Page 131 of Kingdoms of Night

“Your call,” she said tightly. “We’ll have to endure the smoke.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t be thinking of trying to burn your way out? Oh, such clever children. You can’t be that foolish. I suppose that means you don’t understand what this house is. But if you want to try it, go right ahead. I don’t mind my meat smoked.”

“Was that your question, then?” Feron asked with a huff. The wolves growled and barked in support.

Another throaty chuckle came, followed by rasping claws against the wood. “No, no. If you want to set the room on fire, you go right ahead, but I wouldn’t have left the lamp in there if fire could stop me so easily. Do you really think that that means I can’t do anything?”

The walls and the door groaned and creaked, blurring, squeezing.

Blinking, Idalno looked back and forth. It wasn’t her imagination. The room was shrinking!

She grabbed the black obsidian dagger from the sheath at her side and dragged it across her wrist three times in swift succession.

“What are you doing?” Feron demanded, dropping beside her. Buttercup whined while Hawthorn nudged her leg.

The sharpness of the pain dulled within the adrenaline surge and the deep-red pulse of her blood. This would work. It had to.

“My own energy isn’t enough. Need to make it a little stronger if we want it to work.”

He stared down at her wrist, brow furrowed and eyes wide. “You didn’t cut too deep?”

She held her wrist out over the mold, letting the bright-red droplets spatter across it. Her wrist burned as she channeled in more energy. If her aunt could see her now, what would she say about this? Probably that she was doing it wrong, but still, it would work!

“Idalno?” Feron gripped her shoulder. “You didn’t cut too deep, did you?”

“What?” She shook her wrist out over the mold as she looked up at him. “No, of course not. I’m fine. I promise. As long as we get this floor opened up.”

He nodded, leaning in close, regarding her surreptitiously.

The walls grinding against one another, the furniture shook as it all continued to press in, greedily eating up what space they had.

“I’ll brace the walls.” He seized the bed and turned it sideways. Already the walls were halfway to the bed. The dresser rattled along as the wolves backed out of the way, ears laid flat against their skulls. He grabbed a bookcase off the wall and placed it lengthwise on the floor.

Black Annis cackled from the other side. “She who bound me thought she was so clever! If only she knew how many had met their doom. Such a shame you can’t tell her yourselves. It delights me to know she is bound in even more torment than I. She would have made such a meal of you, pretty boy. But it would have turned her stomach.” A hoarse wail rent the air. “Oh! Oh, what have you done? Why does it burn? What are you doing, you dreadful children?”

“It’s working, Idalno!” Feron cheered, the wolves hopping beside him. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s working!”

She ground her teeth, her head starting to spin. The mold was spreading, faster and faster, the wood darkening and pitting beneath the blue-gray mold. As holes appeared, they did not fill back in. Faster. Faster now.

The walls kept crushing in on them, quaking the room.

“Feron,” she said through clenched teeth. “See if you can start breaking through the wood.”

He turned over a dresser and nodded, rushing to the molding spot.

The walls reached the twin bed and bookcase. They ground and pressed harder and harder, the wood straining under the pressure, groaning like a living thing.

She edged back as Feron smashed his boot down into the rotting wood. It snapped off in chunks, crumbling into dust.

Outside the door, Black Annis shrieked and howled. “Horrid children, rotten children! Who are you to eat me!”

Buttercup and Hawthorn growled and barked at the door loudly.

Idalno fell back, her energy snapping to an end as her arm pulsed with fiery pain.

Feron clawed at the floor.

The bed snapped.

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