Page 6 of The Mirror of Beasts

“But we don’t even have a way of stopping Lord Death. Rushing out to find him is only going to get us killed,” I said. “What if the vessel can give us that information? Shouldn’t we be prioritizing that?”

Neve whirled toward me, betrayal flashing in her eyes. “So you don’t care if they die either?”

“I didn’t say that,” I told her.

“You all but did,” Neve pointed out.

I bit the inside of my mouth, anxiety churning my stomach. We couldn’t fight—we had to stay together. In the face of Avalon’s death, we’d chosen one another. And if we were to break apart …

I shook my head against the thought, my heart crimping painfully in my chest. I will have no one left.

“You know my main concern is Cabell,” I said. “All I want is to get him away from Lord Death before whatever hold that monster has on him deepens. You’re the one who suggested it—that the real Cabell is still in there, trapped inside the servant Lord Death created.”

Death magic, born of Annwn, the Otherworld of the monstrous dead, had corrupted Avalon, poisoning its land with shadows, rendering it unrecognizable as the paradise of legend. If it could happen to a place of such power and purity, there was no way Cabell’s mind would have been strong enough to resist whatever enchantment Lord Death had cast over him.

Neve blew out a hard breath, but I knew she understood that much. Whatever she might have said was interrupted by a faint meow, as Griflet, the scraggly kitten who’d journeyed with us from Avalon, edged out from where he’d been hiding beneath the couch.

“Oh, there you are,” Olwen said softly, stooping to retrieve him. The gray tabby purred as she held him to her chest, finally content. But the priestess’s own gaze was anything but. She sent a helpless look my way as Caitriona and Neve turned their backs on one another, both silently fuming.

“Listen, you’re both right,” I said, trying again. “We owe the Council of Sistren a warning, but I don’t think we should hold out hope they’ll do anything other than retreat into their vaults and try to wait him out.”

What I didn’t say was that while Neve might have been a sorceress herself, I had far more experience dealing with them as a Hollower. And when the sorceresses weren’t fighting among themselves over relics and centuries-old grudges, they were nurturing their deeply held instinct for self-preservation.

“Sorceresses aren’t cowards,” Neve said, her voice streaked with anger. “They’ll fight.”

“But this is our fight,” Caitriona countered. “Lord Death deserves to be punished for what he did to Avalon, for killing—” She stopped herself, steadying her breathing before whispering, “For destroying everything, and everyone.”

I tamped down my memory before it could punish me with images of vacant eyes, bodies, blood snaking between the tower’s stones.

“Careful, Caitriona,” Neve said. “You’re sounding an awful lot like a sorceress with all that talk of revenge.”

Caitriona let out a cold laugh. Her earlier words, as we’d stood together illuminated by the funeral pyre of everyone she had loved, echoed back, terrible and hollow. I am the priestess of nothing. That is all I shall ever be.

“Avalon is gone,” Caitriona said, “and so are my obligations to it and its Goddess. If I do not call upon her magic, I am not beholden to her laws.”

A surge of helplessness rose in me as I exchanged another look with Olwen, too afraid to say anything in case it made the situation worse. Her lips parted, the blood draining from her face.

“What?” Neve gasped out. “You—you won’t even use your magic? After everything, you’d turn your back on her?”

“She abandoned us first,” Caitriona said. “Will you be next?”

“Stop it!”

Olwen inserted herself between them, whorls of ink-blue hair rising around her shoulders, as if caught in drifting water. Her face was so stricken, my whole chest ached with the sight of it.

“Stop it,” she repeated, softer this time. “We cannot do this—we cannot fight one another and fight the darkness, too. It’s all toward the same end, isn’t it? No one, not the sorceresses, not us, will be safe while he walks in this world.”

She gestured toward the small basket at the foot of the couch, the blanket hiding Viviane’s shattered vessel.

“All of the memories this vessel contained will be lost to us if we cannot find a way to remake it,” Olwen continued.

My hands curled into fists at my sides.

“We stay with our original plan,” Olwen told us, her chest heaving with the force of her breath, her body vibrating with exhaustion and desperation. “The one we all agreed upon not more than an hour ago. We will find the sorceresses and tell them what’s happened, and then we will seek out the person Tamsin believes can repair the vessel. Yes?”

“Yes,” I said quickly. A painful knot constricting my chest released as the tension in the apartment eased. After a moment, Neve nodded. Caitriona crossed her arms over her chest and looked down, her jaw sawing back and forth.

Thunder split the sky above us like a hammer’s fall, devouring every other sound as it shook the walls. And then, like the deep bellow of some primordial beast, came the unearthly blare we’d heard before.

---