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I lift the candleholder, but before I can aim a blow at the beast’s head, Clara darts around me, shielding me. She lifts her hands, motioning with her fingers spread wide for the thing to stop. I get the crazy feeling she knows this monster, or is at least familiar with it, but not the way she knows her bird and mouse.
This monster isn’t her friend.
“No…isn’t the…” Scraps of her pleading voice penetrate the ringing in my head, but I can’t make out what she’s saying, and as far as the creature is concerned, her pleas are clearly falling on deaf ears.
It’s coming faster now, rising up on its claws, bracing its good wing against the boards to make up for the drag of the injured one.
Heart slamming against my ribs, I try the door again, but it’s still shut tight by something more serious than a manmade lock.
Did Da magic the door closed to protect me?
If so, surely he would have unspelled it by now. Unless…
But there’s no time to wonder what might have happened to Da. The monster is diving for Clara’s leg, its fangs flashing. I wrap my arms around her waist, lifting her into the air as I sweep my leg in a circle, slamming my foot into the side of the bat-thing’s head. I lose my balance at the end, and Clara and I both tumble into the wall, but we recover quickly. I’m already halfway back to my feet by the time she grabs my hand, holding tight as she pulls me to the window, past the momentarily stunned creature.
I reach for her waist again to help her up, but she knocks my fingers away and reaches for me, instead. My protest that I’m too heavy for her to lift is still forming on my lips when she tosses me out the window like I’m one of the mini hay bales Timon hurls to the goats in the mornings.
I sail through the cool night air, muscles tensing as I brace for collision with the rocky ground. Seconds before I hit, something snatches hard at my shirt, slowing me enough to blunt the force of my shoulder hitting the earth. It still hurts, but not nearly as much as it would have.
I look up to see two birds of prey—falcons maybe, or small hawks—swooping in the air above me, but they’re gone before I can form any thoughts about their presence. They sail back toward the window where Clara is climbing out into the fading darkness.
The moon is gone and the sun yet to rise, but the bruised yellow glow in the east foreshadows daybreak, granting enough light to make out the terror that flashes on Clara’s face as something jerks at her leg from inside.
Her eyes go wide, meeting mine for a split second before she’s wrenched back into the room with a scream that echoes in my buzzing ears.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Clara
Pain explodes through my calf—hot and brutal, as teeth rip skin from bone—and for a moment I’m back in the garden. Back to the night Mother cut me away from everything and everyone I loved and cast me out.
The pain isn’t just physical. It rips through my heart, too.
How could she do this again?
I know it’s her. I know it the way I know that Wig and Poke will look after Declan now, keeping him safe as best they can if I don’t make it out of this room in one piece. I’ve never seen Mother in any form but her human one, but the way this harpy’s yellow cats’ eyes flash into mine is miserably familiar.
“Let me go,” I scream, tears of agony racing down my cheeks as I kick at her with my free leg. My foot connects with her wrinkled face, jarring the fangs sunk deep in my flesh and for a moment the pain is so intense I almost pass out.
The world spins and my eyes roll back in my head, and by the time I drag them down again the harpy has a claw wrapped around my other ankle, pinning me to the floor as she gnaws on my leg like a chicken bone.
I scream until my throat goes raw, though I know it won’t make any difference. But the pain is too terrible to keep silent. Sharp, stark suffering drives out every thought but Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop!
I claw at the floor, writhing and weeping as my cries for her to stop become guttural shrieks.
And then suddenly, inexplicably, she does.
She drags her fangs from my calf with a moist, sucking sound and spins to face the other side of the room. I roll onto my side, retching bile onto the wooden floor, shivering with relief and fear and the fresh fire in my leg as the pain transforms into something stiller, but no less savage.
