by S. W. Clarke
So I gave him one. I reminded him of what I had read in The Witching World, about Noir being my horse, about the broken leg, about the healing book in Umbra’s office.
At the end, he sat back. “Oh.”
“Yeah, oh.” I reached out a hand. “So, the key?”
Aiden pulled open his desk drawer, retrieved the key he’d shown me in the stables. “Even if I did let you borrow it, you couldn’t make it work.”
I left my hand extended. “Insert and turn. I may not have magic, but I know how to open locked doors.”
“It’s not that,” Eva said. “The headmistress had the key magically bound to Aiden. That way, only the student ambassador can use it in case of emergencies.”
I groaned; more rules, which meant more obstacles in my way. “Well, this qualifies as an emergency.”
Aiden sat forward. “You’re sure about this horse?”
“I am.” I sighed, dropping my hand. “Please help me, Aiden. I can’t do this without you.”
He paused a moment, his eyes unfocusing as he considered. When his gaze refocused on mine, his jaw went firm. “All right—I’ll help you. But there’s one problem still.”
I nearly winced in anticipation. “What is it?”
“The headmistress is a night owl,” he said. “We have to wait for her to leave her office before we can go in.”
“Sure,” I said. Umbra was old. How late could she possibly stay up, anyway?
And the answer was: really damn late.
Three hours later, Eva had healed my concussion enough for my head to stop hurting. It also gave me the wherewithal to huddle in my cloak behind a tree with Eva, Aiden, and Loki around me.
Eva peered around toward the double doors of the headmistress’s office. “Still no sign of her.”
I blew out air. “Seriously, where is she?”
Aiden pulled his cloak tight around him. “Patience, Cole.”
“This is me exercising patience.” I really, really wished I had fire magic right now, at least to warm my hands. Spring nights in Romania were cold. “Otherwise, I’d have already gone in.”
We waited. And waited. I could trace the hour by the moon’s trajectory across the sky and the cold air seeping into my limbs.
We finally sat down against the tree, and I was grateful for Loki climbing into my arms. I buried my hands into his fur.
“Great idea, buddy,” I whispered at him. “Break into Umbra’s office.”
Loki blinked up at me, his green eyes luminous. “You’ve had hours to contemplate a better plan. Did you come up with one?”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. “It’s official: my cat is smarter than me.”
Eva glanced over. “I’d love to have a familiar smarter than me.”
I pointed at Loki. “You want this one?”
Loki let out an unimpressed yawn.
From my other side, Aiden chuckled. “That cat wouldn’t leave you even if he could.”
I glanced over at Aiden. “You want to ask him? I think he’d give you a different answer.”
Aiden leaned his head back against the tree. “I don’t need to ask him.”
Loki went on purring in my lap, his silence a testament to what Aiden had said.
A thump sounded from behind us, and we all jerked upright. I was the first to stand and peer around the tree.
The door to the headmistress’s tree had opened, and she was emerging into the clearing. We recognized her staff and silver hair in the moonlight.
“Wait until she’s out of the clearing,” Aiden whispered from beside me. “She’s got eyes on the back of her head.”
And when it came to Umbra, that might be a literal statement. You could never be sure.
We waited, all of us still and quiet, until she had disappeared past the amphitheater and to her home on the other side of the academy’s grounds.
And then, finally, the four of us made our way along the edges of the clearing and to the double doors.
Aiden used the master key to unlock the doors, and a thought hit me as we were about to enter: the wisps were in there. I wasn’t supposed to mess with the wisps.
But this had nothing to do with the wisps. This had to do with a book and a horse.
As we stepped inside the antechamber, a high-pitched voice sounded nearby.
Someone was talking to us.
Chapter Forty
I stopped Aiden and Eva, and we all pressed ourselves against the wall of the antechamber as I set a finger to my lips.
We listened for a minute, but nothing else sounded. Not even the wisps floating high up near the ceiling.
The wisps. Was it them?
“I think we’re alone,” Aiden finally said.
I’d definitely heard someone speaking. And where the headmistress had a low, gravelly voice, this belonged to someone else.
I stared up toward the ceiling, and Eva followed my glance. “Did you hear them again?” she asked me.
I swallowed. “Maybe.”
But they weren’t saying anything else. At least, not right now.
Aiden was already depressing the sun at the edge of the room, and the stairs to Umbra’s office slotted to place. He started up them, Loki trotting after. Eva followed.
Instead of going up, I walked to the dead center of the antechamber and stared straight up. When I did, I was able to see something different. It seemed like it had always been there, but I had never looked from the right angle.
The wisps were floating around it, like moths drawn to a light. But I couldn’t make out what it was from this far down.
I crossed to the edge of the room and jogged up the stairs after the others. Aiden was already trying the master key in the headmistress’s office door.
“It isn’t working,” he said. He tried again, jiggling the key in the lock and pushing against the door.
“How can it not work?” Eva said, her voice squinched and high. “I thought it opened all the important doors on the grounds.”
“It does.” He tried a third time, but the key wouldn’t rotate in the lock. “This shouldn’t ever happen.”
That eerie voice sounded again from behind me. High, breathy, sweet as pie.
I slowly turned. “Did you hear that?”
Only Loki noticed I had said anything. The other two were so focused on the door. “Hear what?”
I stepped away from the others. When I reached the railing, I leaned out to peer up at what I’d seen the wisps circling when I stood in the center of the antechamber.
Was that—I squinted—a key?
There, suspended in midair, what looked like a large ebony key gleamed in the blue light off the wisps.
One of the wisps seemed to hear my thoughts, because it flitted over to my face with a soft, pretty whoosh. For a moment it appeared almost crystalline, as though it had hidden depths.
I jerked back, grasping the railing. When it didn’t speak, I leaned a few degrees closer. “Was it you who spoke?”
The wisp didn’t answer, but it also didn’t float away, either. It seemed frenetic with energy, hanging in the air before me. Like it was waiting for me to do or say the right thing.
And the phrase I’d heard that one time came immediately to mind. Shadowend. You return to the ancient place.
“You spoke to me once, didn’t you? You return—”
Before I’d finished those words, all the other wisps stopped their lazy motion. And together, that breathy, high voice issued through the air.
“It is your claim,” they whispered. “Take it and save him.”
Him. Save him.
Who was he? Noir?
A moment later, they all fell away from the black key until a path was cleared. It was so close that I only needed to reach out and take it.
I could save him. I could save Noir.
Loki was meowing at me. But his words had become muffled, unclear. I could only hear what the wisps had said: Take it. It is your claim.
A feeling came over me.
One of rightness. One of assuredness.
It is my claim. I can save him.
“Wait, Clem.” I sensed Loki pulling himself up my cloak onto my shoulder. “Be careful.” I heard his words as though through glass. He sounded so far away—impossibly far, as though he was on another continent and not on my shoulder.
Something had come over me. Something powerful and almost palpable, beyond my control.
This was right. This was meant for me.
I leaned forward almost without my consent, grasping the railing with my left hand and reaching out with my right. I observed myself stretching my hand all the way out, the palm open beneath the stone.
A cold smoke wafted off it. It was beautiful; it looked frigid as ice.
I watched my fingers close around it. As they did, the world I knew melted into darkness.
I couldn’t see. I couldn’t see a damn thing.
But I could feel the ebony key in my hand. Where before it had felt like a piece of ice, now the key seemed a normal temperature. Because everything else around me felt even colder.
The air was frigid.
“Aiden?” I whispered. “Eva?”
Loki shifted on my shoulder. “They’re not here, Clementine.”
My hammering heart leapt when I heard his voice. Thank god he was still with me.
Then his words sank in.
They’re not here.
“Loki, where are we?”
I couldn’t hear anything around us—not even wind. Beneath my feet, the ground felt hard as rock.
And there was no moon. Either it was gone, or obscured completely.
“Take us back, Clementine,” Loki said. His voice was like I’d never heard it before: hoarse, insistent—full of terror. “Take us back now.”
I grasped the key hard. “I don’t know how.”
“Use your magic. You used it to bring us here.”
“My magic? I…” I could barely speak; my breathing came too fast, the air freezing in my lungs. “I didn’t use it.”
“You did,” Loki insisted. “The Spitfire—”
He went silent, his claws digging into my shoulder.
“Loki?”
Somewhere in the darkness, a horse’s hooves clopped over the stone. I could swear I saw a single orange spark appear and disappear in the distance.
“Clementine”—Loki’s claws dug into my shoulders before he leapt off into the darkness—“run!”
“Loki!” I yelled, even as I backstepped across the hard ground.
He didn’t come back.
He didn’t even answer me.
But someone else did.
“Little Red,” came a woman’s voice. It pooled into my ears like drizzled honey. “You’re so far from the academy.”
A horse’s hooves. A woman’s voice.
I suspected I knew who spoke to me from the darkness.
I gripped the key hard—the one memento from my life, from my world. I held onto it for my own sanity. “Where am I, then?”
The hooves kept clopping, closer now, but I still couldn’t see anything. Somewhere ahead of me, a horse snorted. I could smell, though. I smelled earth and an indescribable decay, the combined scent swirling headily up my nostrils. She was close.
“Welcome to the gates of Hell,” came that drizzling voice.
One hoof stomped in the darkness, and a spark flared, lighting a horse’s underside for a split second. And in that second, I saw more than a horse. I’d caught one glimpse of the woman atop her horse. She rose more than eight feet above the ground—just careeningly high.
She was the woman from Umbra’s drawings. From the antechamber’s carvings.
The Shade.
And there stood my cat at her horse’s feet, back arched high, all the fur along his spine and tail risen almost vertical. Loki. He growled, low and insistent. “Stand down, Shade.”
“Just I, or must we all stand down?” she whispered.
It was only then I heard their breathing, their movement—and their laughter. It rumbled slow and pervasive through the air until it reached me and raised goosebumps on my arms.
There were many.
“This is she,” said the Shade. “She has come to us in the witching hour. Bring her to me.”
“Run,” Loki said again with a snarl, clawing through the air as two of the shadows fell to all fours and bounded toward me with impossible speed. “Go, Clementine!”
I wasn’t a runner. Loki knew as much.
And if he knew as much, there was a reason he’d told me to run.
I pivoted away from him, fell into a run in the opposite direction. I ran into endless darkness, pitching forward as if in a dream. I didn’t know what lay before me, or beneath my clapping feet, or above me.
I only knew they were behind me. And catching up. They scrabbled across the ground with silent malice, their nails clicking. And farther back, Loki snarled so hard and ferociously it re-centered me.
He was fighting. He was giving me a chance.
In that moment, the moon broke through the heavy cloud cover. And all at once, pure darkness became blue semidarkness. Over my shoulder, I could see the creatures littering the ground around me, dozens of them. Two of them still scrabbled across the earth toward me.
Beyond them, the Shade with a voice like honey stood with a bow in hand, the curved edge gleaming silver under the moon. And beyond her, a stone archway some twenty feet high, leading into the endless depths of a high ridge in the earth.
The entrance to Hell.
I took three steps before Loki let out a pained cry. With a terrible sound and a scuffling, I turned to see him swinging like a pendulum by his tail. He was in the Shade’s grip.
In the next moment, she threw him into the darkness. I glimpsed him hit the ground, roll twice, three times, and come to a standstill.
I stopped hard, my insides clenching with horror.
Loki.
No.
Not my cat.
Nobody messed with my familiar.
The first two creatures were nearly on me. I knew now I wouldn’t have outrun them anyway.
Which left me with one option.
I dropped the ebony key into my pocket, freeing up my hands. My right palm still bore the imprint of my own fingernails from when I’d fought my boss in my old life. They were battle wounds—reminders.
Reminders of who I was.
I was Clementine.
But I was also the Spitfire.
Chapter Forty-One
My whole life, she’d been there. When I was desperate. When I was angry. When I was desperately angry.
When I was so upset I could spit. And often did.
And it always happened the same way.
When the Spitfire crawled from the pits of my veins, she would burn her way to the surface. But this time she wasn’t just crawling…she fucking clawed her way from my center.
In the past, I’d resisted her. She’d come out despite my best intentions.
Well, screw best intentions. Right now, I intended to burn every one of them to the ground.
That was how it started: a ball of fire in my stomach, roiling and full of fury.
The burning carried into my chest, injected itself into the valves of my heart and circulated from there into the rest of me. And oh, did it burn, that dark and wonderful pleasure.
My right hand came up, the fingers unfolding like petals. It happened so naturally, almost without the impulse from my brain. My palm just rose, and in its fingernail-scarred center flowered a tiny cauldron of flame.
Magic.
My magic.
Headmistress Umbra had told me that I would not be able to use magic unless I believed I could.
But maybe, I thought as my eyes flicked to the creatures who would be on me in the next breath, I just needed to want it badly enough.
I needed it more than I ever had before.
I swiped my hand in front of my body. The motion came so familiarly I didn’t think twice of
it. I already knew what would happen.
The flame arced away from my hand, a sharp wave cutting through the air toward the shadows. When it hit them, the parts of their bodies that were above the fire were separated from the parts below.
The two parts slid apart, butter at either side of a knife.
I lowered my hand, leveling my eyes on the Shade, still shrouded in darkness. She hadn’t moved—but none of the other shadows had, either.
“Well done, Little Red.” Her voice poured across the clearing like morphine. Despite my fury, I wanted to sink into it. Such was her strange and awful power.
But my fury was even more powerful.
“You threw my cat by the tail,” I called out to her. “You know that means I have to dismantle your head from your body, right?”
The Shade laughed, a deep and crackling sound. “Your anger is delicious. Nourish that.”
Off in the distance, beyond the creatures of darkness, a small, insistent flame had sprung to life. It danced and swirled around a tiny form.
Loki?
But my attention was redirected by the sound of a fire flickering to life.
The Shade had pulled an arrow from the quiver on her back, its tip aflame. She pointed it directly at me. “Bury her.”
A dozen shadows poured from the entry to Hell and past her. They came for me with such speed they made the first two seem drunk. In the second I had to react, I knew I only had one option.
End it. Fight like a hellcat.
But I hardly had time to swing my arm once, the flames arcing away from me, before they were on me.
Two were caught in my flames—one at the neck, and the other just below the clavicle.
But the rest?
The rest fell on me like a thousand pounds of ice.
I hit the ground hard, and they came with me. Cold enveloped me, sapping my fire away. Packing down atop my chest, forcing the air out of me.
They didn’t mean to rip me apart. They wanted to suffocate the fire. To completely bury me.
In a moment, I was consumed. Covered. Unable to breathe. I couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t even take in air to smell.
But I could hear. I could still hear.
Somewhere in the distance, a cat called out to me.