Em was the first to fall, gasping like a landed fish and clasping her withered, heavily ringed hands to her bosom.
Everyone was scrambling to get out of the dank little room that was now filling with the miasma of mold and decay, the stench of fear sweat, and the odd metallic tinge of magic, and no one stopped to help Em. It would have been useless, anyway.
The sorceress curled her fingers as if ready to pluck an apple from a tree, and what was left of the old heart streamed out, gay as ribbons from a maypole, toward those reaching fingers, red and black and sickly green altogether. It was almost pretty, if you didn’t know what it signified, and if that terrible, deathly stench hadn’t been filling the room.
One by one, the Snagged fell. The elderly lady crumpled without a sound. When Basil was struck, his glasses fell off, and his face looked naked without them. Nat made it a good distance, but not far enough.
He was young, so young. I remembered how he had spoken of a mother who had beaten and scolded him, and how the sorceress had seemed so perfect and loving by comparison. When he fell, he curled in on himself like a babe who had just fallen asleep.
The sorceresses snatched the paltry remains of the hearts from the Snagged who still had them: the last, rotting, vanishing morsels to which they had clung for so long in hopes of a cure. Shredded hearts flew every which way, like lengths of yarn spun on a wheel. It was the stuff of nightmares.
Cornelius leaped out of my pocket, no longer worried about concealment, and nipped at my leg, startling me into running. I grasped Colin by the hand, and the three of us darted up a back stair. Well, Cornelius and I darted, but Colin stumbled.
He would slow us down tremendously, but I felt a fierce protectiveness toward him, as a sort of symbol of what I could turn into if I wasn’t careful, and I was loath to leave him behind.
Clarissa saw me. I felt her sharp green gaze like a blade in my back. I turned my head to look at her, unwillingly, drawn by her stare and the pull of her beauty, and saw her raising one hand and pointing one painted, beringed finger directly at me, a finger that seemed all at once unnaturally long and over-jointed.
I expected my own heart to stream from my chest in a bright ribbon, and clearly so did she, and so we stared at each other for a moment of almost comic surprise when nothing happened. Then she screamed, doubling over and clutching at her stomach as if she had a sudden bout of terrible cramping.
I had no idea what could have caused it, but her moment of complete bafflement and then pain gave us a small sliver of time, and I pushed Colin ahead of me up the stairs before following.
Of course, running up the stairs then presented us with the problem of where to go next. This was no magic-worker’s dwelling, and “think sideways” wouldn’t be of any use here.
We could hide, or we could jump out a window and run. As far as I could tell, those were our only two options, and neither would be any use. They would find us if we hid, and even the slowest sorceress could easily outrun us. I hovered by the open window, deciding. When Colin grasped my arm, I jumped a foot in the air, thinking Clarissa had got hold of me.
“Leave me,” he said in a rasping voice. This was the first time I had heard him speak all day. I reached for him, but he drew back, taking his hand from my arm. It felt cold where he had gripped me.
“Don’t be an idiot!” I whisper-shouted. “She’ll kill you!”
“He is already dead,” said Cornelius from beside my feet. “He’s right. We have to go.”
We were already dead too, as far as I could tell. I had no idea why we weren’t already.
“I can’t leave him,” I said.
But I could hear and evenfeelClarissa coming for us up the stairs, like the slow warming of a rising sun. I gave Colin one last, useless, despairing glance, and then left him there and jumped out the window, gracelessly, landing like a sack of potatoes and miraculously avoiding a twisted ankle. Cornelius, of course, landed as lightly as a flake of ash.
We ran out into the incongruously ordinary streets, damp and stinking from a light rain that had started falling while we were inside, and Cornelius and I sprinted away as fast as we could—or as fast as I could, because he slowed his pace to stay with me.
Something odd seemed to be happening, though. I was moving as fast as I could, but I seemed to be trotting more and more slowly, as if trying to run through thick soup, or honey. I swung my legs and arms as violently forward as I could, trying to push through whatever was restraining them, but I just seemed to be getting more tangled up.
“Why are you slowing down?” hissed Cornelius.
“I’m not!” I cried. “At least, I’m not trying to.”
The mist seemed danker and thicker than usual, and it covered my mouth and nose as if someone was holding a damp cloth over them. I was unpleasantly reminded of the cloth that the woman had soaked and wrung, soaked and wrung again over Jol’s clammy forehead. It had a similar stink to it.
“This is no natural mist,” I said to Cornelius. “Something is amiss.”
He flattened his ears tight against his skull. We stared together into the thickening air, which had grown so dense that we could no longer see the shapes of buildings through it. Sound was muffled. Those few passersby we had seen seemed to have vanished—whether spooked by the mist, or spirited away by it, I did not know.
Cornelius and I could have been alone in the vast city. It had become harder and harder to move through the mist, or whatever it was, and finally, I could no longer force my legs to move at all. I stopped dead. Cornelius’s eyes shone wide and unblinking.
Shapes formed in the mist. Long, tall shapes that I thought at first were thin figures, but then looked more like blades, gray against the darkness. Like pairs of blades. Like scissors, opening and shutting, cold and sharp.
“Cornelius,” I said under my breath, “any idea what these might be? Ghosts? Phantasms?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
