Chapter 25
The dark is oppressive and deep, seeming to actually shove against me like it wants to fight me, but I can feel the moon somewhere in the distance. I can feel her song in me despite the darkness, despite the pressure.
I look up, and there she is, high above me and yet low in the sky. I know that she’s low. I always know exactly where the moon is—the werewolf promise—so I don’t know why it also seems like she’s so high as well.
Though this is only one of a number of things that don’t make sense right now. At least I can think again.
When I pull my gaze away from the moon, Briar has her arms up and she murmurs something.
Just like that, there’s light.
It pours into Briar’s hands from some unseen source, like she’s holding her palms beneath a faucet of white light that only she can see. She cups her hands and then she throws it up into the harsh, hanging darkness.
The light expands and then surrounds us, like a kind of cone.
It’s so bright that my eyes water. It’s so bright that it takes me a moment to see that it’s not just us in the cone.
I feel Winter press against me from the side. I can hear her pulse, too, rapid and wild. Scared. I don’t blame her.
On all sides, surrounding us, there is a sea of red-cloaked acolytes and priests in their darker robes. Savi is pressed in with us, but she looks less taken aback. Or maybe it’s just that she’s looking around already, taking stock.
“We’re in the crater,” she says flatly. “We’re at the very bottom of Crater Lake.”
The dried-out crater where a temple should be, but isn’t. The place no one thought Vin?a could be if she had a vessel to take her away.
“Very good,” Briar says, but it doesn’t sound like Briar at all.
As I look at her, no longer wearing that necklace, I can feel that dark, seething black energy pour out of her. I see the vision Winter shared, that cage that turned out to be ribs, and I know exactly what happened to Briar. Why she’s acted the way she has—particularly since the solstice.
It all makes a horrible kind of sense. She was right there all along. She must have used one spell to hide her power when she first moved into Winter’s cottage. Then swiped that necklace to make it easier.
Meanwhile, we felt sorry for her. We wanted to be friends with her.
Winter is staring at Briar, her eyes wide and not quite focused. “I know you,” she whispers.
“I warned you I’d be back, you crushable, contemptible human slime.” She laughs then, tossing back her head and letting out a scream that I think would level buildings, if there were any left up in these mountains.
Vin?a. Inside Briar’s body.
But not for long, I think, and want to throw up.
Savi mutters something, but all that does is bring Vin?a’s attention straight to her. “I detest sorcerers,” she snarls with Briar’s mouth. “Nothing but tawdry want-to-be gods for hire.”
“I have never met a god that wasn’t for hire,” Savi replies, and somehow, here, kidnapped by dark fae magic out of a cottage in Jacksonville and delivered to the bottom of a dried-out, desiccated Crater Lake, Savi is herself again.
Smooth and impenetrable. “Your tedious, bloody sacrifices? Your tithes and demands?”
“You can call it whatever you want,” Vin?a tells her, with the voices of the dead in her vowels. “As your bloody sacrifice will be next.”
She waves her hand and her priests surge forward. I can see them coming for me, but I’m still not prepared to be tackled and slammed down into the earth so hard it knocks the breath out of me.
They expect me to shift, so they wrestle my hands behind me and bind them with thick silver chains. They do this first. Then my ankles, too. I can feel the silver, heavy and dull. The priests are very pleased with themselves, but they’ve mixed up their lore. Silver only kills bitten werewolves.
It won’t kill me, but it does make me less effective.
It won’t prevent me from shifting, either, but what it will do is slow my shift down so much that they’ll likely see it and interrupt it.
I’m betting they have silver bullets. Those also won’t kill me simply because they’re silver—unless, of course, that bullet hits me straight through my heart. Or any other killshot.
They even manacle me in just the right way so if I do manage to shift, I won’t be able to get my limbs free.
To one side I can hear Savi murmuring curses, but the priests only laugh. I try to look around, but it’s clear they only slammed me into the ground.
“Gag her,” Vin?a orders her priests. “I’m tired of her spell casting.”
I don’t hear Winter. I want to sit up and look for her, but I don’t want to call more attention to myself. If I twist my body I can see the full moon above me, so I tilt my head, and I focus on her with all my might.
Then, very carefully, I shift. But only a little. Tiny, incremental amounts and focused only on my head.
It’s excruciating. The silver makes it worse.
I feel my bones slide and snap. I feel my face change. I shift just enough and then I stop, even though it’s agonizing. It’s like a thousand knives stuck . . . everywhere.
I pull in a deep breath and I hold it for a moment while the priests are busy subduing Savi.
Then I let out one long, loud, endless howl.
I hear it pierce through the dark, but more importantly, through that bubble of light Vin?a has arranged around us.
The noise of a wolf call like this shocks everyone, and I know this because no one moves. For one beat, then another. Fuck it, I think, and I howl even louder—
And then they’re on me. They kick and they strike and I pull the shift back, snapping my human features back where they belong. This hurts a lot more than whatever blows they think they’re landing.
The next thing I know, they’re taping up my mouth as well.
This also feels better than partially shifting, a thing we are always lectured to never, ever do, lest we get stuck that way.
It’s not until they prop me up in a heap with the others that I see Winter is perfectly fine, considering. She looks a little glinty of eye, which suggests to me that she didn’t like being manhandled and tied up any more than I did.
Of the three of us, she’s the only one who isn’t wearing a gag.
“Don’t feel left out, my little fortune teller,” Vin?a croons. She’s still in Briar’s body, but she doesn’t even move like Briar now. She’s sinuous, somehow. Long and slithery and terrifying. Where Briar stooped and hunched and hid, Vin?a expands.
It’s one of the more horrible things I’ve ever witnessed, and that’s saying something.
She comes over and pats Winter’s cheek. This is not less horrible.
“I wanted to eat you alive,” she confesses, lowering Briar’s face with its piercings to gaze straight at Winter.
This means she’s also too close to me, and the urge to bite her nearly makes me lightheaded.
“I wanted to feast on your entrails and wear your collarbone as a hat. This would be small-enough recompense for your defiance.”
She makes a clucking sort of sound, and then, for a moment, I am certain that I can see worms crawling beneath her skin. Burrowing this way and that, making tunnels in Briar’s cheek. Her chin. Her brow.
I feel my gorge rise and my throat tighten.
But Vin?a isn’t done. She gets closer and snaps her teeth a scant hair from Winter’s nose. “And I still might, when you have been bled out and harvested and offered up. I hope that gives you pleasant nightmares.”
“Nightmares used to be more unpleasant,” Winter tells her. Conversationally. Like she doesn’t have a death goddess in someone else’s corporeal body in her face. “I used to get those horrible headaches, but they’ve gone away. I thought that was because your power was gone.”
And then she smiles, in a manner I can only describe as shit-eating and provocative, directly into the goddess’s face. Briar’s face, but there’s no Briar behind it.
The slap Vin?a delivers, with a screech, sends Winter’s head spinning back and, if I had to guess, probably hurts her neck, too.
When the goddess storms away again, Winter runs her tongue over her teeth. She tries to crack her neck on both sides, winces, and then eyes Savi and me. “Worth it,” she says, her mouth full of blood.
The priests began to chant, which is never a good sign.
The three of us are slumped together haphazardly, a little heap.
I find my head is ringing, but I can’t tell if it’s the chanting, or the fact they took me down so hard, or the way that I howled like that without being fully shifted into wolf form.
I have to hope that it was loud enough. That I let it go on long enough.
That they heard me all the way down in the valley.
Even if they didn’t, I tell myself, it’s okay. Deep down, no matter what magic hides me from Ty, I know that he’ll come. I know it.
He can sense me the same way I can sense him. That has nothing to do with tracking. Not the kind Savi warded us against.
If it did, he wouldn’t have found us at her house.
After a while, the priests come back for us.
There’s more chanting and carrying-on, and this time they have small bowls filled with foul-smelling pastes that they rub on our foreheads.
Then, shoving the tape away, on our mouths.
With brusque and relentless hands, they rip my shirt and smooth the rest of the paste between my breasts, right over Ty’s paw print.
Like they’re rubbing the vile-smelling stuff over my heart.
There’s not anything even remotely sexual about it. I find that’s actually scarier.
I can taste the paste where they slathered it on my lips, and it makes me heave. I don’t want to think about what it is. I want to think even less about what they expect it to do.
I can hear similar sounds of revulsion on either side of me. I wouldn’t say I feel comforted, but at least I’m not alone.
Then they’re manhandling us again, picking us up and half carrying, half dragging us a little ways across the crater floor to a large flat-topped rock.
“It’s always a fucking rock,” Winter mutters.