Page 90 of What Is Dark Within Me

“Hey!” she yelled. The Astraelis didn’t turn, but many of its eyes snapped to her. Eyes with rectangular pupils that must have once belonged to lambs. The small black eyes of swallows that had mistakenly thought the well a decent place to roost. Human eyes. Witches’ eyes. And Otherlander eyes of silver and gold.

Help me, she begged the voice. How do I fight this thing?

She could feel the woman inside struggling against the lock, pounding her fists against the door, shouting through the thick slab of metal dividing them—but Aleja couldn’t understand. One of the Astraelis’s wings came down where she stood, forcing her to dive to the side as she sent out a wave of fire from her hands.

It singed the feathers closest to her, filling the air with the scent of burning hair. Her first thought had been to take out a few of its eyes, but the Astraelis’s wings spread as it faced her, and she realized it would be useless. More eyes were hidden within folds of flesh, pulsing in and out of existence, as if it had stolen so many that they vied for space. They looked at her in horror, surrounded by bloodshot red, but it wasn’t enough to distract her from Nicolas, moving behind the flurry of wings.

Her family’s estate was lined with paintings of a black-winged man with a flaming sword standing at the edge of a battlefield, but none could compare to watching him embrace his full power in front of her. His eyes burned, the color illuminating the rest of his face. Nicolas attacked from above, his wings disturbing the loose pebbles that surrounded the well, lashing hard dust into Aleja’s sun-scorched face.

His sword severed one of the Astraelis’s wings and it fell to the ground, twitching before it stilled. Nicolas did not relent. The shadows Roland had once controlled now obeyed the Knowing One. They swarmed the Astraelis like thousands of insects, burrowing between its feathers, as it shook to buck them off.

This was useless, she thought again, as she tried to follow Nicolas’s strike with one of her own. Even if they held out, the Astraelis was going to tire them down.

At that moment, she remembered something Roland had said to her, while they stared down across a valley of bones and scorched earth.

“How’d you defeat them?”

“None of our commanders ever demanded it of us, but if a soldier had a bomb…”

Well, she was a bomb, wasn’t she?

“Aleja!” Nicolas screamed. She’d yet to take a hit from one of the Astraelis’s wings, but even the rush of air was painful, like someone had kicked her in the chest. She wanted to tell Nicolas that she couldn’t run. That if he died here, there was no hope for anyone when the Astraelis saw their opening.

She thought of all the women sent to this place; lambs to the Astraelis’s altar, used to keep him alive and churning out his gifts. They would never get justice until this thing was dead for good.

There was no way she wasn’t seeing this through until the bitter fucking end.

When the Astraelis realized she was an easy target—her weapon gone, her hands down—it turned to her. Its wings opened as Nicolas screamed through the sound of rushing air.

Aleja looked into the gaping maw she had caught in glimpses.

And when it came for her, she let herself be swallowed.

* * *

For a moment,Alejandra Ruiz had all the knowledge of the universe.

Okay, maybe that was an exaggeration.

The woman in the shuttered place in her mind forced open the door a crack. Aleja sensed that her arms were crossed in disapproval.

That was incredibly stupid, the old Aleja said.

“I’ve done worse,” Aleja told her, because now that she could remember the war, she knew it was true.

You only have a second before you’re absorbed. You better have a plan, general.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be distracting me.”

She felt the other Aleja’s shrug.Time is different here, but notthatdifferent. Hurry.

The others in this strange void—ones Aleja could sense but not see—spoke in a chorus of pained whispers. Some had been trapped here for millennia and could not remember their names or what they had once looked like. Others were decades old; women lost in the mountain pass, sick women promised holy waters to cure them, women seduced by a doctor with bright, ageless eyes. She felt their desperation. She felt theiranger.

These women were witches who would have understood her grandmother’s words. Kindness and compassion could be magic, but so could wrath.

You’re getting it now, Aleja said to her. Or maybe Aleja said to herself, it was getting more difficult to tell.

Aleja felt heat, though she wasn’t sure if she still had a body. Yet she couldn’t stop herself from asking. “Do you miss him?”

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