If the vampires know we’re here, the wolves do too.
I don’t allow myself to think about how scared I am until now. Until I know that Ty is on his way. That it’s possible he’s already here.
That it won’t be only me making sure I run with that moon tonight.
I make myself breathe. I make myself relax the muscles in my body when what they really want to do is tense themselves to failure. All I need to do is keep this moment going until reinforcements arrive.
No sacrifices until then.
“So wait a minute,” I say, when Vinca dances back toward us, making her borrowed body move in ways that would probably make me feel sick if I thought about them too closely. “Was that you all along? Butchering all those poor animals? Hiding in plain sight? Eating boxes upon boxes of tooth-decaying cereal?”
Vinca is at the edge of the rock they’ve arranged us on, and for all that she is an ancient goddess with death in her eyes and nightmares skittering beneath her skin, I can see that what she really wants to do is stand here and brag.
Like every other narcissist douchebag I’ve ever encountered.
“This vessel cannot containmy enormityfor any length of time,” she tells me haughtily. “It is already woefully insufficient. Yet it was the only one available. All of the rest of these creatures are soft. Too easily reduced to useless sludge when pushed beyond their tiny capacities.” She sniffs and looks down at Briar’s arms with all their tattoos. “At least the fae havesomeconnection to the ancient magic. The sugar helped. Or she would be little more than a viscous puddle by now.”
“That is ... disgustingly specific,” Winter mutters.
“So it wasn’t you,” I say, as if this is a perfectly cordial conversation. As if no one’s tied up and bleeding. As if no one is planning to use ourbodies to bring nothing but death and suffering to what’s left of the world. “It was just a sacrifice free-for-all, then.”
“Many of those who worship me let me know the ways they revere me,” Vinca tells me, looking smug. “For millennia, I have received such devotion. I do not expect a mangy werewolf cur to comprehend my might or my power.”
“They are vast indeed,” I say, soothingly, the same way I would tell a wolf like Deirdre that yes, yes, she wasabsolutelyindependent andsopowerful. “You had Briar specifically kill all those things all around the places that we live. They had to be hand delivered.”
I refuse to say Connor’s name, but I know it had to be him too. The ones near the den, certainly. Maybe more. I also get the feeling I know exactly which acolyte of the Goddess of Filth turned him.
“One of the reasons this vessel was chosen was that she was so specifically and strategically placed,” Vinca is saying, and she’s losing control of Briar’s body. Or maybe she’s experimenting. Her tongue darts out of slack lips. Her eyes roll back and stay that way, all white, with veins pulsing. “I did not think that she would be required. I did not imagine that I would not rise. Yet all things happen as they should. Now I can fully inhabit this putrid little world, harness the power of the moon and the stars, and take my rightful place at last. Your unwilling sacrifice makes it that much sweeter.”
“I’m often known as something of a sugary treat,” I agree. “But I do wonder—”
“Silence,” Vinca orders. “It is come.”
That doesn’t sound good.
Then I feel it. There arethingsslithering over my body. Things I do not want to identify. Things that I am deeply concerned match the horrible, wormy things I can see working beneath her skin.
As I stare at her, she still half-wears Briar’s face. But every now and again, like a flicker of static, I see that beaked, terrible other face of hers. The one I’ve heard Winter describe.
I could have lived the hundreds of years of my life without ever seeing it myself.
It makes me want to vomit. The things I can feel crawling all over me—
I can’t think about that.
I can hear Savi and Winter breathing harder on either side of me, and I know it’s not happening to only me. That doesn’t make it better. But it’s not worse, either, and that feels like ... something.
Vinca lifts herself up. She rises from the bottom of the crater, levitating herself high above the three of us. In another effort to pretend I can’t feel anything crawling on me, I tilt my head back, look up, and there she is. Hanging in the air, her chest pointed toward the moon.
My moon,I think, in something darker than fury.Not hers.
I can feel the creepy-crawly, horrible things moving on me, and I have a flash of insight then that I don’t want at all. It’s that paste. That’s where they’re heading.
I have to assume that when they get there, this will all get a whole lot worse.
Vinca stretches out, framed perfectly by her dome of light. All around us, the red cloaks sway. The priests call out their chants and the acolytes repeat them. Over and over again.
I can hear Savi muttering out her spell. Winter is shuddering and makes a low, miserable sound.
