Page 126 of Princess Avenged

I grab the box, climb the stairs and push against the trap door, and it opens easily as if it’s being pulled from above.

Hope again grabs my heart. “Mom?”

I climb out.

But she’s not there. And her bedroom is in shambles. The armoire, standing to my left, is the only thing in the room that’s where it was when I hid in the cellar. Her mattress is slashed, its guts strewn everywhere. The photographs and paintings are all on the floor, their frames twisted and the glass smashed. I shake the glass off a photo of mom and me making chocolate chip cookies when I was six and hug it to my chest.

Holes are punched into the plastered walls where the artwork and memorabilia once hung. There are holes too in the ceiling and the floor, and although I know the cellar is directly below her room, the holes in the floor open only to a small crawl space, less than three feet deep.

Somehow her magic hides the cellar, or is the cellar itself an illusion?

I decide to look under the trap door, but the armoire is back over the opening. Distracted by the destruction, I didn’t hear it move. But its new location gives me hope that my mother is still here, still working to protect me.

I search the rest of our small farmhouse, but it’s more of the same. Furniture slashed and broken, holes everywhere, books and clothes and dishes tossed to the floor. Even the kitchen cupboards and appliances have been yanked from the walls, their wires spilling out like veins onto the damaged floors.

Clutching the box against my chest, I search and search, but there’s no evidence of her. I should feel glad that I can’t spot any blood, but while I know little about magic, I know that the absence of blood doesn’t mean she survived, or didn’t suffer.

A wind arises, blowing torn curtains into the house and the front door slams shut.

I rush into the front room. It could be my mother and not the wind that made the door close.

A message is scratched into the back of the wooden door. My breath freezes in my lungs as I step closer to read it, every instinct inside me telling me this is not another message from my mom.

“Gullveig the Illuminant,” it reads, “wherever you are, we will find you. Evanora will pay for her crimes.”

I stagger back from the message. The words Gullveig the Illuminant mean nothing, and I’m a tiny bit relieved that whoever was here wasn’t looking for me. Evanora could refer to my mom, Nora Cross, but I’ve never heard her called that.

As I try to make sense of the message, it fades, disappearing before my eyes. I run my hands over the wood, but it’s smooth again, no hint of the words that were carved deeply into the surface.

Was the message just my imagination?

I turn around. The entire farmhouse is back to normal. No gutted furniture, no broken glass, no holes in the walls or ceiling or floorboards.

I rush from room to room and it’s all the same. Everything is back where it was.

Breaths coming too quickly, I grab a paper bag from the drawer where Mom keeps them, and then sit and breathe into it until my light-headedness fades.

Was this, all of this, just my imagination? Will my mother step into the farmhouse at any minute, coming back from Henderson’s General Store? Was this all a dream?

Is it still? I pinch my arm and feel it.

The box from the basement is sitting on the counter, above the drawer where I got the paper bag. The box is real. I’m not insane—or at least there’s evidence to argue both sides.

And if I’m not insane, then whoever was here was looking for someone or something called Gullveig the Illuminant, and more importantly they have taken my mom.

I drop the box on the table, take my head in my hands, and weep.

Chapter

Fifty-Two

AUCTIONED FOR HER BLOOD EXCERPT

Ember

Eleven years later

“Can’t our new benefactor come here?” I ask my boss, Shana. “That way he’d be able to see the operations first hand.”

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