Page 159 of The Mirror of Beasts

“Please stop!” I looked back toward the collapsed floor, begging for mercy I knew would never come.

I gripped Emrys’s face with shaking hands, turning it toward mine. His eyes were wide with pain and terror. “No, no, no … you’re going to be all right, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

Not again, not again, not again—

I turned back toward the hall again, screaming, “Help! Someone!”

Emrys’s hand squeezed my arm, returning my attention to him.

“You’re—you’re going to be all right,” I said, knowing I was babbling. I smoothed a hand over his face, cleaning the blood away as quickly as it appeared on his lips. I kissed him then, desperately. “You’re going to be all right—”

“Your … tell …,” he said faintly. “You look … down … to left …”

“Don’t,” I pleaded, feeling myself start to splinter again. “Don’t.”

His labored breathing slowed. I almost didn’t hear him as he said, “I’d … stay.”

I’d stay with you.

And then the last breath left, and there was no heart left to beat.

“Emrys?” I whispered.

His eyes were still open. Still on me. But there was nothing behind them. There was nothing at all.

My scream choked off into a strangled sob. My hands hovered over him, not wanting to touch him, not wanting to feel his skin turn cold, but needing to.

This isn’t real.

It couldn’t be.

I curled down over him, pressing my head to his still chest. The scar on my heart tore open and pain flooded through me until all I could do was hold him while I broke apart.

“No!”

Neve was standing a short distance away from us in the atrium, her white gown streaked with blood. If the flowers hadn’t already fallen from her crown, they would have been burned away by the fury of her expression. The pain as her gaze met mine.

Blue-white light gathered on her skin, and as she screamed, it exploded out of her. The magic flooded the halls with its burning power, driving back the smoke, the darkness. The last of the hunters shrieked as they were incinerated.

But not even the purest light could save what had already been lost.

The Council of Sistren’s Inner Sanctum was a meeting chamber in the western wing of the building. Tiered rows of tables encircled a round table at its very center, where the most senior Council members sat to conduct business while the other sorceresses looked on. It was a place of discussion, of arguments, of pleas, both secret and sacred. A part of me wondered, distantly, if they might change the name now that it had become a mortuary.

The dim light made the room seem far smaller than it was. The shadows had closed in overhead, and the candlelight was too weak to hold them back. Now that night had fallen, the domed glass ceiling would let in no light until the moon passed over it.

The sorceresses had laid the dead out on the tables to prepare their bodies for burning. Twenty sorceresses and mages in all, nearly a third of their numbers. And then … there were the other two.

I sat on the stairs that separated the two tables, staring down the aisle at nothing. A bucket of sweet herb water and a rag waited on the step below, but I couldn’t bring myself to take them. One of the sorceresses had tried to tend to the bodies, but I’d lost it at the mere thought of anyone else touching them but me.

I drew in a sharp breath, wondering why it hurt so much to even think their names.

A nearby sorceress began to sing a soft prayer as she drew a shroud over another—a sister, maybe, or her mother. Others waited nearby to take the body to the funeral pyre. The lovers were the worst to watch, their faces glistening in the candlelight as they wept.

But they, at least, could face the ones they’d lost.

It was almost unbearable to stay here, in the terrible silence. The death in the room felt like a dull buzzing against my senses, and made my skin crawl. It was a sharper, more pronounced feeling than the one I’d had in the cemetery only hours ago, but as the hours passed, it had dulled again. It was almost too frightening to think about what it meant.

Nash’s unfinished words drifted through my mind again. Your … power … is …

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