Page 174 of The Mirror of Beasts

Olwen held me firmly, even as I tried to jump to my feet.

“Let me go,” I gasped out.

“Wait,” Olwen said, repeating the word until it became a prayer. A litany. “Wait, wait …”

I could no longer see Caitriona’s face through the churning mist. She was nothing more than a dark outline until a wind came to bellow through the clearing.

She stood exactly where she had before, staring down at the remaining fragment of Excalibur’s blade.

“I’ve never known you to hesitate,” Lord Death said, sheathing his own sword.

A new, painful chill took hold of me as her words in the library’s attic circled back to me, just as cruel and terrible the second time.

He’s a monster, Tamsin, and you know what must be done. There is only one way to stop a monster.

“Cait …,” I started to say, but her name was drowned out by Lord Death’s baritone.

“You were always too strong, too fierce, to be a mere priestess,” he continued, drawing a step closer to her, then another. “What binds you to the isle now? I know what your heart desires. You’ve already discarded the beliefs that once held you back. Allow me now to break the shackles that remain. Kill the hound. Prove your loyalty to me, and your sisters, all of Avalon, will be reborn in this world.”

Olwen’s hold on me tightened again, but her expression never changed. She didn’t call out reassurances, or even beg her sister to hear her, the way I would have expected her to.

“You … you would have me come to Annwn?” Caitriona rasped out.

“You would lead armies of the dead to punish the wicked—all the wicked of all the Otherlands,” Lord Death continued. “You would ride alongside me in the endless hunt, your power limitless.”

“Don’t do this,” I begged her. “This isn’t what you want. This isn’t who you are.”

If Caitriona heard me, she did nothing to acknowledge it. Instead, she looked up. My skin crawled as Lord Death laid a heavy, gloved hand on her shoulder, his expression a sickening play at seeming paternal.

She’s going to do it, my mind screamed. She’s going to kill him.

“It is who you are,” he said. “My crown allows me to weigh the worth of a soul, to judge it. What I sense in you now is the hate necessary to survive.”

Even at a distance, I saw the way her lips trembled as she pressed them together. The bleakness of her dark eyes. Her shoulders sloped down, as if the fight were draining from her.

“No,” I tried again. “None of that is true! You aren’t your pain. You aren’t your anger—”

But with one last look at Lord Death, she started toward me. Toward us.

“What are you doing?” I asked, leaning protectively over Cabell again. Panic trilled in me.

“Wait,” Olwen breathed out.

“Stand aside, Tamsin,” Caitriona said, emotionless. “It was always going to come to this.”

She’d said it herself before, in the library. There is only one way to stop a monster.

“Cait, please,” I babbled. “I know what he’s done. I know that he hurt you in so many ways and nothing will ever truly make it right. But it’s not too late for you. You don’t have to cross this line.”

“You forgive him?” Caitriona asked, advancing toward us, her silver hair swaying around her face with each step.

“No,” I said. “I don’t. But I love him, and I can’t kill that part of me—I’ve tried, Cait. I’ve tried.”

He was my brother. He had done horrifying things he couldn’t take back. But he was my brother, the same little boy who held my hand when we walked alone in the dark, both of us hungry and exhausted. And now he was coming back to us. He was climbing out of the darkness alone.

“He can make amends,” I swore.

Caitriona looked worse up close. Clumps of moss and stray leaves clung to her hair. The skin beneath her eyes looked bruised by sleepless nights.

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