond them, Briony saw a clearing almost identical to the one they stood in, with trees, and a stream running through it. She could almost have been looking through an empty stone arch, except that the light seemed different somehow when looking through it. Brighter, perhaps, but also subtly changed, like it didn’t come from the same Sun.
    Of course, it probably didn’t.
    “Did you see that?” Briony asked the others.
    “Aunt Sophie leaping into the mist?” Kevin replied.
    “We al saw it, Briony.”
    “Not that. What was beyond the mist.”
    Fal on shook his head, beating his brother to it. “We didn’t see anything. It’s just mist, Briony. There could be anything on the other side.”
    “Not anything,” Briony insisted. “A place like this.
    Almost exactly like this.”
    “We have bigger things to worry about,” Fal on said, nodding to where the dragon currently stood on the turf of the meadow. It didn’t seem to be about to move, and yet somehow, without so much as twitching a muscle, it exuded a sense of menace that carried over to the four of them.
    Briony forced herself to ignore it. Potential y dangerous mythical creatures weren’t as important as the fact that her great aunt had just leapt into a strange world without them. “If it isn’t moving, we have time. We should get through after Aunt Sophie. The dragon won’t be able to do anything there.”

    “You hope,” Kevin added. “It’s from there, remember.”
    “We stil need to go. We can’t leave Aunt Sophie alone.”
    “And we can’t just rush into something without knowing what we might be getting ourselves into.”
    Briony gave him a long look, noting the tension in his shoulders and hands in a way that she might not have spotted had they not spent so much time around one another. He was nervous. Briony had seen him throw himself at vampires, fight off werewolves, and face up to everything that had happened to him since turning into the creature he was without a problem, and yet something about this gate scared him. “What is it, Kevin?”
    “There’s just something… wrong about this. It feels strange.”
    “It didn’t look dangerous,” Briony pointed out, “and you are a werewolf. What could be a problem for you?”
    Kevin shrugged. “That’s the point, Briony. We don’t know what could be over there. As strong as I am, there could be things that are stronger.” He nodded towards where the dragon stil sat. “There a r e things that are