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Her mouth pressed into a thin line. “I’m getting you out of here,” she said.
“No, I have to go with them,” I said, and it was my voice but not my words, like something else had seized hold of me.
“Go, little witch,” my grandfather said, and at the edge of my vision strobed the cracked-glass haze of his presence.
Dimly I registered that Bryony had extinguished her lantern. The cool stone pressed against my back. Jessamine’s fingerscombed through my hair, and music spilled from her onionskin throat, the liquid notes of a piano. I drifted with the music, my senses bleeding away from me, replaced by a cocoon of darkness.
Rough hands took hold of me, but I was a world away. Something shrieked in the distance. The voices came again, this time all around me, distorted and strange.
“Damn it. It bit her.”
“I see.”
“Is she conscious?”
A pause. “No.”
“That’s something, at least. What’s it doing? Can you stop it?”
“There is no precedent for this. And we are well beyond the realm of medicinal remedies. Maybe the witch—”
“No. We’re not involving her.”
I watched the darkness slide across the starscape, a shadow against the unlight of the stars. It moved without pattern, its shape indescribably strange, but I wasn’t afraid. I could feel it sliding inside of me, slipping beneath my skin.
“We don’t know if this is fatal. It could—”
“Look at her. If that spreads any more, we’ll lose Helen, and I don’t know what’s going to be in her place.”
“Take her to the stone. I have an idea.”
I was faintly aware of movement as someone carried me. There was a scrape, like a door opening, and then the smell of rain-dampened stone. Time shimmered in the void; I could see it, almost touch it. I watched the seconds struggle by as my body fought against the creeping cold.
“You’re sure?”
“No, but in another minute, we’ll lose the chance to find out.” I wondered what they were talking about. Maybe—
Pain lanced through my arm, just above my wrist. Horrible, tearing, burning pain, and I screamed until my throat was raw. The void vanished, but another darkness was rushing in, unconsciousness flooding over me.
In the brief second between the glittering void and the empty dark, my vision cleared. Above me were stars—the real stars. And a looming gray stone, roughly hewn. On its surface was carved the spiral of Harrow.
And into the spiral I fell.
13
THE SUN STRUCKmy eyes like a fist. I mumbled a protest and rolled over, pulling the covers up over my head.
And then I sat bolt upright, panting. The dream, the hallway, the Folded—that pain in my wrist—I stared at my hand. It was fine. Not even a bruise or a whisper of discomfort.
What the hell happened last night?
Simon had been there, but he was with Mom, hours away. And then the woods, and Bryony, and the voices... But Eli had been there. In the hall. That, I remembered.
I shoved my feet into slippers. The breakfast bell was ringing. I must have slept through the first bell already. I stormed downstairs and burst into the breakfast room ready to demand Eli explain what the hell had happened, and for that matter, what Simon was even doing at Harrow—but I stuttered to a stop in the doorway. Everyone turned to stare at me.
Everyone. Eli and Iris. Caleb. Roman, Victoria, Desmond, Celia. Even Sandra.
“Good morning, Helen,” Iris said. She was sitting in her customary place, a cup of coffee before her. She dropped a sugar cube into it as she studied me. “I trust you had a pleasant rest.”
