“Aurelia, no,” my mother breathes, her eyes wide, lips parted.
She is as beautiful as my memories of her. I scramble to my feet. She looks healthier than when I saw her last, but her body is not a body at all; she is translucent. A spirit.
Next to her stands the ghostly form of her tiger mate, Cassius Clawson, who I’d seen not long ago at Clawson House. He’s as tall as Scythe, with shoulder-length black hair and black brows over a fierce, pale face.
Xander grunts to his feet next to me, in his human body as I am.
“How?” I ask, my voice breaking. “How are you here?”
My mother reaches for me, her eyes glittering with emotion. “You need to leave, my love, right now.”
Xander reaches for my hand, and I let him take it because it steadies me. “I miss you,” I say to her, my hands stretching out even though I know it’s useless. “I tried to find you. I didn’t know?—”
“It’s done now, Lia,” she says, her voice uncharacteristically fierce. “You did for me what no one else would, and for that, Iowe youeverything. But you should not be here. This place is not for the living, nor for the good. This is damnation, Aurelia.”
I take a look around us then. There is nothing but shadows. Nothing but moving, roiling darkness and a feeling of ancient, cold dread.
“Then why are you here?” My voice is a desperate plea.
“We are waiting,” she hisses. “I cannot rest until—” Something pulls her backwards, making her fade. Her eyes go wide with fear.
“Lia, you must go now,” Cassius says, his voice deep as he protectively holds my mother around the waist. His voice echoes around us, and then fades away.
“But how?” I cry. “Ghoul’s vortex is here to kill us all! I don’t know how to stop it without killing someone!”
My mother and her mate exchange a glance that speaks volumes. Then Cassius steps forward as if fighting the force pulling him away. “Bring him here, child. Bring him tous.”There is dire promise in his voice, and suddenly, I understand what needs to be done.
“Go, before it closes!” my mother’s voice echoes around me. “This place is death!”
Xander and I whip around, and the funnel behind usisclosing, that hole strung up in mid-air, shadows twisting around it, getting smaller and smaller by the second.
Without thinking, I shove Xander with my telekinesis, and unprepared for it, he shoots backwards through the hole, but not before his outstretched hand clasps around my wrist, pulling me with him.
“No!” I cry as he slides through the opening legs first, then hips, then torso. It closes around his outstretched arm. The darkness behind me seems to call my name.
Xander’s face is only anguish, the bright lights of his eyes flickering. “Lia, it was supposed to be me!”
“I can’t let you,” I breathe, and with all the force the Wild Goddess gave me, I unfurl Xander’s fingers from around my arm and shove him back to the land of the living.
The surface beneath me gives way, and with nothing for my feet, I float away from the opening, my legs scrambling to find purchase and discovering nothing.
The exit wheezes shut, leaving nothing but a glowing fifty-cent piece on a wall of forever-black.
Chapter 112
Savage
Some people think I’m not all that bright, and yet thebrightestof all ideas came to me when I heard the chirpy chirps of the nimpins up on the academy wall. Stacey had collected an entire herd of them from when the animas left, and zookeeper Rick said they couldn’t take them away from the school.
Snakes don’t like nimpins.
And so here we are, with Mace’s truck wearing hundreds of serpents like a venomous warm jacket and tiny cotton balls of coloured fluff rising high into the air todefeatthem.
“Good job!” I say to Stacey because I know she doesn’t hear that very often.
I can’t hear them because of Scythe’s protections, but the nimpins chirp in a big way and Eugene even tries to help with his own cock-a-doodle-doo, and the snakes start to have seizures. They fall off the truck, some of them even shifting back into human form to tumble with dramatic thumps, clutching their ear holes.
That’s when Eugene gives me a vision: the driver inside the truck guns the engine and presses the pedal to the floor, andit speeds towards us, the shadow vortex moving along with it. Then five more helicopters arrive behind him with fresh reinforcements.
