Page 64 of Enthralled

I dodge his swiping arm, drop to the ground, and roll, nimble as a cat. When I come up, I wrench my hands apart, splitting my sword into two glowing chain links. As the Hollow Man lunges, I throw first one than the other. They wrap around his arms, so heavy, so tight, weighing him down. He shrinks beneath them. I twirl my hand, and another chain appears, spelled into being by my fast-writing pen in another reality. I wrap this chain around his neck, pull him smaller, smaller, until he is nothing but a hunched little bag of creeping bones, bowed before me in this landscape of shadows.

I stand over him, tall and strong. Now it is I who gaze upon him with contempt.

“You are nothing,” I snarl. “You wanted to make your name great across the nation. You would sacrifice anything to your ambition, but what did it bring you in the end?” I create another chain, bind him faster, tighter. He roars, straining, but he’s helpless in my grasp. “That legacy of yours? Forgotten. Everything you cared about is nothing but rot and ruin now. Like you.”

He shudders, bowed down before me, straining against his chains but unable to break them. A Greater Noswraith? Hardly. He’s nothing but a minor fright, a pathetic joke.

“You never were anything,” I say, standing over him. “You are hollow, Edgar. Empty, weak. Puffing yourself up on our misery because you always knew there was nothing real inside you.”

His head rears back. Those living shadows pour from his eyes, from the hole in his chest, struggling even now to reach me, to claim me, to draw me into their depths. I jerk the end of the chain, and the monster roars and rattles, helpless in my grasp. Bending over him, I spit in his face. “When you died, the whole world breathed a sigh of relief. You were not mourned. You will not be remembered. You are nothing.”

His raging eyes gape up at me, twin windows into hell. For a moment—a terrible moment, that sends my heart plunging—I see him. Edgar. With his prominent brow and the shaggy, overgrown beard, his collar pulled askew, his tie hanging limp from his neck. I see him, this man I loved and feared and wanted so desperately to please and to emulate. My father. My idol. My god.

You’re not seeing rightly . . .

He’s in pain . . .

A ragged cry bursts from my lips. I draw my arms back, and a sword forms from nothing an instant before I bring it down, straight through the Hollow Man’s neck.

His head tumbles. Hits the ground. Rolls.

Trailing a river of black blood.

I stand above him, breathing hard. And I’m no longer in the formless dark of the Nightmare. I’m on Clamor Street, gazing down on the moonlit body of my father. My dead father, who lies in ruin beside me, unable to hear my screams. Only I’m not the one screaming. I’m the one holding the sword. I’m the one who ended him.

I stare at that broken body, the blood, the death. My own screams, disembodied, disconnected from me, echo in my ears. I am the slayer, and I am the mourner. I am both and neither at once.

And Edgar lies dead at my feet.

“Dad?” I whisper, my voice choking. “Dad, what have I done?”

A piercing scream.

Not my own voice—Oscar’s.

I whirl on heel toward our house. My brother stands in the doorway, staring out at me. Only it isn’t the child Oscar but the man, and he isn’t standing in the doorway of our wretched house on Clamor Street but the entrance to Vespre library. The library comes into focus all around me, the chaos, the starlight, the hard, painful reality. I stand in my cubicle, looking at my brother over the spell-scrawled pages of the book in my hands.

“Clara!” he cries, stretching out his hand to me. “Clara, help me—”

A sudden gout of red mist billows up from behind and envelops him, even as a subtle voice whispers in my ear:He really loves you, you know.

Then pale arms wrap around my brother and jerk him back from the doorway, back into that mist.

“Oscar!”I cry.

Some distant part of me is still aware of the world around me. Aware that I’m still standing in my cubicle with the volume containing the Hollow Man’s binding clutched in my hands. Ivor grapples with Anj, while Lir kneels beside Mixael’s fallen body. Castien stands at the gate, working to break it, power flowing through and around him.

It’s been no more than a few seconds since I entered the Nightmare Realm.

It’s also been a lifetime.

I stare at that open doorway, writhing with mist. No one else seems to have noticed the arrival of a new Noswraith. No one else realizes what this means, who she is. But I know.

The Eyeless Woman has Oscar.

My own nightmare, my own creation. And she’s taken my brother.

With a roar I snatch another blank book from the desk, wrenching open the cover to a fresh page. Immediately I plunge back into the Realm of Nightmare, surrounded by churning shadows so thick, they obscure all view of the library. I don’t care. I fling out my arm, and my flaming sword appears once more. Springing out from the shelter of the cubicle, I race to that doorway. But it’s no longer the entrance to the library.

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