‘Catherine, I’m scared,’ I said, gagging on my own voice asthe warm waves turned into burning walls of fire that crashed into me. ‘What’s happening?’
She didn’t reply this time. Her eyes turned black as I cried out, the pain turning into agony, growing more unbearable with every second. Collapsing to the ground, my limbs spasmed in the dirt until I was thrashing around wildly, clawing at my grandmother and pleading silently for her help. Instead, she held me in place and, with her eyes boring into mine, she plunged my hand into the dirt.
‘Earth,’ she said, my fingers sliding into the soil like a hot knife through butter.
‘Water.’
Rain poured out of the cloudless sky, hard and heavy, soaking my dress and turning the ground to mud.
‘Fire.’
The flames appeared out of nowhere. Scorching hot, they singed my eyebrows and eyelashes and burned the back of my throat. I writhed around in the mud, desperate to break Catherine’s wristlock but she was too powerful, too strong.
‘Air.’
This time, when she spoke, the flames disappeared and the rain stopped. I tried to take a breath to steady myself but it was impossible. The fire burned out because there was no oxygen to feed it. Our sacred circle had become a vacuum. Panicking, my lungs seized up, shrivelling in my chest. I fought against Catherine’s grip, but it was pointless, she held me down as easily as if I were a rag doll. Without taking her obsidian eyes off me, she reached for the dagger and held it aloft.
‘Blood.’
‘Catherine, no!’
I screamed as she plunged it downwards, waiting for the stabbing pain. But pain didn’t come. Instead, something hotgushed over the back of my hand, merging with the mud. Her grip on my wrist loosened and I looked up to see the point of the dagger sticking out of the back of my grandmother’s hand, hilt pushed all the way up to her palm. Catherine slumped over, before falling face first into the dirt. I scrambled forward to turn her over and held her lifeless body to mine, too broken to do anything other than sob. It was only then that I saw the other woman inside the sacred circle with us.
Tall and pale with long white hair.
‘Breathe,’she said.
‘I can’t,’ I choked. ‘There’s no air.’
She pressed her hands against my chest and my lungs filled with something pure and bright, something electric. In that moment, a doorway opened, allowing me a glimpse at the lives of a hundred women who had lived before me. I saw them all at the same time, watched their whole lives in one heartbeat, and felt all of their knowledge and strength in me. Then I exhaled, the door closed and it was gone.
‘The blessing welcomes you,’the woman whispered before turning to walk out through the trees.
Catherine spluttered loudly, a deep, gurgling sound, then jerked backwards to cough up mouthfuls of dark earth. She looked up at me, her green eyes her own again but violently bloodshot, rubies and emeralds staring out of a porcelain face streaked with dirt and tears.
And then she smiled.
‘Do you feel it?’ she asked, wrenching the dagger out of her hand in one decisive move, barely wincing as she flexed her fingers. I watched in horror as the wound began to close of its own accord. ‘Do you feel the blessing?’
‘I feel a lot of things.’ My hand was still covered in her blood and my white dress stained red and black. The sound of the fire and the rain and the memory of all those livesechoed so loudly inside my head, I could hardly hear myself think.
‘I feel it. We draw strength from each other, and Emily, you have so much strength to give. Enough to wake our sleeping sisters.’
She wiped the dagger on her thigh and snatched in a shallow breath as it slipped from her fingers, falling to the ground almost in slow motion. We both reached for it at the same time, our fingers crashing together as the blade sank into the earth and the world flashed a blinding white before it was all cast in black.
‘Catherine?’ I yelled, desperately groping around for something, anything to ground me. The darkness was all-consuming, every speck of light and life extinguished, deep and heavy and suffocating.
Then the vision came into view. White-hot, pitch-black flames, tearing through a city so fast, the people they consumed didn’t even have time to scream. Buildings were incinerated, cars and trucks disintegrated on contact and the sky burned an ugly, unnatural green. Only the trees still stood, the black fire travelling along their branches, swinging from tree to tree. It was the moss. The Spanish moss and the black flames were one and the same, delivering devastation to Savannah and razing it to the ground. As the flames passed through, I saw waves as tall as skyscrapers, washing away the carnage as though the city had never even existed. I saw it all. Felt it, smelled it, tasted it. And at the very centre of the apocalyptic horror, two bodies stood in front of a stone archway under a blinding full moon, preparing to do battle in the ashes of what was once Savannah. One crouched down low, ready to attack, the other stood back, unmoved by the threat and surrounded by a halo of black fire. The physical manifestation of all this death. As I moved closer, the figures became clearer.
A woman and a wolf.
The wolf we thought we’d killed in Bonaventure.
And the woman wielding this terrible weapon, was me.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
When I came to, the trees had pulled back, the water had dried up, and everything was as it was. Catherine sat by my side, watching over me as the world flickered back into view.
