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Rats.

They were everywhere.

I screamed as they ate at Rose’s corpse. Her body gray and shriveled in her bed. She was dead. Oh goddess. She was dead.

NO!

I tried to scare them away as tears streamed down my face, but they wouldn’t leave, ignoring me and nibbling at her lifeless body. They bit into my flesh, and I cried out as they surrounded me. Without thinking about it, I called on my power, it had become second nature. “Stop,” I commanded.

All the rats around me suddenly stopped what they were doing, backing away from me, and jumping off Rose’s bed.

The room spun now, and I was in the woods—Rose, the house gone.

The rats remained—all of them stared up at me, waiting, as if they were under my spell.

This wasn’t real, I reminded myself.

The crones were in my head. They were projecting this into my mind, but the rats, they’d changed visions with me. I’d commanded them to stop, and they had, and now they were with me in the next vision. Were they somehow linked to me by my power?

Maybe they were here, or maybe they were in the room with my body.

A figure cloaked in black appeared in the distance, watching me. I stumbled back a step, my heart pounding. He flickered, there one moment, then vanished. I searched the forest around me wildly—he appeared again, closer this time.

Something snarled, the vicious sound coming from the opposite direction. Demons, a lot of them. They’re all just part of the vison, I told myself. I did my best to ignore my rising terror and focused all my power on the small army of rats staring up at me.

“Do you know the alpha wolf?”

Their little heads nodded.

“Do you know where he lives?”

More nodding.

“Come here,” I said to the one closest.

The rat obeyed.

If they were surrounding my body on the cave floor, like I thought…hoped, they were, then my blood was right there.

“You want to please me, don’t you?”

I felt his eagerness to make me happy.

“If you roll in my blood, the alpha will scent it, and then you can lead him here to me. That would please me very much.”

Another nod.

The demons were drawing nearer, closing in on me.

“Go now, friends, and bring me the wolf.”

Draven

Asher walked back into the great room.

“I’m done talking,” I said from my spot by the window.

She held up a bottle of bourbon. “I’m done talking as well. Let’s get hammered instead. And if nothing else, it might numb the cravings for your witch, for a little while, anyway.”