The quiet stretched for almost a minute before I heard soft footsteps coming closer. I didn’t open my eyes until they stopped at my side.
I blinked through my blurred vision, and the face of an unfamiliar man swam into focus. He raised a strip of white cloth—a blindfold—and lowered it towards my face.
I should have fought it, but I had no fight left. I couldn’t even twitch a finger as the blindfold slipped over my eyes, shutting out the silver glow of the moon.
The moon.
She was really watching this.
She was blessing this.
She’d rather I be killed than let Thrax have even the smallest chance—two percent, one percent—of being free of her curse.
When the blindfold was tied, I felt the man’s hand at my stomach, removing the knife.
And just like that, the chanting began again, this time louder, thicker, rising above the night and seeming to claw at my scalp. The man who had blindfolded me was still beside me, his voice the closest.
Was he going to stab me now?
What were they—
The sharp tip of the knife touched my chest, right above where my heart slammed like a trapped bird.
He was going to sink it through me.
Fear paralysed me.
They were really going to do it.
I was going to die.
The heat of the steel beneath me seeped up through my back, the fire intensifying like it knew the ritual’s climax had come.
Suddenly, the chanting stopped again, and one voice—one I would know even after death—rose above the silence.
“Unto Thee we render back this soul. Accept her, O Mother of Light, and hallow the labour of our forebears. Behold this sacrifice, wrought in reverence, sealed in blood. Take her unto Thy keeping, grant her a passage clothed in peace, a rest untroubled. Moon of solace, keeper of the night, sanctify this offering, as it was in the beginning, so let it be now, and evermore.”
The rest chorused, “Now and evermore.”
Silence.
The knife began to tear skin.
My body shook with fear, shock locking me into place—
“Evermore your fucking face, old fuckers!”
Amelia?
From my left came the whoosh of a sharp object slicing the air.
The next sound was a thud, the unmistakable impact of something sharp and deadly meeting flesh and piercing through it. The man beside me grunted, the knife on my chest clattering to the ground.
Air rushed back into my lungs. My heart pounded like it had been restarted, my chest rising and falling in greedy, ragged breaths.
I was still intact. I was still alive.
Someone had come for me.
