Page 57 of The Girl in the Forest

Weapons were useless in this fight. I sank to a crouch, tossed my bow aside and dug my fingers into the sand, syphoning the decades of energy that had accumulated in this cave. The flash fire tore through my veins, and when the pressure turned madly explosive, I rose and sent it whipping toward the scrying bowl.

The bowl and stand wavered and fell away.

Without a pause, I turned toward the spring. Water continued to flow, but it no longer filled a stone basin. Instead, a muddy depression held stinking water rimmed with cracked bones.

The oculus was next; when the energy hit, the light splintered into a thousand pieces that whirled and fell like ice in a storm, barely visible in the lowering light.

Night-dark openings in the rocks became dead tunnels that went nowhere.

The cave dimmed, devoured by the shadows while the torchiers stood, sad sentinels with the flames whipping whitely.

I summoned more energy, let it stream in shining ribbons toward the witches in their golden thrones. Illusion fell away.

I couldn’t tell how long they’d been dead, but it was long enough to look mummified. They were still sitting—suspended three feet in the air—but their arms were tied to the armrests of the tarnished thrones. Over their heads, the veils hung in black and white tatters, tangled in gray hair. What was left of their gowns barely disguised emaciated bodies.

The witches that once inspired fear were now no more than dried husks, the shriveled prey of spiders, with all the life energy syphoned out of them.

I stared, and in that instant, a shadow behind the dead became a solid figure with gleaming black hair, a perfect face.

She screamed before she disappeared—and I recognized that scream. Hated it. Hated the terror that always gripped me when I heard it.

It was the scream that echoed in my head when Grayson inked his rune… when I stood in the cave behind the waterfall, clutching a magic book.

Now… I knew I hadn’t imagined the scream, and the woman who screamed was important.

I should pay attention. But not yet.

I wasn’t finished with what she’d started.

Fumes puffed from the vent, flashing from white to gray to black before I sent energy flowing in great, golden waves. The air snapped. The scent of sulfur soured the air, but I left nothing of the vent except the ash falling toward a dead fire.

Next were the pillars, white and black. Black and white.

They collapsed in pieces.

I turned to the torchiers with the guttering flames, paused while the light wavered. But the frenzy inside me kept swelling, building. Perhaps driven by the ancient magic still hammering through the cave. From centuries filled with Gemini Witches... wails from the destroyed tore around me, the ruined hopes and dreams. I thought of my mother, crushed by what she could not control. My friends in Azul. Their screams heated my blood and became mine. Their pain… became mine.

I was their vengeance, and I loosened the energy before it broke free, sent it soaring through the cave. Sand exploded at my feet, the bits of mica glittering in the vanishing light.

The cave groaned, as if it retained some dark power—but it was no match against the fury that collapsed side tunnels like a string of closing eyelids.

With each beat of my heart, energy surged. Rocks softened, folded inward, and as they disintegrated, I saw the images that were still on the cave walls… images of the failles, expending too much energy and lying dead in the mud.

All for the sins of the queens.

And I was just as bad.

If this was how I ended… so be it.

At least I’d stop hurting people.

“I’m sorry,” I thought, and perhaps it was a vain hope—that Grayson would hear me. The rune was broken, and the shield of corrosive witch magic was rigid with spite. Nothing would break through. I couldn’t warn him of the evil hiding here, waiting to destroy.

If there was any evil left when I was done.

Roiling dust snuffed out the light, and in the descending dark, I could summon no illumination. No remnant of energy remained in my fingertips.

I stumbled, following what I thought were my footsteps, depressions in the sand that could lead me back to sunlight—or deeper into the dark.

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