When I stood, though, the car seemed to be moving insanely fast, the trees rushing past us at dizzying speed. My stomach dropped as if I were already falling, but I kept walking forward.
We reached the end of the train and climbed down onto the rear platform. It was a little bit bigger than the platform between all the cars, and I breathed a sigh of relief to be back on solider ground.
“Stop right there!” A man shouted behind us.
I looked back to see a man shoving through the door from the engineer’s office, wearing a light gray uniform. He gripped a wand in one hand, and magic crackled around its tip.
“Stop! You’re trespassing.” The man shouted.
“I don’t have time for that,” Silas said pleasantly. He raised his magic toward the man, but magic from the man’s wand blasted toward him.
I was closest to the security guard, so I dove at him, slamming into him. His magic spiraled into the air harmlessly.
The two of us flew into the back of the train, and he grunted at the impact. He punched me across the face and the world washed red as pain exploded across my jaw. I dropped low, leveraging my weight to tip him over the railing.
The wind almost seemed to pull him away, but it tried to take me away too, tugging at me urgently.
Jensen grabbed the back of my sweater as the man fell to the snow below, landing with a plume of white. He reeled me against his body.
“God, I love you,” he murmured into my ear, his arm around my waist.
I was smiling as I turned to the guys.
Rafe did not return my smile. He said drily, “I have a completely different reaction.”
“You would,” Jensen said.
Silas was already moving his hand in a wide circle, forming a bubble of golden magic. “He’ll be fine,” he said. “That fall looked survivable. He’ll just need to use a spell to keep himself warm on a rather long hike. Let’s hope he’s not going our way.”
He flashed me a dizzyingly bright smile. Great. That sounded promising.
“Try to land as close together as possible,” he said as he formed the last of four bubbles, which shimmered at the edge of the platform. “The shields will slow your descent into the snow and protect your pretty selves from too many bruises. But we don’t want to lose each other—”
“Stop!” Another man yelled. This one was at the top of the train car, looking down at us.
Silas sighed. “This is getting so tiresome.”
“How does this work?” Rafe demanded, heading for the bubble.
“Like this,” Silas said blithely, pushing him into the bubble, which seemed to shimmer around him.
Rafe frowned, but Silas pushed him a bit further, right off the platform.
The Rafe-bubble fell toward the tracks, then began to roll down the long, snowy hill. Even though Rafe was a blur, I still got an impression of deeply annoyed.
“Let’s go!” Silas called.
Jensen and I were already rushing toward our bubbles. As soon as I felt the warm prickle of magic around my skin, I jumped. Jensen seemed to jump almost in time with me, the two of us racing to catch up to Rafe so he wouldn’t be alone.
It was only because my bubble twisted that I saw Silas hesitate there on the edge of the platform. It seemed almost as if he was staring up at the man who had chased us, as if he knew him.
For a second, I thought Silas wasn’t going to jump at all.
Then he leapt off the train too.
The golden bubble was rolling fast around me. I saw rocks and tree limbs rush by along with the brilliant white snow, but none of them impacted me. I slid down a long hill, the bubble shimmering more and more until it burst. My momentum carried me just a few more feet, and then I rolled to a stop, face-down in the soft wet snow.
I climbed to my feet in the darkness. I was surrounded by enormously tall old trees that stretched into the sky, the trunks so wide they might be a thousand years old.
“Jensen?” I called softly. “Silas? Rafe?”
The deep silence of the night seemed to press back at me. Cold settled through my skin, sinking into my bones.
I pulled my pack off to retrieve the little pouch that held my packable winter coat and my gloves. Silas had warned us that parts of the Greyworld were very cold, even in spring, and we’d packed for all kinds