“That’s about the time I realized you hadn’t left; you’d been taken. “The anger I felt, the fear—” He shakes his head. “I scoured the earth for you, and then I scoured the Otherworld. Every minute that passed, the dread deepened. And it—” He runs a hand through his hair, letting out a choked laugh. “It was so much worse than those seven years of waiting. So vastly worse. “I cashed in years of favors for bread crumbs, and still it took me days to find myself in the Fauna Kingdom.”
