‘It’s your choice, Emily,’ he said, voice breaking as he spoke. ‘It’s your choice to make.’
Blood ran down my cheeks as his claws pierced my skin, but instead of pushing him away, I pulled him closer, meeting his lips with an urgency I couldn’t begin to understand. His claws retracted and his hands knotted themselves in my hair, drawing me in as if I could never be close enough.
‘I’m sorry.’
A whisper on the wind, a voice I couldn’t place.
Wyn seized up in my arms. His chameleon eyes widened until I could see the whites, then he collapsed against me, sliding down to his knees as I struggled to keep him upright, a dead weight in my arms.
‘Help!’ I screamed into the night as his head lolled back, thegold string that tied us together unspooling. ‘Someone, anyone, please help us!’
Seven figures stepped out from the shadows wearing grey robes. Forming a circle around me, they pulled back their hoods to reveal their faces one by one. Ashley, Lydia and Jackson, resurrected, Catherine, Wyn’s brother Cole, and two others. A man and a woman I didn’t quite recognize but somehow knew.
‘You’re not ready,’ sang a high-pitched voice, as sweet and southern as a magnolia blossom.
Still in her party dress and pretty shoes, the little girl’s hair curled against her pale cheek as she skipped into the centre of the circle. We’d met before, she and I, here in this graveyard, on the way to my Becoming.
‘Someone gave me a gift,’ she said. ‘But I don’t like it. You should take it away and keep it safe.’
She placed something cold into my hand and, leaning into its weight, I brought it up to my face, the ornate gold handle, the sickening serrated silver blade shaped like a tree branch and crusted with Wyn’s blood. It was a sword, and when I curled my hand around the hilt, my fingers fit perfectly into the grooves as though it had been made for me.
A dozen or more images shot through my mind. A burning pile of wolves, Wyn’s body on top. Lydia writhing on the ground, screaming. Jackson surrounded by sapphire flames. Ashley brought to her knees, clutching at her throat. Catherine with her head thrown back and her feet floating off the floor. Crystals, herbs, black fire, green skies, skyscraper tides, and Bell House wrapped in thorns, being pulled down into the earth.
‘You’re not ready but you will be. You have to be,’ the little girl said.
The seven figures replaced their hoods and stepped back intothe darkness. And as they vanished out of sight, the ground beneath my feet crumbled away and I was falling through the inky black, a haunting voice whispering in my ear.
When the dead fight back. When the earth consumes. A lie becomes the truth. She will return.
Chapter Thirteen
It was dark when I came to, no longer in the craft room but lying in Lafayette Square underneath the oak tree that was mine and Wyn’s. The moon sat high above in a velvet sky, still almost full, only the slightest sliver chiselled away, and I stared up at it from the cold, hard ground, my throat raw from screaming or sobbing or both. All my nails were broken from scratching at something I couldn’t name. In the distance, Bell House glowed, her white walls reflecting the moonlight, shining just for me.
‘Emily. I’m sorry.’
Turning away from my home, I watched as the first Emma Catherine came into view, emerging from behind the fountain at the heart of the square.
‘Sorry for what?’ I replied, relieved and afraid and infuriated all at the same time. ‘Disappearing the whole month or what I just saw?’
I forced my aching body into a sitting position, leaning against the tree trunk for support. A single strand of Spanish moss came down to rest on my shoulder, gently brushing back and forth against my cheek.She will return.The repeated refrain from my vision. And here she was.
Emma Catherine knelt down at my side, lifting my hands to inspect the jagged remains of my nails. The last time we’d met, our hair was the exact same shade of deep, shining red. Now hers was back to its ghostly white, matching her translucent gown. She held out her hands for the moss and it moved towards her, allowing the ghost to wind it around my bloody, injured hands.
‘For what has happened and what is to come. None of us want this for you.’
As angry as I was, the sight of her was beyond reassuring. She was here, I hadn’t been abandoned.
‘But there’s no way around it,’ I said as the soft, soothing moss whispered away the pain in my palms. ‘Because someone, somewhere came up with a prophecy and determined the course of my life for me.’
‘Not someone,’ she replied simply. ‘Me.’
I blinked at her surprisingly straight response.
‘You?’
Emma Catherine showed me a sombre smile and nodded. The ground was hot and hard beneath me but I felt like I was floating on an uncertain tide.
‘You’re the witch who made the prophecy?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t Catherine tell me it was you?’
