‘It should’ve been you,’ the man said when the sword fell into his hands, his voice full of gravel and hate. ‘In time, it will be.’
He took a step forward into the centre of the circle, holding out the blade and I moved backwards, keeping one hand on Wyn’s prone form, but instead of attacking me, he lunged at everyone else, stabbing each of them directly in the heart. One by one, he moved from person to person and no matter how loudly I screamed and begged them to run, they stood their ground, waiting for their untimely deaths, never once taking their eyes off me.
‘You are death,’ the man declared, slowly sheathing his blade in Jackson’s heart as my friend stared back at me, his face contorted in a silent scream. ‘All who follow will fail, all who love will lose.’
Finally, when they were all bleeding out into the cemetery ground, he lunged at me, but when I tried to run, black roots twisted up from the earth, tying themselves in knots around my feet and ankles. Even the plants had been turned to darkness in this place, and when I called for my ancestors, I felt nothing. They were gone. The consecrated ground of the Bonaventure corrupted.
‘No!’ I screamed, delving into the deepest reaches of my magic to free myself. ‘This isn’t real! You aren’t real!’
But it felt real. The black flames running along the Spanish moss kissed my skin with blisters and when the tides roared up from the river, twenty feet tall, I could smell the saltwater. With black fire immolating every tree, running along the Spanish moss, I turned to Catherine where she lay on the ground, dying but not dead.
‘You must make the choice,’ she whispered, blood dripping from her mouth as she spoke. ‘Save this world or end it. Find your peace.’
Find my peace? When everyone I knew and loved was dead on the floor around me?
A rough, leather gloved hand gripped me by the throat and hoisted me into the air, and as the sword pierced my heart, I awoke with a start, gasping for air as I sat up, water splashing onto the floor around the tub.
‘You changed your future once, you can change it again.’
Right at the edge of the bed, dressed in her favourite blue silk gown, Catherine beheld me with emerald eyes. Her hair was pinned up away from her exquisite face. She twisted her aquamarine ring around and around on her finger as she spoke.
‘He is coming,’ she said. ‘Lives will be lost. Which lives and in what order, is very much up to you.’
‘No one is going to lose their life.’ I clung to the side of the tub, my heart pounding. ‘Who is he? What does he want?’
Still on the bed, she smoothed imperceptible wrinkles out of her skirt with both hands.
‘An end,’ she replied. ‘To magic.’
‘All magic? Not just witches?’
‘Like most men who wish to remove something from this world, he doesn’t truly understand what he desires.’
‘Magic is part of the world,’ I murmured, shivering at thememory of his sword piercing my skin. ‘It’s part of nature, you can’t erase nature. He can’t possibly understand what we are, why would anyone try to wipe out something they don’t understand?’
‘Oh, Emily, that’s the only reason they need,’ Catherine replied with a disappointed shake of her head. ‘Did your father teach you nothing?’
The candlelight pulsed as she stood, walked over to the bathtub and picked a fluffy towel from the brass rack.
‘We miss you,’ I told her, a confession, as she laid the towel on the side of the tub. ‘Me and Ashley. When are you coming back?’
She pushed the wet hair off my face.
‘If and when I’m needed.’
‘You’re needed now.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘My part is done. I brought you here.’
The flames of the candles flared and I looked over at the pictures on the dresser, flames licking at the photograph of Catherine’s wedding and the picture of my dad, the images burning away under the glass.
‘Protect the blessing and the blessing will protect you,’ Catherine instructed. ‘When the dead fight back. When the earth consumes. A lie becomes the truth. She will return.’
Every single candle in the room guttered at once and when my eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, I was alone. Outside the bedroom window, the sun had set and the sky was dark, pinpricks of stars the only thing illuminating the room now. The carriage clock by the bed said it was past 9 p.m. Half a day had passed since I filled the bath but the water was still hot enough to turn my skin lobster pink. Carefully, I climbed out, searching for crucial evidence my grandmother had ever been here, that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Had she left the towel on the side of the bath or had I put it there myself?One thing was certain, the silver frames on her dresser weren’t full of ashes when I entered her room. At the end of the bed there was a depression in the quilt, as though someone had been sitting there for some time, watching over me.
And right beside it, Catherine’s aquamarine ring.
Chapter Thirty
