“Yes, it’s me.”
She shifted as I stepped forward, and I realized she was trying to put herself between me and the Geatgrima.
“It’s over, Sarah. You have to give this up.”
Sarah threw her head back and laughed, a dangerous sound devoid of humor and brimming with lunacy. “You expect me to stand aside for you? To give up the greatest triumph of my life and my afterlife? What a pathetic little mouse he has tried to replace me with. How could he have ever thought you worthy?”
“I don’t know,” I said, suppressing the stinging truth of those words. “But I don’t want to be chosen, Sarah. I don’t want to replace you.”
“Then you are a fool, and just as unworthy as I knew you to be. But he doesn’t need you,” she said, and turned to gaze at the Geatgrima again. “I will penetrate the secrets of this place, and he will welcome me back to him.”
“Sarah, this is delusion,” I said. “You are no longer a pentamaleficus. He cannot use you anymore.”
She spun around, her face rendered inhuman with rage. “I CAN FIX IT.”
“Your powers are tied to your bloodline, and you no longer have a body. No blood, no body, no powers. I know it’s hard to accept, but you must accept it.”
“I cannot,” she replied in a strangled whisper.
“Why? I don’t understand.”
“You haven’t seen what I have seen. What could be. Whatwillbe. If you only knew?—”
“Then show me.”
Sarah’s eyes went wide. “What?”
“Show me. You say I would understand if only I could see. So, show me.”
Sarah’s face split into a smile of bleak amusement. “You would fall so fast, pentamaleficus. You would turn in the moment and flee this place, straight into his embrace.”
“Prove it.”
I didn’t know where this recklessness was coming from, but it seemed, at least partly, to be a desperation to understand. This girl had stood in the very same position that I was in now. The Darkness had wanted her—tempted her. But where I had resisted, she had given in. And I wanted to know—Ineededto know why.
“Show me!” I shouted again.
Sarah held out her hand. I stepped toward her.
“Wren, no!” Jess cried out. From the corner of my eye, I saw her start toward the circle, reaching for me.
But I had already made my choice. Without stopping to think, without considering the consequences, I stepped over the boundary of the circle, right out of my own reality.
And into Sarah Claire’s.
Back to the Beginning
I’m standing alone in the forest.
It is dark and warm, the kind of summer night that lies upon you like a heavy blanket. The air moves sluggishly in my lungs as I trudge through the underbrush, and my hair sticks to my face and neck like clinging cobwebs.
I am not afraid. The forest is familiar to me.
Despite the deepness of the dark, I know my way. My feet, bare and filthy, pick easily between the tree roots and stones that litter my path. I am seeking something specific, and I pay not the slightest attention to anything else around me in my search for it.
Not the silence.
Not the mist unfurling in tendrils between the trees.
