She comes over and pats Winter’s cheek. This is not less horrible.
“I wanted to eat you alive,” she confesses, lowering Briar’s face with its piercings to gaze straight at Winter. This means she’s also too close to me, and the urge to bite her nearly makes me lightheaded. “I wanted to feast on your entrails and wear your collarbone as a hat. This would be small-enough recompense for your defiance.”
She makes a clucking sort of sound, and then, for a moment, I am certain that I can see worms crawling beneath her skin. Burrowing this way and that, making tunnels in Briar’s cheek. Her chin. Her brow.
I feel my gorge rise and my throat tighten.
But Vinca isn’t done. She gets closer and snaps her teeth a scant hair from Winter’s nose. “And I still might, when you have been bled out and harvested and offered up. I hope that gives you pleasant nightmares.”
“Nightmares used to be more unpleasant,” Winter tells her. Conversationally. Like she doesn’t have a death goddess in someone else’s corporeal bodyin her face. “I used to get those horrible headaches, but they’ve gone away. I thought that was because your power was gone.”
And then she smiles, in a manner I can only describe as shit-eating and provocative, directly into the goddess’s face. Briar’s face, but there’s no Briar behind it.
The slap Vinca delivers, with a screech, sends Winter’s head spinning back and, if I had to guess, probably hurts her neck, too.
When the goddess storms away again, Winter runs her tongue over her teeth. She tries to crack her neck on both sides, winces, and then eyes Savi and me. “Worth it,” she says, her mouth full of blood.
The priests began to chant, which is never a good sign. The three of us are slumped together haphazardly, a little heap. I find my head is ringing, but I can’t tell if it’s the chanting, or the fact they took me down so hard, or the way that I howled like that without being fully shifted into wolf form.
I have to hope that it was loud enough. That I let it go on long enough.
That they heard me all the way down in the valley.
Even if they didn’t, I tell myself, it’s okay. Deep down, no matter what magic hides me from Ty, I know that he’ll come. I know it.
He can sense me the same way I can sense him. That has nothing to do with tracking. Not the kind Savi warded us against.
If it did, he wouldn’t have found us at her house.
After a while, the priests come back for us. There’s more chanting and carrying-on, and this time they have small bowls filled with foul-smelling pastes that they rub on our foreheads. Then, shoving the tape away, on our mouths. With brusque and relentless hands, they rip my shirt and smooth the rest of the paste between mybreasts, right over Ty’s paw print. Like they’re rubbing the vile-smelling stuff over my heart.
There’s not anything even remotely sexual about it. I find that’s actually scarier.
I can taste the paste where they slathered it on my lips, and it makes me heave. I don’t want to think about what itis. I want to think even less about what they expect it todo.
I can hear similar sounds of revulsion on either side of me. I wouldn’t say I feelcomforted, but at least I’m not alone.
Then they’re manhandling us again, picking us up and half carrying, half dragging us a little ways across the crater floor to a large flat-topped rock.
“It’s always a fucking rock,” Winter mutters.
On my other side, Savi is whispering with her head tilted down, the better to hide what she’s doing, I think. She glances toward me, the tape they used to gag her around her chin, and her eyes a fury.
Rain,she mouths.
I think that’s an excellent idea. I try to shift again, to let out another howl, but something isn’t right. My body won’t do it—and I wonder if it’s that paste.
They toss us up onto the rock and climb up to arrange the three of us with our backs touching, like we’re witches awaiting trial. Crone, mother, and maiden, and we all know how those trials went for the accused.
I look out at the acolytes who press in toward this rock. All of them are chanting now. All of those red cloaks are flowing as they move. Their plague-doctor masks are as unsettling as ever.
I would very much like to join Savi in some pruning. I would like fewer of these minions around if there’s a next time. If we live long enough to worry about such things.
I force myself to look beyond all that red-cloaked chanting. I have my perfect werewolf vision no matter what form I’m in, so I look past the cone of light all around us, too. When I concentrate, I can lookfarther. Up those steep sides of the crater, which explains why I thought the moon was in the wrong place.
Up on the crater’s rim, I see something flicker. It looks like smoke.
Vampire,I think. I’ve never been so happy to see one.
