There was a small door with a curved top in the wall. No handle or anything, just an indent where it could be pulled or pushedopen. If we hadn’t fallen, we would’ve missed it. “Should we find out?” I asked, locking eyes with Lucas.
“No,” Nix said. She stood back behind us with her arms crossed. “I have a bad feeling about this. We need to go.” She pointed her finger at the ground to emphasize. “Now.”
Lucas took out his dagger. “You two stay here. I’ll go.” Before I could object, he was pulling the door open. There was nothing but blackness beyond it. “Hold the light over here,” he said. I held the torch next to the doorway. He began to crawl inside. “There’s no one here,” he called back over his shoulder. And then: “Whoa! You have to see this. Give me the light.”
“Come on,” I told Nix. “Or would you rather stay out here alone in the dark?”
Reluctantly, she got down on the floor by the doorway. I told her to go first. After she went in, I scurried through, feeling like something was sneaking up right behind me, like when I’d go for a snack in the middle of the night and run back to my room as if being chased by a ghost.
On the other side of the door there was a little round chamber. I’d thought we’d end up in one of the rooms of the palace, but this was something else entirely.
“Don’t walk there!” Lucas called out, shoving his arm in front of me so fast it almost knocked the wind out of me.
I looked down and saw that I had nearly stepped over a line on the floor. I held the light up. It was a chalk circle, sprinkled with what looked like salt. My heart pounded furiously, and I brought a hand to my mouth to suppress a scream when I saw what stood in the middle of the circle: a doll.
“What is this?” I asked out loud, though it was a rhetorical question; we all knew what this was.Kulam. Black magic.
“A mambabarang,” Lucas muttered. “I knew it. They use the dolls to send the beetles to poison their victims. Stay back, both of you.”
Nix wrapped her arms tightly around herself and backed up closer to the door like she wanted to flee. “I don’t like this,” she whimpered. She looked like she was about to cry.
“Neither do I,” I said, because I just noticed that the doll was wearing Sirena school robes and wore her hair in a ponytail just like mine.
It was a doll of me.
24
Nix picked upthe doll because I couldn’t.
“Let’s get out of here,” Lucas said.
I made my legs move. Someone—a mambabarang, an evil, dark witch—was definitely trying to kill me. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. I was too shaken and scared into silence. Numb.
We heard stomping overhead. It shook me out of my stasis. The guards were probably on the move. We’d been in there longer than I thought. “Hurry,” I urged. The fear in me was starting to change, starting to morph into something else. Anger.
Nix was already starting for the door. “Hold on!” she said, stopping before crawling through. “What if the witch is out there?”
“Then we’ll handle it,” I said impatiently. “Come on, Nix. You’re a resurrectionist. How can you be scared of death?”
She turned to me, shock on her face. “You knew?”
“Duh, it’s in your name.Phoenix?And you can make wilted flowers bloom? And heal dying animals?” Plus, I was tired of cowering in the dark, and while Nix might have the power to resurrect things, I was the princess. And I was furious. Someone out there was definitely trying to get rid of me. Well, good luck with that. I wasn’t going to be a sitting duck.
Once we were finally out of the room, Lucas pushed the door into place, and we all huddled together and made our way back through the dark passageway.
Somewhere inside the palace, the stomping continued as the guards made their rounds. They turned off down a hall leading away from where we were; we could hear their collective footsteps fade away.
“Come on,” I said. “They’re getting close to the queen’s chamber.”
We hardly spoke the rest of the way, other than the occasional “What was that?” when one of us heard a creak or a drip. I was positive the mambabarang would appear at any second, imagining their long, gnarly fingers reaching out of the darkness to wrap around my throat. But not if I strangled them first.
Finally, we slipped back out of the passage, one by one.
The guards were stomping toward us now. They’d come around the corner and run right into us unless we made it around the turn before them.
“Don’t they follow your orders?” Nix asked me. “Why are you afraid of them?”
“I’m not afraid of them. I’m afraid of Elias deciding I need a shorter leash.”
