The morning rays of sun refracted through the prismatic tunnel walls and provided a myriad of colors that Cassie had never seen before. Shades of blue from the sky and green from the jungle were prevalent, but there were unusual shades of pink and purple there, too.

When not captivated by the magnificence of her surroundings, her thoughts were vacillating, high and low, light and dark. She was doing her best not to let the conflict show. She kept her expression neutral and hoped her eyes would not betray her.

Joe, unable to stay silent for any duration of time, gradually quickened his pace to match hers. He nudged her and smiled. She smiled back. Her attention returned to Chris's sure footsteps, now a few more paces ahead of them.

It was unlikely he would even look back.

She tried to purge the ache from her chest with a sigh, but it was as if her throat were closing over. The wisp of breath that did escape was merely a sad quiver.

"Princess, you're awfully quiet today," Joe felt the need to mention. "The whole silence is a shield bit is more of a preference at this point, don't you think?"

"Perhaps," she voiced, both airily and evasively.

"What's on your mind?"

Recapture, likelihood of premature death, and . . .

Chris's head shifted slightly to the right. He didn't offer her an eye, but was it at least an ear?

"Don't hesitate. Just say it," Joe pressed on.

"Oh, nothing really," she lied.

His mouth twisted into a dissatisfied smirk. "I'm not buying it."

Cassie had an idea. It was foolproof. She would trigger Joe's monologue mode. It would break up the monotony and keep him content for a while. "Why don't you tell me why you decided not to become a medical doctor? It seems the occupation would have suited you."

Until this point, Chris had seemed consumed by his own thoughts. But he slowed down and made their single-file line into more of a cluster.

"That's an excellent question, Joe," he said. "You wasted a lot of money when you dropped out of med school, and it wasn't your money, either."

Joe immediately went rigid, from eyes to jaw to shoulders. Normally, his anger was the stewing sort, a slow smolder, but that didn't mean he was above the emotion. He could mask even fury and rage with a poignant quip and a forced smile, but he couldn't make all signs of it recede.

Too much provocation could result in an explosion. One brother or the other. Maybe both. Everyone had a limit, a threshold that should never be crossed. And at this stage of their journey, she didn't want to cause conflict on a topic so inconsequential. "I'm sorry," she said. "I should never have asked. It's not my concern."

"Don't be sorry. It was a fair question," Joe said with the forced congeniality Cassie had anticipated. "And for the record, it was money borrowed against the equity on my mother's house—a house neither my brother nor I will ever go back to." He was looking at her, but the words were clearly pointed at Chris.

Chris stepped ahead of them again. A shrug shuddered through his broad shoulders as if the answer were inadequate but not worth the fight.

"Well," Joe started, sounding calm and reasonable, yet lacking the same level of good humor he had before. "There was a combination of factors. I didn't like spending twenty hours a day memorizing material that I no longer found interesting. And then there was Rebecca. I know I mentioned her not too long ago. Do you remember?"

"Yes," Cassie replied. "You were with her in Aspen, Colorado, and that was where you learned to drive a snowmobile."

"Right," he said. "Good memory. Well, it was a full-time job trying to keep her happy. Um, let me rephrase that. It was a full-time job keeping her stable. We moved in together, had the same med-school friends, saw each other day and night, no break.

"It all fit together for a while. It was convenient, cheaper, and socially endurable during what should have been a lonely, isolated time. And out of a need for some normalcy, our grades started slipping, and she couldn't cope. She stopped eating, sleeping. The pills, the mood swings. . . These cries for attention just pushed me away. I rediscovered my creative side, music and such, and started hanging out with a different crowd . . . without her. A close acquaintance of mine was writing a screenplay. He liked some of my ideas and asked if I wanted in on the project. This was after I found out I was on academic probation. I could have worked it out, but I decided to move from San Francisco to Los Angeles. All of a sudden, I was a screenplay writer and a struggling one at that. And that's when life really got out of hand."

"Joe?" Cassie asked before he had a chance to move off topic.

"Yes, Princess?"

"What about Rebecca? How you both processed the stress may have been different, but it seems you had the same problem and could have benefited from the same solution. She didn't want to go with you?"

"To L.A.? No. I didn't ask her to."

"Did you love her?"

"Of course I did, but—"

"You loved her and lived with her, and yet you didn't even consider marrying her?" Cassie frowned. If Joe knew the meaning of love, he would not have followed his "of course" with a "but." She would have been more satisfied if Joe had said no.

"Marry her!" Joe replied with jovial outrage. "That's a bit old-fashioned, don't you think?"

"Joe, look who you're talking to," Chris chimed in.

Joe didn't even acknowledge Chris with a glance. "I was only twenty-three."

"Chris was approximately the same age when he married Alana," Cassie pointed out. "Right?"

"I was twenty-four," Chris answered.

"Chris was an aberration," Joe shot back quickly.

Cassie wasn't going to back down until Joe explained himself better. "So, let me get this straight. Rebecca counted on you and your love to be there for her, you had a way out you didn't extend to her, and you abandoned her when she needed you the most?"

Joe emitted a scornful laugh. "I don't know why I am even attempting to explain this to you. You're obviously out of touch with the human world."

"Try me," Cassie said. "Maybe I'm not as out of touch as you believe."

"Okay, relationships can be messy."

"Aren't they always, in every world?" she challenged.

"Rebecca . . . had too many family issues," Joe said carelessly, thoughtlessly.

Cassie spun around and looked him dead in the eye. "Don't we all?"

Joe seemed startled at first, and then a grin eased onto his face as he raised his hands in mock surrender. "Look, I know the future Mrs. Joseph MacRae is out there somewhere, and Becca just didn't fit the bill. We can't all be as fortunate as Chris and find 'the one' at seventeen years old. Many of us require a lot more trial and error. Some more than others. And what about you, Princess? Any wedding bells in your future?"

The silence she let ensue was like a deluge of frigid water.

"No, not even remotely," she eventually murmured through breath that felt borrowed. "I don't think I'll ever get married."

"Really? Why is that?"

Because a wedding dress would be inviting bloodshed . . . like last time . . .

"It doesn't suit me," she replied, intentionally vague.

Joe's eyebrows lifted as if he were waiting for her to say more.

"I mean, the wedding part, not necessarily the marriage. The whole thing seems overblown. With so much pressure, so many eyes on you, so much riding on success . . . things are bound to go wrong," she continued.

Her response wasn't a lie per se, and she hoped it would satisfy him.

He quickened his pace and put his arm around her shoulders. "Maybe you just haven't found the right guy," he said with a wink.

Cassie leaned in toward Joe but was more confused than comforted. "Joe, why do you keep doing that with your eye?"

"Wink, you mean?"

"Yes."

Chris was apparently still paying attention because a chuckle burst out of him. "Yeah, Joe. Why don't you tell her?"

"Hey, that's enough out of you," Joe said to his brother, clearly not amused. "I wink when I'm joking with someone. It's like I'm letting them in on a little secret."

"What's the secret, then?" Cassie whispered.

His eyes switched from calculating to self-assured. She could almost watch the witty remark write itself on his face before the words came out. "Princess, if I have to explain it to you, maybe you weren't deserving of the wink. I take it back."

"How can you take something like that back?"

"I can do what I want."

She sighed with genuine frustration this time. "You are impossible."

He squeezed her shoulder. "I know. I get that a lot."

"Hmmm. . ."

I wonder why?

They walked along with his arm around her shoulders for a while. As she was wondering how to politely disengage, the tunnel began to narrow.

Chris slowed to a stop. "As much as I'd hate to break up the love fest back there," he began.

"Love is not quite the word I would use." Cassie pulled out from underneath Joe's arm.

"There's only love, Princess, only love. You just have no sense of humor," was Joe's retort.

She shook her head. He's not nearly as funny as he thinks he is. But winning wasn't everything. She decided to let him have the last word—this time.

"We're here," Chris announced. They came upon a barrier, thicker and inkier than the rest of their surroundings. His hand disappeared into the sea of darker colors. There was an audible sucking sound and he yanked it back out. "I think it's a door. I just can't figure out how to open it."

Joe joined the effort with both hands. "It's a weird sensation, but it doesn't hurt."

"It does if you go too far."

Chris put his hands back in for another try. Together they pushed, pulled, and poked along the barrier and adjacent walls.

Eventually, Joe sat down and Cassie took a seat next to him. Chris struggled for a few more minutes and then sat facing them. There was nothing more they could do without assistance from the outside.

Kimo had said he would meet them at the end. Although he was gruff and intimidating, his word seemed ironclad.

"We're going to see Dad, allegedly," Joe said to Chris. "What do you think that will be like?"

"I don't know. It's hard to say," Chris replied. "What do you think?"

"It will certainly be uncomfortable."

"Are you going to be the good little golden child or give him the verbal lashing he deserves?" Chris asked.

"Huh," Joe said as he considered his options. "That's a tough one. I haven't decided yet. And are you going to keep your cool or kick the bloody pulp out of him?"

"We'll find out soon enough, I guess." Chris looked to Joe, raised his eyebrows, and his mouth lifted, too. It was slight and roguish, but it would still qualify as a smile.

She had to look away.

"That's what I'm afraid of—your spontaneity on these matters," Joe teased, and they both chuckled.

It seemed to signal that they had recovered from their tiff and were united against a common adversary—their father. Scott MacRae certainly had explanations to divulge and apologies to make.

The moment of levity was brief. A hazy figure swooped in from the sky and landed in front of the impassible wall. Accompanying a sound similar to water gurgling, a blast of humid air rushed in. The colors shielding the wall did not vanish but became more transparent.

With Chris in the lead, they pressed through what remained of the strange shell.

"The password is the same on both ends," Kimo informed them once they emerged. "I thought you would have been able to figure that out for yourselves by now."

His wings fell slack, and he marched away from the tunnel. After exchanging contrite eyerolls, Cassie, Chris, and Joe followed him silently.

Cassie would have been speechless regardless of any surrounding conversation. Outside the colored tunnel, she couldn't tell if she was still on planet Earth.

She had never believed that paradise existed, but her senses now told her otherwise. Bright green grass; trees with broad leaves interlaced with flowers in deep purple, orange, sunny yellow, pink; birds and winged insects flitting from one bloom to another—all of it beneath a cloudless blue sky. Beams of early morning light were filtering through the flora, and the moist air seemed to warm her from the inside out.

She could not have imagined a more wistfully romantic setting. It was as if she had been reborn and life was now full of possibilities rather than boundless tragedies.

Soon the sound of falling water captured her attention. As they wove through the lush terrain, she caught a glimpse of a magnificent waterfall. At the top, the water rumbled over the edge with power, but as it hit the jutting rocks and vines, it became a misty spray and a stone-bound cascade.

She refused to walk any farther until she saw where the water pooled.

Bodies of water had never been pleasant or inviting before. In Pyxis, the West River was a sure death for the fairies it consumed. And the dank trickle accompanying the city's borders—it was a warning to reconsider any unauthorized journeys.

Since the ground was soft and Chris's steps were marking the course, she made the gutsy choice to veer toward the lagoon. It was meant to be a quick, solitary endeavor, but Joe's footsteps remained in stride with hers.

"Is everything okay?" he asked.

"Perfect," she replied without slowing down or looking back.

"Are you coming, then? We're going to lose Kimo."

He stopped walking, and she paused to answer. "You can go on without me. I'll find my way."

"I'm not going without you, so come on!" He made a dramatic sweep with his arm.

As she darted away from him, a sound blipped from his mouth. She was out of range before she could receive his full-fledged protest.

Cassie breezed through the sprawling fronds and scaled a rock at the edge of the lagoon. The brief detour was worth the sprinting she would have to do to catch up with the others. It was the perfect time of morning to see the sunlight hit the mist at an angle to make rainbows. With no time to spare, she memorized the position and shade of every color. She wanted the image to be just as vivid in her dreams, ones she hoped to wake from with a smile.

When she returned to the place where she'd forked off, Joe was still waiting for her. He immediately grabbed her wrist, giving her no choice but to stumble along, though with each step she grew more and more resentful. She wasn't a child and hated being treated like one. And even a child could have found the way back without assistance. Her footsteps in the mud were impossible to miss, and so were everyone else's.

They weren't far behind, and soon Chris was in sight. Joe pulled Cassie in front of him and finally released her, yet he continued to march her forward with his hands on her shoulders. And of course, Chris glanced back at them in time to witness the tail end of her humiliation.

"Where did you two crazy kids wander off to?" he asked.

"Someone, who will remain nameless"—Joe's head bobbed in her direction—"went on a sightseeing expedition."

"I told you to go on without me," she whispered through clenched teeth.

While Cassie was making sure Joe could not misinterpret her fury, Chris began walking backward. "I've been meaning to say this all day. You two should totally duel it out. And may the best fairy win." He then turned his back on them and took a few long strides ahead. "And I would definitely put money on the good-looking one."

"He means me." Joe coughed in amusement, yet to Cassie's oversensitive ears his tone was painfully smug.

"No, I didn't!" Chris shouted over his shoulder.

Cassie pushed past Joe, purposefully bumping his elbow. And, easy as that, Cassie's dampened mood no longer existed. In fact, she had to force herself not to smile. Despite her best effort, she knew she couldn't effectively remove the elation from her face.

Her silent revelry lasted until Chris reached the crest of a hill. She took her place beside him.

Beneath a thick bed of Hawaiian tree ferns stood a fairy-sized hut with a pitched roof covered in coconut husks. Kimo charged toward its bark door without hesitation.

When Joe joined Chris and Cassie, the three of them exchanged glances, solemn and wary this time. After three years—no appearance, no message, no word, no sign of Scott MacRae—this encounter wasn't going to be something to smile about.

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