The door was ripped open. “Emma, there you are.” Daddy scowled down at her. “What did I say?”
She wanted to push herself further back inside the wardrobe, into the soft warmth of blankets and pillows. She didn’t want to go with him. But she also didn’t want to lose Tiger, and Daddy would take him away if he saw him again. She had to protect Tiger, so she shoved him under a pile of old T-shirts and pushed herself up.
“Emma?” The voice was frantic. Not Daddy. A man’s voice that she thought she should know, but it was very far away. “Emma! Why the fuck isn’t she answering me?”
She paused and looked around as she stepped out of the closet. Who was there? Who was cursing? That word was a big no-no. But there was no one there except Daddy. And he was angry. She lowered her gaze to the floor. “Sorry. I didn’t hear you.”
He grabbed her arm, not bothering to reply, and dragged her down the corridor to his office. The only times she’d even been in it were for him to take her blood. But Mummy didn’t need her blood anymore. Mummy was gone.
Daddy pushed her into a chair and she sat quietly as he muttered to himself. Beside her was a long, low bench set up with a very bright light. It was covered in old books and thick notebooks filled with tiny writing. In the middle stood a wide silver bowl. It was the kind of shiny thing that drew her eyes. It looked expensive, like something from a gallery in Cardiff, with lots of little pictures carved into the silver on the sides. But she knew better than to touch it. It had a strange kind of feeling to it—very old and very evil, like something the witch fromSnow Whitewould use.
Daddy’s fingers twitched as he focused on the bowl. Emma didn’t have her Shadows yet, but she’d lived in the Order all her life and she knew that he was calling Shadows. The bowl seemed almost to glow as he worked, the pictures that decorated its plates moving in the strange light. She hated them. Hated this cold, horrid room. She wanted her mummy and her Tiger.
Daddy moved a book out the way and lifted the heavy knife that had been hidden behind it. It seemed to be made from some kind of stone, but the blade was polished and gleaming, and her fear ramped up into terror. She wrapped her hand around her locket and held it tight. “Daddy, I have to go and do my homework. Can I go, please?”
Daddy frowned. “You can sit right there.” He used the knife to stir inside the bowl and then took out a vial of something thick and dark and added it to the bowl, still muttering to himself.
He nodded once and then pulled on a pair of heavy gloves, turning to watch her expectantly.
Her breath caught high in her chest. All she could manage were short, panicked gasps. Her locket couldn’t help. Nothing could help. She was only ten, but she knew without any doubt that she had to get away.
She pushed herself off the chair, ready to run, but Daddy grabbed her arm and shoved her back down, holding her there with one hand. He looked her in the eye and growled. “You are calm. You are well. Do you hear me, Emma? You. Are. Calm.”
Her body sagged into the seat, her heart beating in frightened bursts. She was supposed to be calm, but she didn’t feel it. She felt sick. Her body wasn’t listening to her brain. Her body was staying in the seat like Daddy had ordered when her brain wanted her to run. She whimpered as she watched him drag a gloved hand through the bowl. Then he scooped up the strange mixture and smeared it down her neck.
The acid burn flooded her veins and she started to scream. Darkness spread across her vision as cruel tentacles scorched through her, latching themselves to her spine, wrapping themselves through her and inside her, eating at her barely formed Shadows, gripping and strangling them, and all she could do was scream and scream.
But then other people were there in the darkness with her. She knew them. Ethan and Bryn. Her body lurched and a dark strand of decades-old Shadow dislodged from where it had wrapped around her.
She convulsed again and another strand was pulled away. The two Healers surrounded her, dragging old, broken fragments of blood Shadow from where it had twisted and settled. Pulling the corrupt fragments away from where they had been strangling her Shadows all this time.
Suddenly she was falling, or flying maybe, back up through the darkness.
“Kay?” Ethan grunted.
“I see them,” Kay agreed.
Emma blinked. She closed her eyes, then opened them again. Kay was standing beside her blasting the wisps of ancient blood Shadow, crushing them until only pale gray smoke drifted away through the air.
“Zach?” Emma’s voice was dry and rasping within her shredded throat. Her face was wet and she felt as if she’d run a million miles, and all she wanted was for Zach to hold her. But he wasn’t there. Where was he? Why wasn’t he holding her hand?
“He’s here.” That firm voice was Kay’s. “Zach, she needs you.”
Then Zach was at her side, holding her hand in a tight grip and looking down at her. His eyes were so dark, like the ocean after a storm, his presence the safe harbor that she needed. He lifted his other hand and ran his thumb down her cheek. “God, Emma,” he said, voice shaking.
A sob bubbled up in her throat as another flood of tears poured down her face. Tears of exhaustion and relief and buried pain. “I think… my father….”
Bryn patted her hand on the other side. “Elizabeth saw it. She told us as it was happening.”
Emma swallowed against the ache in her throat, clinging to the warmth of Zach’s hand. “What does it mean?”
“It looks like your father experimented on you when he was trying to get the blood Shadows to work,” Bryn admitted softly. “That experiment failed, but some of the blood Shadow wrapped itself around your Shadows while they were forming. We pulled it away and Kay destroyed it.”
Emma lifted a shaking hand to wipe away the tears. “Did it work?” she whispered.
Kay passed her a tissue. “Take a look for yourself.”
“I don’t—”
