Page 58 of Soulbound Shadows: Part 1

Stupid, stupid, stupid. I should have known my pendant wouldn’t work while we were inside the witch’s home. Her magic was soaked into every inch of the place.

Nanny Murk lurched toward us with surprising speed, strings of spittle flying from her jagged black teeth. The cleaver she clutched in her bony hand gleamed a sickly, acid-green in the dim light. Frozen in place, I stared her down. The room was too cluttered to dodge. Half of me was absolutely livid with the other half. Of all the times to go full-on deer-in--headlights, it had to be now?

Firm, cool hands grabbed me. The world lurched, and then my feet were off the floor. Gabriel pulled me into his arms, ran directly at Nanny Murk, then leaped over her head. She howled with rage as her cleaver sliced through the empty air and wheeled around to face us.

“Tricksy little rats,” she spat.

I scrambled down from Gabriel’s arms, and we ran, pelting down the hallway toward the front door. The witch bellowed, and the house heaved around us, tattered tapestries stripping away from the walls and reaching out for us. Things began to rise up from the heaps of junk to chase us, moth-eaten taxidermy running after us on desiccated paws while ancient newspapers flapped around us like birds.

My heart was in my throat. The strange warping of the hallway made sounds seem odd. First it sounded like Nanny Murk was far away, then like she was right behind us, then like she was far away again. I didn’t dare look back to see how close she actually was.

The scar on my arm was stinging. I’d been barely twenty, cocky and reckless when Nanny Murk had given it to me. I’d gone in unprepared, and she had found me, brought me to one of her experiments. If she caught me again…

I shook myself. No, no, that wouldn’t happen. Not again. I was stronger now, and I had backup. A massive spike whizzed past us and slammed into the wall, shuddering from the impact. I yelped, and the witch laughed, low and throaty.

“We have unfinished business, don’t we, little rat?” she snarled. The hallway stretched out impossibly long in front of us. One of the tapestries tore itself off the wall and flapped into our path. It showed a man with old-fashioned clothes, maybe 1850s, holding a cudgel. He began to peel away from the fabric behind him, reaching out for us with woven hands. I blasted a small dart of fire through his flat chest, and he began to burn with the pop and hiss of damp twigs. Gabriel threw him behind us, and there was the crackle of fire beginning to spread.

Finally, finally, we reached the end of the hallway, bursting out into the entryway. An armoire threw a door open into our path, but Gabriel shoved it out of the way with a snarl and the sound of splintering wood. We vaulted a pile of old bird cages and ran for the door. Gabriel reached it first, but as soon as he touched the doorknob, the entire door glowed a bright shade of green, and he flew backward, slamming into the far wall with a sickening crunch. His landing was softened by another tapestry, which was a mixed blessing. The three little children on it, all with identical gaunt faces and little blue pinafores, grabbed at him with cloth hands, keeping him pinned halfway up the wall.

Nanny Murk rounded the corner. I looked back and forth frantically between Gabriel and the door. The wards on the door were familiar, but there were enough of them layered up and twisted over each other that it would take time and attention to break them, and I didn’t have either of those to spare at the moment.

“Stay still,” Gabriel mouthed at me urgently, and I did, freezing in place. The tapestry children called out for Nanny Murk with voiceless mouths, managing to make a sound like denim on denim. She swung toward them; her head cocked to the side.

“Caught one, did you, my lovelies?” she cooed, petting the corner of the tapestry like it was a favored child’s hair. “Good work, good work, such very, very good work…” She leaned close, barely an inch away from Gabriel, and sniffed loudly. “Not the little witchling,” she said, shaking her head in disappointment. “No matter. She can’t escape me for long, no, can’t escape Nanny.”

She held up the cleaver, and I sprang into action, firing a bolt of magic at the rusty chain above the room’s dust-fuzzed chandelier. The little projectile hit perfectly, and there was a quiet, ominous creak that made the old witch’s head snap up. Then the chain gave up the ghost, and the whole thing crashed down to the floor, sending fragments of glass and metal everywhere.

Nanny Murk jerked back with a shriek as shards of glass buried themselves in the thin skin of her hands and face. It gave Gabriel just enough time to fight his way free from the small cloth hands keeping him pinned, and he landed silently on the floor.

Flames licked down the hallway we’d run through, casting the whole place in a grimy orange glow. It raced along the carpet, making a trail for itself into the atrium and reaching eagerly up a stack of mildewed cardboard boxes. Nanny Murk let out an enraged hiss, stomping her feet so hard that the ground jumped and trembled beneath us. Somewhere in the boxes, glass broke, and a cloying mix of pungent herbal smells filled the air.

Nanny Murk stomped and stomped, shrieking with rage. With each stomp the building twisted, windows sliding around, and doorways shifting. A staircase began to jut out of the wall, barely a foot wide, but enough to get up to the second floor. Gabriel and I ran for it at the same time, taking advantage of the hiss and sputter of the fire as it reached a huge dead plant in one corner of the room.

We scrambled up the stairs, grabbing onto the wall for stability. The fire was close behind us, and when we managed to get up to the strange little balcony, Gabriel grabbed my arm.

“Muffling spell,” he murmured, barely loud enough for me to hear, and I nodded, pulling the spell up around us. He turned and kicked down hard on the top few stairs, splintering them away and sending them crashing down to the mess beneath us. It wouldn’t buy us much time, but it would stop the fire from going up the stairs.

Three hallways twisted away from the balcony, all equally unwelcoming. We picked one at random and ran. The witch’s magic chased after us, twisting the room into a jagged zigzag and sending framed paintings flying off the walls at us. A large landscape caught Gabriel in the side, and he staggered into me. I managed to brace him, and we kept moving.

From behind us, there came a laugh and the sound of nails on wood. I glanced back just long enough to see the large, dark shape of the witch scuttling along the wall like a massive bug, and I pushed Gabriel into a side room, flinging up the muffling spell so I could close the door silently behind us.

The room we were in was dark and made a faint, rhythmic thunking noise, barely audible over my own shuddering breaths. A window set into one wall let in a tiny bit of light, but it was the sickly gray-orange of a months-old Jack-O-lantern. Once my breathing slowed, I lit up a small orb of warm golden light, just bright enough to illuminate the vampire standing next to me.

Gabriel looked grim. His hair was falling into his face, and a bruise was blooming on his cheek.

“Are you all right?” we both said at the same time.

Gabriel huffed out a quiet laugh. “I’m fine.”

“So am I.” I rubbed a hand over the scar on my arm. “I’ll be better once we find a way out, though.”

There was a crash and a shriek from the hallway outside, and I held my breath as I heard Nanny Murk rush past. I waited a few seconds and then brightened the light in my hand enough to fill the whole room. I had to clap a hand over my mouth to stay quiet when I realized where we were. I’d been here before.

The room was large, filled with the bulky, angular shapes of looms. There were at least a dozen, all hung with more tapestries like the ones that had attacked us downstairs. Woven faces stared down at us from all angles—men, women, and children trapped in string. In one corner of the room, the biggest of the looms was weaving all by itself. The thunking noise came from its mechanisms sliding around, sending a wooden shuttle the length of my entire arm slamming back and forth through the threads.

Next to the loom was a large chair, roughly made of stained wood. There was a man in it—or at least the remains of one. The man had a broad, weathered face, and brown eyes that stared blankly up at nothing. His hi-vis vest was tattered, and the Department of Sanitation badge clipped to it was covered in grime. It looked as though he’d been dead for a few days, but with magic in play, it was hard to tell. Thick, leather bands were wrapped around him, keeping him strapped down to the chair, with his arms stretched out onto the splintering arm rests. One of his arms had been jaggedly slit open, and a thick, blood-red string stretched from the wound to the loom.

I took a step back, then another, pressing a hand to the scar on my own arm. On the loom, the tapestry version of the man, woven out of his own life force, slowly took shape.

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