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I reach towards my reflection, hand trembling. I wait for my fingers to meet the glass, but instead, they pass through. On the other side, I feel scorching heat, and when I wrench my hand back, I find blisters forming across my palm.

This is it. This must be the way to the heart of the house, where Elric is waiting.

I take a shuddering breath, then step through the mirror.

The first thing I feel is the unbearable heat. Flames lick at my face, burning my cheeks, charring the ends of my hair. The smoke is more pungent than ever, clogging my windpipe, stinging my eyes. More blisters spread across my skin, raw and filled with fluid.

I have made a terrible mistake. I’m going to burn here.

But then, as suddenly as it came, the heat subsides. The roaring flames retreat to the walls, diminishing into embers. The smoke wisps into the corners. I blink away the tears blurring my vision and focus on the room I have stepped into.

There are no windows. Wherever I am, it is cut off from the outside world, a tomb deep in the bowels of Leighbury House. Red brick walls close in on all sides, their rough surface coated in a layer of soot. The ceiling is low, with no chandeliers adorning it. The only light in the room comes from the flickering oil braziers, one in each corner. They cast shadows on the walls, bathing the room in a dim, fiery glow.

The light isn’t much, but it allows me to see the figure standing in the middle of the room.

Elric.

His back is hunched, his auburn hair lank and greasy around his shoulders. At his feet, I recognise the familiar bloody strokes of a pentagram painted against the floor. But this one isn’t fresh like the one at Wreymoor Hall. The stains have long seeped into the wood, becoming part of the grain.

A low muttering pricks my ears, and I realise Elric is talking, though I can’t make out the words. His voice is low and rasping, like his vocal cords have been charred along with the walls surrounding him.

Eventually, he turns around. His shirt is loose and dishevelled, his expression bleak. Between his hands, he’s clutching some kind of book, his fingers digging into the leather-bound edges.

I recognise that book. It’s the same volume Iestyn keeps in his library. The spine has the same jagged, infernal script.

The speech of Mephistopheles is not meant for mortals, Iestyn had warned me. It is the language of the damned.

My heart stills. I couldn’t read the title in Wreymoor Hall. I can now.

Atroti.

37

Elric stares at me. His black eyes glint in the glow of the braziers, but there is no light in them. It’s like looking into the void, knowing that if I step over the edge, the darkness will swallow me. This is the brute who hunted the village girl through the woods to the elder grove, who strung up the farmer like a butchered pig and fed on his insides.

This is the monster that killed Henry.

I curl my hand around the hilt of my rapier. The blade trembles in my fingers, but I hold it steady as I point the tip towards the vampire’s cold, dead heart. I don’t know where Iestyn is. I don’t care. All I can think about is this wretched creature before me and the empty cavity in my chest he carved out six years ago.

“You did it.” Elric gives a hollow laugh. “You set him free, and in doing so, you have doomed us all. Oh, the sightless folly of a mortal mind.”

I tighten my grip around the rapier. “Whatever the consequences are of freeing Iestyn, I will bear them. Just as you will bear yours.”

“He has enchanted you, hasn’t he?” Elric tilts his head, drawing back the corner of his lip to reveal his fangs. “Do you not feel his fingers around your spine, his words on your tongue? Or perhaps you succumbed to him willingly, opening your heart to him as easily as your legs. No, don’t blush, dear girl. This isn’t the first time Iestyn has seduced a mortal for his own ends. I can hardly blame you. But when the atroti return to this wretched world, you will blame yourself.”

Atroti.

I stare at the book in Elric’s hands, the twin to the one I first saw in Iestyn’s library, the one he tried to keep hidden from me. A sickening sensation sweeps over me. All these weeks I’ve spent with him, carrying out his dark bidding, Iestyn was—

“Lying,” Elric whispers, watching me. “You saw only what he wanted you to see.”

As I stare at him, his skin turns red and mottled, blistered scars marring both sides of his face. His auburn hair recedes, leaving only charred wisps around his crown. He has been consumed by fire, spat out by the flames.

He twists his mouth into a smile, but he has no lips to move. “Humans have never learned to mistrust their eyes. When you see something, you want to believe it.”

He’s right. I never let myself see it until now. I didn’t want to see it. But I can’t deny the truth staring up at me in those infernal jagged letters. Elric wasn’t the one who wanted to reenact the ritual. Elric wasn’t the one trying to bring the atroti back.

“Ah, there it is,” Elric croons. “The moment it shatters. The moment when everything…breaks.”