I’M MOVING FAST. I’m surrounded by fire and ash and shadow. There is no sun, only darkness. I’m lost. Moans and cries fill the air around me. I taste blood in my mouth. I’m searching for something, but I can’t find it. The darkness shifts. Mist swirls around me and then parts long enough to reveal mountains of the rotting bodies of humans, witches, and animals. I’m standing in a red river. Bodies float past me, children. I try to move, but something grabs hold of me from below the surface. And then a figure emerges through the river.
At first I think it’s a man. Then I see that his flesh is made of moving shadow and green fire. He is no man. I cannot run.
He has found me.
I woke up in a cold sweat. I opened my eyes to a pulsing headache the likes of which I’d never felt before. I felt a flash of blinding pain. The ground wavered for a moment, and before I registered what was happening, I rolled over and vomited.
“Elena?”
Celeste had been sleeping next to me and had an unfortunate close-range view of my stomach contents.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
I hadn’t woken the others with my retching, and I wanted to keep it that way. Will looked my way, but to my relief he remained seated against the trunk of a colossal birch.
“I just felt a little sick. It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”
What the hell had just happened?
I covered my mess with some earth and dried leaves and moved my bedroll to Celeste’s other side.
Remnants of the dream were still fresh in my mind as though I had truly lived it, as though I had truly been there.
I winced because my wound throbbed, and I cussed it away. I was cold, hot, and then cold again. I knew I was running a fever. But I’d never been sick a day in my life. What was happening to me?
Glimpses of my dream flashed in my mind’s eye: the red river, the dead, the thing that came out of the water. A wave of nausea hit me again and I struggled not to be ill again. I rubbed my eyes. Was I going mad? Normal people didn’t puke their guts out after waking from a dream. Only it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt real.
Had I seen a vision of the future? I couldn’t have had a vision. Only the witches from the Augur clans were gifted with the Sight. As I struggled to come to grips with what was happening to me, I could feel Celeste watching me.
Her big, round eyes gleamed in the light of the small fire.
“I can make some ginger tea,” she whispered. “It’ll help settle your stomach.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I breathed and forced a smile. “I feel much better now. I guess my stomach’s tired of eating strips of dried turkey.”
I hated lying to her. Celeste had always been open and honest with me. I was glad it was hidden in the darkness. On a whim, I had taken Celeste away from everything she’d known and brought her to a foreign land where everyone hated witches. Not only was the land slowly being infected by the black blight, it was mortally dangerous to be close to me because I was being hunted. The high priests wouldn’t give up. Celeste could die, and I wondered if I’d made the right choice by compelling her to come with me.
“Get some rest,” I said.
I lay back down and pretended everything was fine—that I was fine—when I looked and felt like I’d feasted on rotten meat.
I knew Celeste wasn’t fooled. She lay back down, but I could see her eyes were open, and the tiny twitch of her jaw showed that her mind was racing.
I didn’t sleep a wink for the rest of the night, but I took comfort in Celeste’s soft and steady breathing. At least one of us would be rested.
The following morning was worse. I didn’t puke my guts out, but the constant pounding behind my eyes made it hard to concentrate. White spots kept exploding behind my eyes, and no matter how often I rubbed them, they didn’t go away, nor did the pain lessen.
Nonetheless, I wore my pain on the inside. I didn’t want the others to see. I feared they’d make me turn around and go straight to Gray Havens so the witches could examine my head.
I couldn’t be sick. I was a steel maiden. So what the hell was wrong with me?
That afternoon, on the seventh day, after a few hours of riding without a break, I lost track of time. The rhythm of the hooves had distracted my restless mind. But despite the stuffy hot air, the longer we rode, the more I felt a growing coldness.
The last time I had seen Jon, his face had been covered in thick, black veins, and his skin had been crusted and scabbed like he was suffering from leprosy. But his eyes had disturbed me the most. They were cold and black and foreign. It was like looking into the eyes of someone else, someone I’d never met before. There had been no love there. They were not Jon’s eyes.
I tried hard to focus on his face before he’d been infected, his warm lips, his strong, hard body pressed up against mine. I tried to recall the musky smell that drove me mad and made me want to rip off his clothes.
We’d been apart for nearly three months. Anything could have happened during that time. I straightened up and pulled my shoulders back. My anger made me feel a little better; it stole my grief and absorbed my guilt. But I knew anger would cloud my judgment and lead to mistakes. I couldn’t afford any.
I stuffed the memories into the empty place inside my heart. I would have to live with my grief. This was my last shot. I had to stay focused.
There was a sudden shift in the air, as though we’d crossed some invisible barrier from summer into fall. The air lifted and cooled, but not with the familiar coldness of winter. The chill was something else. It felt unnatural. Shadows loomed over us, and the sun hid behind a swarm of dark and angry clouds. There should have been about six hours of daylight left, and yet it was neither day nor night.
And then a smell like the decomposition of something that had been wholly unsavory even in life caught my attention.
Something was very wrong.
I whirled around in my saddle, but there was nothing on the road in front or behind us—nothing I could see. And yet the familiar feeling that I was being watched hit me like a splash of cold water.
“What is it?” Will called from behind me.
I turned and saw that his hand had moved to the hilt of his sword. The men followed his lead and did the same.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
My eyes darted to Celeste’s face pale.
“But something feels off. Whatever it is, it’s not friendly.”
I knew something was coming, I just didn’t know what. I looked at the wall of trees that surrounded us on either side. At first glance they looked impenetrable, but I knew that anyone or anything could easily ambush us from their depths.
I knew the necromancer priests wouldn’t leave this road unprotected. They would have expected me to come this way. I knew that sooner or later their evil would present itself.
“Be alert,” I called. I scanned the forest again but saw nothing.
“It won’t be just regular temple guards after us. Watch for sudden movements from the forest and the road. And trust your instincts. Whatever comes at us, if it feels foul, kill it. Don’t think. Thinking will get you killed.”
We had to be prepared for anything. For all I knew the priests could have sent an army of infected kids to rattle us and make us easier to kill. The bastards were that evil.
“Nugar, watch the back,” ordered Will.
He kept riding on ahead and then circling back. Nugar tugged his horse around and positioned himself at the back. His battle-axe winked in the dim light, unsheathed and ready to throw.
Lucas eyed the forest. Everything was unnaturally still. Will’s eyes darted nervously to me. The men were restless. My soldiers of light waited, anxious to kill whatever was out there before it had a chance to kill us.
“Is it the necromancers?” Celeste pulled her mare next to Torak and gripped the dagger that Will had given her. “Have they discovered us?”
Just as I was about to answer, a chill licked up my spine, and the wound at the back of my neck itched and stabbed. I knew the feeling all too well. When we’d first set out to Witchdom and neared Erast, the late Prince Landon Battenberg’s home, I hadn’t seen the evil that lurked there, but I had known it was there because I had felt it. It had also warned me of the high priests’ black magic inside the golden temple. When the wound on the back of my neck throbbed, I knew evil was near.
There was black magic here…or something else…something worse.
The darkness increased until we could barely see each other. Darkness was coming from the west.
It rolled towards us like a great black wave. The trees moaned and cracked. At first I thought it was the black blight, but the trees didn’t just sicken. They withered, dried up, and broke apart as though they’d been burned from the inside by invisible fire.
The darkening clouds hid the horizon. My heart slammed in my chest.
The clouds spread over the road. There was no going around them.
The darkness was coming straight for us.