Page 53 of The Mirror of Beasts

“I’ve never seen her like this before,” Emrys said. “She’s helped me do research in the past. She was charming.”

“Great,” I said. “Now she’s a charming revenant who wants to claw our faces off.”

He exchanged a worried look with me. When he nudged me behind him, I realized he still had a grip on me. I was too harried, too distracted by the hard throbbing of my death mark, to object as we took a long arcing path around the shelves, heading for the stairs.

The revenant stalked behind us, leaving a trail of grime and soot smeared in her wake.

“That’s a good Enora … stay back now,” Emrys said, holding the talisman out in front of us like a shield. She snarled and snapped like a wounded animal. Her hands hovered inches from my throat, stroking the air, as if imagining how it would feel to shred my soft skin instead.

“Noooooooo,” she wailed, almost sobbing as we made our way up the stairs backward, not daring to turn our backs on her.

Her body contorted into grotesque shapes as she climbed on hands and knees behind us, the ridges of her spine rising like thorns. Her jaw unhinged itself like a snake’s. “Noooooooo!”

Nash’s words shuddered through me, throbbing in time with the death mark.

Like spring, you are cursed to die young.

“—sin?” Emrys was talking to me. “Tamsin!”

I forced myself to respond. “What?”

“Can you get the door?” he asked. “She’s not going to get out, I promise.”

I was embarrassed by how hard my hand was shaking as I felt for the knob behind me. It took another beat to get a good enough grip on it with my sweat-slick palm.

I all but fell backward into the library’s marble atrium. The impact knocked some sense into me, and I scrambled back. The statues kept watch as Emrys struggled with the door, with hanging the talisman around the handle.

With a scream of rage and seething magic, the revenant blew it open, throwing Emrys back into the nearby statue of Athena with enough violent force to stop the heart in my chest. The talisman flew the opposite way down the hall, clattering as it hit the floor. My mind tracked the sound of it, screamed at me to retrieve it, even as I scrambled toward Emrys’s prone form.

There’s no blood, I thought, rocked with relief. I gripped the back of his jacket, shaking him. “Emrys!”

He groaned, but the sound was swallowed by the revenant’s mournful wail; she sobbed and screamed until I had to cover my ears. My stomach turned as her cries echoed against the cold white stone, as inescapable as her path toward us.

Toward me.

The stench of rot poured from her as her eyes fixed on my face once more, her grasping claws trembling as they stretched toward me.

“Tamsin!” Neve’s cry carried down the hall a moment before she appeared, her face etched with fear.

“Run!” I shouted back.

The revenant spun toward her, snapping her teeth at the sight of Neve summoning a spell. As her otherworldly song rose, a blue-white light gathered around the sorceress. The words from my dream echoed back to me, haunting and otherworldly. Protect her, protect her—

The revenant went utterly still, as if caught in some unseen web. When she spoke, there was none of the mindless rage. There was only terror. “No … no … not you—!”

Neve balked, taking a step back in alarm as ash and dirt dripped off the revenant, crumbling onto the pristine white marble floor. Beside me, Emrys forced himself to sit up, shaking his head as if to clear it.

Ash and dirt and debris fell away from her form as it crumpled, until only the ethereal outline of the ghost remained. “Not you, not you—forgive me!”

The spirit flew back toward the door to the basement, singeing the air with the scent of raw magic. The commotion had drawn Caitriona and Olwen, and the sight of them just beyond Neve’s shoulder finally spurred me to action. I released my grip on Emrys and ran for the talisman.

“What was that thing?” Neve gasped out as I slammed the door shut and hung the talisman around the handle.

As if sensing me there, the spirit surged forward again, rattling the door, straining it against its hinges. For a moment, I was terrified the talisman had cracked when it had fallen.

But it held. The sigil lit with a cerulean glow, forming a seal around the door, imprisoning her, but not her voice.

Emrys stood slowly, his gaze catching mine as the revenant’s screams turned to a lament of desperation.

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