Page 63 of Necromance
I looked up, lifting one shaking hand to point. He followed my gaze, his brow furrowing. Above us, the mirror still reflected a version of me, but not me. That thing smiled with a mouth too wide, stretching inhumanly across its face, black eyes sinking like bottomless pits. It lifted a hand and waved slowly, mockingly. Its fingers were stained with something dark and wet.
Lucien tensed, pulling me closer against him.
“Not your best look,” he muttered, voice like steel. Then he looked where I pointed next, down the corridor.
My bedchamber door was gone. Every door was gone. The hallway had stretched itself grotesquely, growing longer, darker. Only the one door remained now at the far end, cracked open like a mouth mid-laugh.
“Lucien,” I breathed. “The castle… it moved everything. That door wasn’t there before.”
“No,” he said tightly. “It wasn’t.”
He stared at it with a look of loathing. “It’s her. Serena. She’s doing this. I can feel her.”
The name made my blood turn cold.
He started toward the door, tugging me gently along with him, his hand tight around mine. “We need to move. No point staying in the hall.”
Another tap echoed down the hall, louder this time. Like something beckoning.
Lucien’s grip tightened.
“What were you doing in the hall alone? I told you to summon me.”
”I did,” I said emphatically, hurrying my steps to keep up with him. It wasn’t acompletelie this time. I hadn’t known my door would simply vanish and I had called for him…
He shot me a look, one of annoyance, but also an apology. “I didn’t hear you.”
We stepped through the door and froze.
The moment we crossed the threshold, the air changed, thickened. Gone was the cold stone corridor. We stood now in what could only be described as a ballroom from hell. The door slammedbehind us, the lock grinding into place.
The vaulted ceiling stretched impossibly high, shadowed by curling, black vines that crept like veins across the stone. The chandeliers, once grand, now hung crooked and draped in cobwebs, their crystal arms tipped with flickering, blood-red candles. Vines crawled along the walls and slithered across the cracked marble floors. Glistening thorns as long as daggers twisted along their spines, pulsing as if alive.
A haunting melody began to play, sour and strange, as if wrung from broken instruments. The sound made my skin crawl. Then, from the corners of the ballroom, skeletons in tattered finery began to appear, stepping into an eerie waltz. Empty sockets turned as one to face us, their bony hands locked together as they spun and twirled in time to the music.
“Lucien,” I managed, barely able to speak as I gripped his arm. “What is this?”
He didn’t answer. His jaw clenched, eyes narrowing as the music swelled… and then she appeared.
Serena.
She stepped from behind a pair of twisted, vine-choked columns, a vision of cruel elegance in a crimson gown that shimmered like freshly spilled blood… the same dress I’d seen in my vision. Her onyx hair was pinned up with thorns, and her eyes—those sharp, unnatural blue eyes—locked onto Lucien.
She didn’t speak, but simply lifted her hand in one graceful, effortless motion. Vines erupted from the floor beneath me.
“No—!” I gasped as they coiled around my legs, my waist, my arms, hauling me into the air like a rag doll. Thorns bit into my skin, and I cried out, the breath ripped from my lungs.
“Mia!” Lucien shouted, turning, but it was too late.
Vines curled around him too, not binding him but guiding him, shoving him forward, toward Serena like he was nothing more than a puppet on strings.
She smiled then. A beautiful, monstrous smile.
“You will dance with me, Lucien,” she purred, her voice like velvet dipped in poison. “You owe me that much.”
Lucien’s fists clenched, his body straining against the vines as he tried to resist. But they pushed harder, forcing him into a bowed posture before her. I writhed in the air, heart pounding, thorns digging deeper as Serena turned her gaze toward me briefly, coldly, then back to Lucien with a hunger that made my stomach turn.
“Have you missed me?” she asked.
