My heart judders as his hounds step out into the open.
We are closed in, the gasoline-soaked bushes writhing at our backs.
I try another explosive, but it is as useless as the other.
With no other choice, we run into the labyrinth.
We turn up and down the rows, pausing to listen as the hounds bay, not from inside the maze, but from outside the maze. We are surrounded. Trapped. Forced into the center, where the fountain swirls with shadow. I know what’s down there. I remember all too well those slimy tentacles from the deep.
I back away.
Our only escape is the rift before us with the beacon shooting upward.
But I can’t use it.
I won’t abandon the others.
I hold the machete tight, expecting Rafe todesert me. To step through the rift, to save himself. Instead, with his shirt torn and his scars exposed, he snaps open the pruning saw and stands with me.
Vorat slides into view. With a lazy swish of his hand, the beacon dissolves. The rift disappears. And it’s just us—me and Rafe, and this monster that moves like vapor.
How do you fight shadow?
With more shadow.
I grab the onyx from my pocket, but Vorat throws out his arm and I am hurled off my feet. I land hard against the stone bench, my breath gone, stars dancing in the periphery of my vision. Rafe is beside me on the ground without the pruning saw. But what does a pruning saw matter? What can any of our weapons do?
Rafe helps me to my feet.
Vorat curls a sinewy finger around the chain at his throat.
Fury swells inside me. I want to attack. Lop off his head and snatch the ruby from his neck. As if it’s an actual possibility, I pick up the fallen machete. My grip tightens around the hilt.
He tilts his head, and I catch a glimpse of the face beneath his hood. Just like Lily’s drawing. I watch in horror as his mouth tears open into a crude slit. He speaks, his voice like nothing I haveever heard—unnervingly refined with whispers following each word, like the souls of those he has consumed. “Come with me and I will let the others go.”
I scoff at the lie.
He’s not going to let them go.
But if I can distract him long enough, it won’t matter.
His prisoners will be gone.
“What is it you want?” I ask.
“Where do I begin?” He moves to the other side of the fountain, his form stretching and unraveling like vapor pulled by wind—darkness flowing across space, then gathering back into shape. “You destroyed a curse that birthed an entire world, a curse woven into its very foundation.”
I draw back. Why is Vorat talking about the curse?
“I have spent years searching for a way to undo what it has done. On Halloween night, you and the boy made it possible at last. His life, I have.” He fondles the ruby. “But your blood, I still need.”
“For what?”
“To reclaim what the curse stole from me.”
I blink, confused. “Stole from you? What could it have possibly stolen from you?”
“Everything!” His rage ripples through the clearing.
