He had wondered if there would be a cue, some perfect moment to pull the girl down into the earth. He figured the twins would say something, maybe the funeral chant he’d seen from Dreya’s past, but they didn’t. Instead, after a few moments of silence, they began to sing.
The song was just a melody, but it was deep and sorrowful and sent chills down his spine. The quiet woods seemed to go even more silent, as if every particle of creation had paused to listen in. And that, he knew, was the cue he was waiting for. He opened to Earth and reached deep.
The ground in front of them rumbled. Like quicksand, the snow and dirt became fluid. The body—no, Tori—sank into the soil. Tenn could feel her tiny, birdlike body drawn down into the depths of the earth from which she’d come. He wanted it to be beautiful, that final embrace. He wanted to block out the sensation of her bones snapping under the weight of stone, the fluid that spilled from her flesh. But he couldn’t. Magic was a curse. Magic would always be a curse.
Finally, when she was at least six feet under, he cut himself from the power and the awareness of her twisted body. His limbs shook from emotion and Earth’s drain, and he slumped against his staff. The twins finished their song. They gave him a solemn look, then bowed before the freshly turned dirt and walked off. Tenn hesitated.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered into the snow.
He wasn’t certain who he was apologizing to.
They gathered their things and began the long, slow walk back to the clan in silence. Tenn couldn’t wash the feeling from his bones, the uncleanliness of the magic he had done. Even that small amount of magic made his legs shake and stomach rumble. At least, sometime during the night, one of the twins had pulled the blood from his clothes. Not that it made him feel any cleaner.
It was midday when they stopped for lunch. And it was midday when they realized something was wrong.
Devon stiffened, his chunk of bread forgotten.
“What is it?” Dreya asked.
He didn’t respond at first. But then Devon’s lips parted, and he whispered one, weighted word.
“Impossible.”
“What?” Tenn asked. His heart began to race, and he opened to Earth, scanning the countryside for anything moving, any sign of Howls or Inquisitors or worse. He felt nothing.
“The rune,” Devon said. He looked at Dreya, his eyes wide. A second passed, and then she hissed in a breath.
“It is moving,” she whispered.
Tenn didn’t ask more. He closed his eyes and visualized the tracking rune. He could feel its location. It was right in front of them, pulling them on. And that’s when he felt the slight shift, the tug.
Devon was right. The rune was moving. Fast.
“What the hell?” he said.
They all shared a glance. Then, as one, they grabbed their things. When they started back down the highway, they were running.
* * *
Despite their haste, they didn’t reach the woods until just before dusk. Tenn pushed his senses through the trees. For a moment, nothing seemed amiss. The woods were empty. Still. Except...
“I can feel the trailers,” he said. He looked at Dreya.
“The runes,” she said. “They must have been compromised.”
They ran into the trees at full speed. They didn’t hesitate to examine the marks on the trees that they passed, the lashings that seemed less than random. They all knew the marks of kravens when they saw them. And Tenn knew without a doubt that these slashes were cut across the runes themselves, rendering them useless. No one should have even known about them.
That’s when it clicked. Matthias could follow his dreams, read his thoughts. And if that were true, Matthias had seen everything Luke had shown him. The runes on the trees. And the tracking rune that would have led him straight to the Witches.
“It’s my fault,” Tenn gasped. He nearly collapsed in disbelief. Matthias hadn’t taken Tori to try and kill him. Matthias had taken her to lure him out and take the Witches. Matthias didn’t want him learning more about the runes.
Either that, or Matthias just wanted to prove that no one was safe around Tenn. Not even those Tenn turned to for guidance.
Neither of the twins said anything. He knew they wouldn’t lie. He knew they were drawing the same conclusions he was.
“There might be survivors,” Dreya said instead. He could tell from the waver in her voice that she didn’t quite believe it.
But when they reached the camp, the trailers were silent. Empty. Earth and Air told them as much.
The fire in the center had burned out, and more than one trailer door stood open, swaying gently in the wind. They stepped into the midst of the encampment, feeling for all the world like they were entering a ghost town.
“Search them,” Tenn said. Even his words seemed too heavy in the emptiness of this place. “Maybe they fled. Or left a clue.”
They split up and did precisely what he commanded, though he knew it was from protocol and not actual hope. He ducked inside Rhiannon’s trailer. The curtains were drawn and bowls of cold porridge sat untouched on the table. The scene reminded him of the dining room, where he’d first encountered emotional transference, but no shades of the dead ran through him. He glanced to the cabinet holding the singing bowl. It was open, the door dangling from a single hinge. Empty. Whatever happened, Rhiannon had had the foresight to grab the bowl with the rune. She wanted to be followed.
Someone yelled. He bolted outside.
It was Devon.
Devon stumbled backward from a trailer, his hands over his face. He tripped, fell into the snow. Dreya was at his side in an instant. Tenn was right behind.
Dreya smoothed his hair, whispering soothing sounds into his ears. His eyes were wide and he gripped the arm she wrapped around him.
“What happened?” Tenn asked.
“Go...” Devon stammered. “Go look.” He pointed a shaky finger at the trailer he’d just left.
Tenn looked at Dreya for support, but she was focused entirely on her brother.
He stood, doing his best to steel himself for whatever was waiting inside. If it had been enough to scare Devon...
He crept up to the trailer, Earth blazing in his stomach and his grip on the staff tight. The door opened with the screech of hinges.
The interior was dim, barely illuminated by the dying light outside. But it was enough.
The trailer was perfectly intact—the bed made, clothing folded on the nightstand, a cold mug of tea on the counter. Everything looked normal. Everything, save for the lump on the edge of the bed. At first glance, he’d thought it was a pillow. Only pillows didn’t drip crimson.
It was a body.
Half of one.
And there, splattered on the wall in the corpse’s blood, in Matthias’s jagged script, were two words.
your move
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
TENN BURIED HIS second body at nightfall, the only light coming from an orb of magic hovering in the air.
It was far less ceremonial than with Tori. Tenn didn’t even try to be gentle as he pulled the body down into the earth.
There was no point.
They’d never found the other half of the corpse.
“What are we going to do?” Dreya asked.
There weren’t any more bodies. Devon was still in shock, his arms crossed around himself tight. Tenn didn’t blame him. After seeing what had happened in the twins’ past, he knew another dead Witch was hitting far too close to home. Rage burned in his chest even as Earth ate at his insides, his limbs shaking from magic and anger.
Matthias would pay. For all of this, Matthias would pay.
“We follow them,” Tenn said.
“Do you have a plan?” Dreya asked.
“Yeah,” he said. And
he did. Mostly. It had been forming ever since he found the empty cabinet that once held the bowl. It was suicide, and it probably wouldn’t work, but it was the only hope they had.
“What is it?”
“Runes,” he said. “I’ll explain on the way.” He looked to Devon. “Do you think he’s well enough to travel?”
She nodded.
“Don’t worry about him. He has been through much worse.”
They all had. Hopefully, after this, Matthias at least would be out of the picture.
* * *
They stopped atop a small hill overlooking a field. Tenn had a feeling the hill hadn’t been there before, considering it was strewn with the rubble of toppled houses, and the base ringed with overturned cars. The necromancers had set up camp below—a few tents, a few campfires. It was, without a doubt, the rest of Matthias’s army. It made Tenn’s blood boil, made him want to burn the whole world down. But he had to stick to the plan. To get the Witches out alive, they had to be tactful.
“I know where they are taking them,” Dreya whispered. Her words were tight. Clipped.
“Where?”
She nodded to the black horizon.
“There is a Farm ahead. A few miles. I can smell it.”
Tenn’s gut twisted. The Witches had been safe until he’d come along. Now, they were set to be food or new recruits to the Dark Lady’s army. Matthias was definitely playing him: What worse fate was there for a bunch of pacifists than to be turned into bloodthirsty monsters, or food for them?
“Then we’ll have to finish this tonight,” he said.
As though there’d been another choice.
They set to work immediately. They gathered a handful of stones, and Tenn slowly carved the tracking rune into each of them. Then he flipped them over and carved in the symbols he’d memorized from the trees, runes of misdirection and hiding. He hoped he’d remembered correctly.
But the runes seemed to whisper in his head as he wrote them. The rest of the world fell away. It was like writing a language he’d always known, a string of runes that spelled a phrase that tingled on the tip of his tongue. It took only a few minutes, but it felt like hours—sweat dripped down his forehead and his thoughts spun in a haze. He felt high. If not for the weight of what he was about to do, he might have drifted off entirely.
Then, using the end of his staff, he traced a large circle in a space cleared of rubble, the line cutting through the frozen dirt. He traced more misdirection runes along the perimeter while the twins waited impatiently inside. When it was done, he stepped back and stared at the runes. They glowed faint and green, just like they had on the trees, the entire circle a dim neon.
Luke had said runes required energy to work. Tenn had assumed the energy from the earth powered the cloaking runes; it looked like he was correct.
“Do you see that?” he asked, his voice quiet with awe and not a small bit of...not pride...humility.
“See what?” Dreya asked.
“The runes,” he said. “They’re glowing.”
Dreya raised an eyebrow but said nothing. It was Devon who spoke.
“They just look like chicken scratch to me,” he said.
“Never mind,” Tenn said. He held out a hand. “Give me your wrist,” he said to Dreya.
She didn’t even pause before holding her arm out. He took it gently, pulling back the layers of her coat and sweater. The skin beneath was pale porcelain, her veins just visible beneath the surface.
“This might sting,” Tenn said. Then he opened to Earth and drew.
It was a cheap trick, one he’d learned early on as an easy way to practice his new Sphere. He changed the pigments in Dreya’s wrist, tracing the tracking rune into her skin. It wasn’t healing and it wasn’t harming, but it still required him to touch her to make it work. It took only a few seconds. The rune stood out delicate and dark on her wrist. Devon was next, and this time Tenn changed the pigment to white, the rune glowing ghostly against Devon’s dark flesh. Finally, he traced it into his own wrist.
“Memorize these,” he said, holding out his wrist. “Once I’m outside of the circle, it’s the only way we’ll have of keeping track of each other.”
Tenn took a deep breath and stared out at the encampment. What he was about to do was suicide, but there was no fear or anticipation. Coldness filled him with a dead resolution. Jarrett’s face came to mind—is this how he had felt before leaping to his death? Is this how it felt to truly sacrifice yourself for something greater: the clarity, the stillness?
The absolute calm.
“Remember the signals?”
“Yes.”
“Then...I guess I’ll see you soon,” he said, the words tasting horribly close to a lie. They nodded solemnly, and Dreya opened to Air.
The gathered stones hovered up and twisted a slow orbit around him. The moment they left the ground, he opened to Earth and siphoned energy into each stone. The runes glowed green with life. He could tell from the sudden glaze in Dreya’s eyes that the runes had worked; he was invisible.
He jumped and dodged side to side, just to make sure, but the stones continued their rotation around him undisturbed. So long as Dreya stayed focused on the tracking runes, she should be able to keep the stones centered on him. So many shoulds, but it was the best he could hope for.
“I’ll miss you guys,” he said.
As expected, neither of the twins heard him.
He stepped out of the circle, and they vanished from sight.
For a moment, he stood there, staring down at the army, Earth fueling his senses as he sought out the huddle of Witches. He could feel them, just barely, congregated near the center of the encampment. He couldn’t tell how many were left, but he had a feeling it was a smaller number than what they’d started with.
He stilled his thoughts, gripped the staff tighter.
Then he ran down into the mouth of hell.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
HALFWAY DOWN THE HILL, Tenn sent a surge of Earth into the branches of the tree beside the twins, making the limbs shudder. The first signal. A heartbeat later, chaos broke out in the encampment.
Devon’s work was quick and efficient, a vicious blend of calculated destruction and artistic flourishes. The dozen or so campfires blazed into life with a roar, searing the sky with pillars of flame. Fire spread in seconds, leaping to ignite flesh and canvas. It was beautiful, in a way, the smear of orange against the dark. Beautiful, save for the scent of burning Howls. Not that Tenn had any time to admire from afar. Even though the fires made sweat drip down his skin, he ran straight into the heart of the army. Everything was sound and heat, screams and cinders, and the madness slashed a grin across his face.
Finally, the monsters would know how it felt to fear the night.
Kravens swarmed past him, but they edged around his runes like water flowing around a stone. Up close, when he wasn’t trying to kill them or dodge their blows, he saw them for their true monstrosity—graying flesh sagging or peeling off, strands of fat and blood and pus dripping from every open sore and orifice, bones broken and twisted and reshaped as talons and spikes, spines horribly bent and arms and fingers elongated. Even worse was the smell, the cloying sweetness of rot and blood that seemed to crawl into the recesses of his throat. He wanted to gag. Wanted to strike out and end their putrid existence.
He didn’t.
He just ran, ducking and dodging and waiting for a monster to stumble past his runes, but they never did. The nightmares shoved around him unaware, and it wasn’t just the kravens that sought out prey, but the more humanoid Howls—the pale bloodlings and deceptively beautiful succubi. They stood out from the throng, both crazed and aloof. But even they were repelled by Tenn’s defenses, and he marveled at how well the runes were actually working. He just hoped he worked fast en
ough that Matthias couldn’t read his thoughts—hopefully, it was something that could only be done when sleeping or passed out.
His luck held. He reached the Witches without being discovered. As he’d hoped, they were barely guarded—why should they be when Matthias’s entire army surrounded them? Instead, there was a single necromancer, a man in an old ski coat and knit hat. Not exactly the most intimidating or dark choice in attire, but it was cold. The Sphere of Earth glowed bright in the man’s pelvis, and he held a stone covered in pulsating runes. So that was why the guard was so loose—Tenn could feel the strands of magic twisting from the necromancer, twining into the Spheres of the entire clan.
Each of their Earth Spheres were being drained. Just enough to make them weak and tired, enough to make using magic an impossible chore. He remembered the feeling of being tapped well.
The Witches themselves gathered in a tight knot near the bonfire, the only group in the entire camp that hadn’t moved. Only a few were dressed to be out in the cold; the rest had clearly been taken in their sleep. One man near the edge wore nothing but jeans, his feet bare and frostbitten, another kid—a few years younger than Tenn—was missing his arms. Just the sight made Tenn’s blood boil. All of the Witches had a sort of stoicism to them, though, one that said this wasn’t the worst they had undergone.
He didn’t see Rhiannon. Fear shot through his chest. Was she held captive elsewhere? He didn’t want to think of the alternative.
It was then that he noticed the smear of darkness on the ground by the fire, the few small mounds he wished he could mistake for rocks. But he knew precisely what those chunks were. The kravens had feasted, and they’d let the Witches watch. He wondered if they’d made the clan choose who died first.
That alone made Tenn want to prolong the necromancer’s pain, but another burst of fire nearby brought him to his senses. While he was here deliberating, the twins were weaving their destruction and keeping him safe. And the army was trying to hunt them down. He had to act fast.
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