Page 13 of The Mirror of Beasts

Acacia stamped her foot, letting out a little noise of annoyance. She retrieved her wand from what must have been an enchanted pocket of her cloak and used the knife end to scratch out a sigil on the nearby wall.

The stone bars snapped back down into grooves in the ground, the thunderous impact rattling my already hurting body. The manacles fell away from our wrists, dissolving to dust as they hit the earth.

Neve sprang to her feet with a relieved sigh. Caitriona ran on unsteady legs into the pathway, but the sorceresses were already gone. She muttered something darkly beneath her breath that was likely better left unheard.

I wasn’t sure I could have moved even if I’d wanted to. Olwen rushed over to me, kneeling at my side, worry etched into her grime-streaked face.

“Are you all right?” she asked, beginning her examination. I gasped as she prodded a sharp ache on the right side of my ribs.

“Well, I was,” I squeezed out.

“Just bruised,” she noted. “I don’t have any healing salve with me. Can you tolerate it a bit longer?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“What happened?” Emrys asked.

That persuasive smile was gone now, the aura of swagger extinguished with two soft words. If it had been anyone else, I would have called his expression concern.

He was looking now. He studied each of us in quick succession, with the fleetingness of light glancing off glass. In the end, Emrys Dye really was a coward; he couldn’t even summon the nerve to lift his eyes to our faces. And damn him, because those eyes … they had the audacity to still be so beautiful. One gray as a storm cloud, one green as the earth—trickster’s jewels, meant to tempt the unsuspecting thief.

Caitriona edged closer, until she’d partially blocked me from view.

“Not even a hello?” he said lightly.

My top lip curled as the bitterness churning in me fermented to a deeper hate.

The silence from the others bolstered me from all sides. I rose slowly, with Caitriona’s and Olwen’s help.

A flicker of something crossed his expression, breaking through the pleasant veneer he wore. I knew better than to believe it was anything like regret.

I’d known him for too long not to see through this act. I knew what he wanted now. Information.

Time had moved differently between our world and the Otherland … until, of course, we’d shifted them back into alignment with the ritual. For us, it had only been a little over a day since he slipped away with the Ring of Dispel, taking it back to Madrigal for all the gold and freedom she’d promised. For him, it would have been days, maybe more than a week.

But he deserved nothing. Not the truth of what had happened. Not kindness.

Not us.

The professional in me had understood, even if I hadn’t wanted to, why he’d done it. Maybe, with the distance of decades, or lifetimes, I would have found a sliver of acceptance. Let the wound scar over. But the wound he’d left was still bloody and gaping, and I’d be dead and damned before I let him drive another blade in.

In the end, Olwen broke first. She charged forward, forcing him back a step as she jabbed her finger at his heart like a dagger.

“You!” The word dripped with shocking vehemence. “I liked you and—and trusted you! We all did, every one of my sisters and friends! How dare you? How dare you take the ring and leave us—!”

Her voice choked with emotion. “Goddess forgive me, but a part of me wishes you had died, because at least I could go on believing that you were good, and kind. That you were our friend. But now you are nothing but a stranger and a thief.”

Olwen, I thought, an ache opening deep in my chest.

Emrys’s face turned wan. He held his hands out, the palms turned up as if in supplication. “Please, just listen—”

“And allow you to lie to all of us again?” Caitriona said coldly. She held a hand back toward me, not to reach for mine, but to bring me closer to her.

“How did …,” Emrys began, each word he chose more uncertain than the last. “How did it happen? Did anyone else make it?”

“We are the only ones who survived,” Caitriona said.

I looked down as Emrys recoiled, absorbing her words like a blow to the gut. “Even Cabell?”

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