The little girl swallowed, the chalk-white skin of her slender neck trembling. I was frozen in place. I felt as though I was a spectator in my own body, completely unsure about what I was going to do.
The girl’s eyes stayed fixated on my sword. Her lips trembled, but her voice was steady. “Are you going to kill me?”
Her words shook me from my trance. I followed her eyes to Valkyrie, then looked back to her. The horror of what I’d been about to do hit me like a freight train. I stumbled, reeling, nearly throwing my sword from my hands as I dropped it.
“Skylar, what’s the—” Asher stopped when he saw her. Mia and Colson, too, were staring as though she were some hideous beast, even though the reality was far, far worse. This wasn’t the shapeless, nameless, formless being I’d had in my mind. This was a child. This was pure innocence.
“Are you…” I had to clear my throat. I sounded ragged with shock. “Are you the Cursed One?”
The little girl’s face wrinkled in distaste, causing a few strands of her blond hair to fall across her face. “My name is Miranda.” Her face scrunched tighter, as though trying to remember something else from a long, long time ago. “But yes, I think they called me the Cursed One. I don’t think it’s a very nice name, so can you please call me Miranda?”
All of us must have continued gawking at her for a half minute while the sounds of crackling flames and shouts of those in pursuit grew closer.
At last, Colson stepped forward. Miranda craned her neck up and up and up, like she was standing beside the Empire State building. Her eyes grew so wide I was afraid she’d go into all-out panic right there. Not that I’d blame her.
“Yes, we’ll call you Miranda,” Colson rumbled. “We have to go now, Miranda. We need you to come with us.”
Come with us? What were we supposed to do with a kid? At the same time, I could see his reasoning. Maze-like mansion or not, we had maybe ten seconds before the Society was on us. And until we had a clue what we were actually going to do with the Cursed—with Miranda—there was no way we were going to leave her here.
I felt a tiny hand wrap around my fingers. Miranda was looking eagerly up at each of us. Her touch was so warm, so alive. It made me doubly horrified how easily this girl trusted the ones who only a minute earlier had seemed ready to kill her.
“There’s a back door,” Miranda said. “It leads to the most beautiful garden ever! I think it is, anyway. I have never been in it. But it is very pretty from my window—”
“There they are!” someone shouted.
“A garden sounds perfect,” I said. Miranda was briefly pulled off her feet as we took off running. I hadn’t gone five feet before a solidifying sensation crept over my limbs.
“We’ve got Greubal!” I shouted.
He loped toward us from the far end of the hall. I saw his furious eyes blazing from here.
“You won’t escape! Mistress will be happy! She’ll reward Greubal, she’ll praise him!”
“Keep going!” Asher ground to a halt and began moving his hands in a complicated pattern. Mia followed suit, orange lines coming out of their fingers like they were drawing in the air with magic marker. In seconds, a shimmering screen of nearly invisible magic barricaded the hallway, cutting us off from our pursuers. It’d buy us time, but I knew we were running out of options. We were using a lot of magic. Too much more and we wouldn’t be able to cast a simple stun spell, never mind something that would get us out of this alive.
Greubal reached the barrier and let out a screech of rage as he pounded his fists against it. “You can’t stop Greubal! I will feast on your bones! I will—”
“Hopefully stop referring to yourself in third person!” I shot back. We flew down the next hall, rushing through a small ballroom. Miranda was already panting. Her tiny legs worked frantically to keep up, but we didn’t dare slow down.
“Miranda, I need you to pick up the pace,” I panted. “We’re almost out of here.”
Miranda wordlessly nodded, too out of breath to reply. I could feel her small weight starting to drag on my arm. If she stopped, I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to—
Without a word, Colson leaned down and scooped Miranda in one of his arms as easily as a mother cat with her kittens. I almost laughed as Miranda’s eyes bulged and her tiny arms gripped tightly around his neck as though hanging on for dear life. Colson grunted, “Keep going.”
We picked up the pace. The hallways and ballrooms funneled us into another, smaller, set of back stairs. Unlike our original plan, it seemed the Society hadn’t thought about cutting off any secondary escape. I slid down the bannister without stopping, landing at a crouch and double-checking our surroundings. We must have put some distance between us and our pursuers, because everything was quiet. The distant sounds of chase sounded nothing more than the usual groanings of an old house.
“Clear,” I said.
The moment we burst through the door and back outside I felt a quake rumble the foundation of the house. The earth beneath my feet trembled. I knew all too well what that meant. “We don’t have much time.”
We’d emerged into a…well, I guess technically a garden. Although calling a collection of mossy swampland and the saddest, drooping willow trees I’d ever seen a ‘garden’ was a bit of a stretch. I couldn’t see where to go next. Placing our feet was treacherous. I took a wrong step and had to kick putrid bog gunk off my shoe.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” Miranda sighed.
“Ah…sure, kid, it’s amazing,” Asher said. “Any way to get through?”
Miranda scrambled until she was perched on Colson’s shoulder like a messenger hawk. She squinted as she scanned the marshy grounds. She pointed. “There! That path leads to the…the…”
Her face went pale. She seemed to curl back into herself.
“The outside?” Colson guessed.
Miranda wordlessly nodded.
Mia looked concerned at her reaction, but at the moment we couldn’t wonder how Miranda would deal with being exposed to the great wide world beyond this house for the first time in…well, ever. As long as she didn’t spontaneously combust when exposed to sunlight, or wasn’t allergic to absolutely everything, then we were good to go.
The path Miranda pointed to was the most stable. We’d soon stumbled through the worst of the marsh (sorry, “garden”) and faced a hundred yards of open ground that led to an enormous wall.
“You’re sure there’s a way out?” Mia said as we ran. “And we’re not going to hit, like, the giant rock wall that’s clearly in front of us?”
“There’s a way!” Miranda said. “I can find us a way!”
The house was nearly entirely on fire. Flames exploded from the side windows, as though trying to escape as much as the occupants. The entire mansion was like a lampshade with a candle inside, the flickering orange revealing frantic, harried shapes outlined against the walls.
More acolytes who’d managed to escape had spotted us. I felt the twinge of Kasia’s eyes on me as she directed her little minions to give chase. I expected to have to fight off her powers, but it seemed from this distance her strength had lessened. I wasn’t complaining. Some acolytes were already closing in, a few getting caught in the marsh, but plenty had made it through, their spells like shooting stars in the dark as they whizzed by us.
“Almost there!” Asher shouted. He batted away a stun spell. “Colson! See if you can find an opening—”
The earth started to move.
“Oh…so not good,” I said.
The others had all stopped. It was the absolute worst thing we could do, but it was almost mesmerizing to watch.
Cracks split down the floor of the cavern, shooting off in every direction, ripping enormous chasms in the earth. The marshy ground beneath the house depressed, then began to vanish altogether, swallowed up by the shifting ground as it was sucked beneath. The house was the last to go. The entirety of it bowed, like the frame of a ship that was caught between two enormous tidal waves. Glass shattered. I heard what might have been cries of horror from inside as half the house was swallowed by the sinkhole, vanishing quick as a blink. Miranda let out a horrified cry as we watched, until there was nothing left but an enormous gaping hole reaching its yawning mouth toward us.
Miranda sobbed again. I understood her distress; no matter what that house was to her—an actual home or her prison—it had been the only thing she’d known for who knew how long. To see it disappear like that—there one second and gone the next—must have been excruciating to watch.
The remaining acolytes, Kasia included, were still after us, staying just out of reach of the growing sinkhole. I turned to see how far it was until we hit the wall and nearly ran smack into Asher.
Apparently we’d arrived.
“Way out, way out, way out…” Mia said under her breath, hands probing the rock.
“There’s got to be something here!” Asher said. He frantically cast more light across the solid face but there was no opening. A killing spell split the stone beside us.
“Really?” Colson snarled, turning to face our pursuers. “Don’t we all have other problems to worry about?”
As if agreeing with him, the entire cavern lurched to one side. The ground bucked, making standing difficult. Too much longer and we’d be taking a free skydiving lesson toward the center of the earth.
I flung a spell back at the acolytes, then noticed Miranda still staring wide-eyed at where her house had been.
“Miranda!”
She turned to look at me. She seemed stunned. But now wasn’t the time to have a mental breakdown. “A little help?”
She lifted one tiny hand and pointed to our right, over Asher’s shoulder. “I see a tunnel.”
And hex it all if I didn’t suddenly see a tunnel entrance there, too. I don’t know how we could have missed it before.
We funneled into it without hesitation. This one was narrow and crudely bored. Sunlight pierced my eyes from up ahead and I scraped past a jagged rock that caught my sleeve. We were nearly out.
Feet pounded at our back.
And the Society was still closing in.
“Spectra!”
My stun spell caught the first in line as he came around the bend, launching him back into his friends. The press of bodies pursuing us shoved him forward again and I barely had time to run before I was nearly overwhelmed by counterattacks.
My hands stung with small cuts from the rock. My legs were bruised from bashing into the rock sidings, but at last light filled my entire vision and I stumbled out into glorious free air.
Right into the dragons.