Persephone's Orchard (The Chrysomelia Stories) by Molly Ringle Read Free Book Online

friends know I’ll be out tonight.” Standing beside the seat, Sophie tapped a text that she copied to Tabitha, Jacob, and Melissa: Staying with some people from the party tonight. M, don’t expect me till morning. All is fine though. See you.
    Tabitha and Jacob, of course, were in different cities and wouldn’t know if she slept in her dorm room or not, but it felt safer to let a few various people know where she was.
    Not that she was telling them the truth about where she was.
    Sophie watched the text whoosh away, then glanced around at the dark landscape. “How come you can text and call the regular world from here, but can’t see it? Or hear it or touch it or anything?”
    “Certain frequencies of electricity or radio waves get through to here. Just another oddity.” He buttoned up his coat to the neck, then handed her another bundle of black cloth, which looked to be a wool blanket when she unfolded it. “You’ll want that,” he said. He sat on the driver’s seat, gathering up a riding whip from the floor. Behind the seat, Kiri turned around in a complete circle, then lay on the floor, chin on her front paws.
    Sophie sat next to Adrian, the blanket bunched up on her lap.
    “Buckle up.” He fastened his seatbelt, and nodded to hers.
    She found the two ends of the lap belt, which was the kind you’d encounter in an old pickup truck, and clicked them together over her lap.
    He hooked his arm into hers. “The seatbelts are old and don’t work terribly well,” he explained, “especially at the speed we’ll be going. So it’s really important you hold on and stay near me. Ready?”
    Suddenly terrified, she only nodded.
    Adrian snapped the whip out the empty windshield, saying the word “Home” as he did so, evidently a directive to the horses.
    They launched off, shooting up into the sky like rockets, pulling the bus with them.
    The force crushed her back against the seat and stole her breath away. This was what G-forces must feel like to jet pilots, she thought as the world blurred past in blue, black, and flashes of reflected starlight. The notion of looking for signs of human habitation became laughable. She could barely distinguish one entire forest from another at the rate the landmarks were flying past.
    “So if I die here,” she said, raising her voice to counter the roar of the wind, “do I die in real life?”
    “Unfortunately, yes.” He clutched her arm tighter against his side.
    As the horses reached their cruising speed, or so she assumed, the force eased, and she was able to move a bit more freely. But the shapes of mountains ahead still approached at a reckless speed. “How fast are we going?”
    “The speed of souls. From doing the time-and-distance maths, I’d say it’s a bit over three thousand kilometers an hour.”
    That scared her into shutting her mouth and holding still.
    The bus tipped up, up, up into shockingly cold air, and skimmed over the snowy caps of a mountain range before plunging down again. Her ears popped with the altitude change. Sophie realized the mountains had been the Cascades, which should have been at least an hour’s drive away by car, yet they’d zoomed over them within a few minutes of take-off.
    She stared at him. “How can we possibly be going this fast? I mean, without the wind or the G-forces or whatever ripping us to pieces?”
    “Not really sure.” He kept watching the horses, but tilted his head closer to hers as he spoke. “Our best guess is some kind of aura. Either from the horses or from us. Or a combination of both.”
    “From you? Who are you guys?”
    “We’re on your side,” Adrian said. “Try not to worry.”
    “How long have you been doing this? Coming to this other world and flying around?”
    “Couple of years.”
    “And you’re sure you know what you’re doing?”
    “Well. Mostly sure.”
    She watched the continent flow past beneath her. The horses kept the bus just above the treetops, but not a single car headlight