Chapter XXXI
XXXI
The witch’s overall abilities are limited by their physical body, and each practitioner has a finite reservoir of ability. Overextending oneself, over the course of days or even months or years, can lead to exhaustion and, in extreme cases, death.
Vic shot forward.
She gasped for air and clutched her throat. She felt as if a strange substance filled it, though she caught gulps of crisp, clean air.
She noticed the darkness first. She raised a hand in front of her face and squinted at the shape of it moving through the air.
The snow she noticed second. A dusting of fresh flakes lay across her body, delicate as powdered sugar. She shook the snow from her arms and felt the ice bite into her then, felt the sharpness of the raised hair across her skin.
It took Vic a moment to recall why she lay on the forest floor.
When she did, her hands shot to her abdomen, remembering broken skin and horrible, unsurvivable pain.
Frozen fingers probed the exposed skin at her belly through gashes in the fabric of her clothing.
But the skin underneath was smooth and unbroken.
Everything was on the inside where it belonged, and she gasped with relief.
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw that something had cleared the trees around her.
They lay scattered like broken matchsticks, spiraling out from Vic’s prone form like they’d been blown back from her.
Perhaps Xan had come after all. He would be strong enough to fell the trees.
But whoever had come had left Vic there, and Xan wouldn’t have walked away.
Vic pulled herself to a seat with a grunt, though her muscles burned with the effort. Her joints ached as if they’d been still too long. She had no idea how much time had passed while she slept.
She listened for signs of the creature as she squinted into the shadows.
Though the forest lay as quiet as it had when the creature first appeared, Vic felt a new life behind the silence. She couldn’t measure it with any of the senses she knew well enough to name. But she felt the forest breathing against her ear.
She didn’t have to think to understand why that was. The knowledge of her change sat bone-deep, certain as a hum under her skin. Every cell in her body was just a little bit different.
Vic spotted a crumpled mass on the ground and approached it warily. A smattering of snow sat atop what appeared to be a stone, oddly shaped and alone.
She reared back when she realized what it was.
The creature’s body lay curled on the frozen ground.
On its back with its legs pulled toward its body, its skin blackened and shriveled.
Burned beyond recognition and frozen in perpetual agony.
Its muscles seized from the fire and stuck that way.
The bleached bone of its face melded into the snow underneath.
When Vic stepped closer, her motion disrupted the fragile form, and one of its legs crumbled into ash.
Vic couldn’t think of anything capable of doing that.
She walked away, stumbling blind through the forest until she saw the road. Vic did not know how long she had wandered, and she did not question how easy it was to find her path out of the forest now that she was not looking for it. Ice crunched underfoot as she stepped onto the asphalt.
The car sat exactly where she’d left it, still running on the side of the road. The headlights cut through the night and reflected off the ice like moonlight on water. The driver’s-side door hung wide and welcoming. Vic crossed to it and climbed inside.
The car was almost out of gas.
Vic wrapped her hands around the steering wheel.
Dried blood stained her fingers and filled the cracks in her skin.
She’d been leached of her color by the cold and the fear, and her hands, so pale they were almost purple, didn’t look like her own.
Vic threw the car into reverse. The tires spun on the ice, then the car jammed backward as if shoved by an invisible hand.
Vic ignored the odd tug behind her breastbone and pulled onto the road.
She couldn’t see through the ice coating the windshield, but she didn’t need to.
The road carved forward into the night, and Vic followed it.
It felt as if only seconds had passed before Vic spotted the entrance.
She could see it now, changed as she was, a gap in the woods.
Vic banked right without slowing down and buffeted onto the tiny lane.
Moments later a familiar form loomed from the darkness.
Avalon Castle, the great sleeping dragon. Waiting for her.
The castle lay dormant tonight, with its windows dark against the black sky. Vic left her things behind when she got out of the car. She trudged up the staircase and shoved the massive doors. They gave way under her palms and pulled themselves open to admit her.
A burst of warm air hit her frozen skin, and Vic prickled with discomfort. She took the same route she’d taken every morning, her footfalls hammering through the empty halls.
Her thoughts swam past her in a muddle of confusion. She couldn’t pick one out, couldn’t decipher any of them. She felt tired and worn out, exhausted and unable to think.
Vic did not stop to admire the paintings on the walls. She did not notice how they changed in the moonlight, or how she would parse more details if she looked upon them now.
When she reached the door to her and Henry’s apartment, she walked past it without slowing, for she no longer had a key. She passed the stairs she would have taken to Sarah’s rooms. She passed the library and the courtyard and wound down the staircase to the training wing.
She didn’t think about where she was going or why, other than to follow the vague sense of safety she thought she’d find in the small office off the Sentinels’ lounge.
In the load-out room, the weapons racks had been cleared. She did not stop to consider why.
A man’s voice spoke behind her.
“You.” There was anger in that voice, and confusion.
Vic stopped but did not turn. She knew that voice.
“How did you get back into the castle?” Nathaniel demanded. “You were supposed to be gone. You were supposed to be dead.”
So he’d known about the Orcan in the woods.
Vic had been right; Nathaniel was working with Aren.
She should have felt vindicated, but she only felt tired.
Vic closed her eyes. She would sort this out in the morning.
She’d climb onto the couch in Xan’s office and sleep, and tomorrow she could handle Nathaniel.
A strange odor hit her lungs. Organic and acrid, it burned the hair inside her nostrils as she inhaled. Something like rotten eggs and smoke, sulfur and gunpowder.
She looked at her feet.
Black and yellow sand dappled the floor, spread haphazardly like baking flour. Vic’s gaze snagged on the image as the wheels of her fogging mind fought to make sense of it.
“What are you doing?” Vic’s voice sounded distant, gone from her. She needed rest.
Nathaniel moved behind her. More powder hit the floor.
“You had to come back, didn’t you? God, this is all your fucking fault. If you hadn’t come into this castle, none of this would have happened.”
His voice drew closer and a hard hand clamped around Vic’s upper arm. She didn’t fight as Nathaniel dragged her forward. She was too tired to fight.
“You know what? This is better, actually. A poetic end to the whole thing. Everything will be wrapped up nicely when they get back.”
Vic stumbled, but the hand around her arm held her upright. In some thick part of her brain, Vic realized that she did not want to go with him. Whatever Nathaniel planned to do next, she did not want to be a part of it.
She scanned the wall as he pulled her from the equipment room, but she couldn’t get her eyes to focus.
Her left hand closed around a dagger hanging on a hook by the door.
It was short, only the length of her hand, but she clutched the handle as Nathaniel pulled her out of the room.
She knew how to hold it, how to use it, but Vic had never stabbed a person before.
“None of this would have happened if you had stayed away,” he was saying.
The odd terseness in his voice waned as he grew more agitated.
“If you had done what you were told and left this castle, I wouldn’t be here.
None of us would be here, if you had listened.
But no. You had to push. Push and push and push. ”
They were halfway down the training hallway. He must have come here already, because a line of powder trailed in front of them like a venomous snake.
“And Shepherd let you do it. He let you trample our traditions and our rules. And this is where we end up. If it weren’t for you showing up here, poisoning our Elders against our ways, I would never have had to go to him.
I would never have agreed to this. But you gave me no choice.
Do you have any idea how humiliating that was?
After everything he’s done, to go groveling?
But of course you don’t. Your kind never thinks about the bigger picture.
You never think of anyone but yourself.”
Nathaniel shook Vic as he spoke, and she realized he wasn’t talking about her, not really.
He’d projected a personality onto her, complete with villainous intent, and now Vic would have to suffer for it.
With a wave of his hand, the door to the Arena swung inward, and he pushed Vic inside.
It was a mark of how addled she felt that the drop didn’t even cross her mind.