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Rebecca sounded tense. But, as always down here, she kept her composure.

This woman was tougher than steel and more collected than Gloria.

But there was something they all didn't know. Something I knew. Something no one expected from the old Julie.

The old Julie had died that evening.

I looked at the unsuspecting women I had once feared so much.

They didn't know that they would never be in control of me.

Amulet

Angus MacRae

“There will be new rules.”

That's what Amara had tried to drill into us. That we should stay away from Bayla Adams. She had been so insistent, had seemed so fearful.

I had noticed that Grace and the other Earth Quatra were learning more defensive techniques that they could combine with their element, as if there really was a danger coming from Vanderwood University.

They had all forgotten that it was a Senseque who had lost his life. Julian's father. Not a Quatura. And yet there was a state of high alert among Blairville’s Quatura and intensified element training, which my two cousins in particular took seriously.

None of them seemed to realize that what they should be afraid of lived behind their own walls and was spreading like an aggressive yet undiscovered tumor.

A creeping sensation in my neck brought me back to the present. The same one that haunted me for three weeks now. It was as if a dark shadow was hovering over my neck. But there was no dark shadow.

I suspected it was the Salma that was making me hallucinate, because I was consuming more than usual. A whole vial in the morning was my new dose to survive this madness and control my inner destruction.

“Julie...”

I turned abruptly in the doorway to my room and peered down the empty hallway.

The male voice I had heard in my dream last night. A dark dream. The voice, a mere whisper, which I had heard again this morning.

I had followed it down into the underground passages of Moenia, but I had stopped in a dark corridor far away from the usual corridors. The voice had disappeared and Grace had appeared behind me. She had asked me what I was doing in the old, dilapidated corridors and said that it wasn't safe enough.

Then we had left, and the whispering had been there again, so I had turned around one last time, but there had been no one there. Just like now.

The voices must have been coming from my head.

Grace was right. I was going crazy.

Trapped in thought, I walked over to my mirror and studied the reflection of the new Julie. I did this every day, often for hours. Not because I liked what I saw, but because I saw more. The knowledge that I could be more than the Julie I was now attracted me with an uncomfortable intensity.

Eventually, I opened the white Victorian wardrobe and stared at my old clothes. I would burn them.

The closet door closed on its own, and I wandered to the other side of the closet.

When I opened the next closet door, my gaze fell on the clothes I had ordered in the last few days.

No one would recognize me again.

“And?”

The word made me flinch.

I stared at the reflection of my room in the mirror.