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“Zehr!” I cried.
“I thought you’d never ask,” he purred. “Just use your power, Honor.”
“I’m afraid to!” I’d never have said those words out loud, but when I was thinking to Zehr, it was harder to control what I confessed.
“I’m right here,” he promised.
As if I wasn’t afraid of who I was when I was with him.
I raised my hands, tamping down my wildness, trying to control my power. But I could feel it jump to each Scourge, who suddenly looked at me, a dozen pairs of hostile eyes fixed on me.
“Sleep,” I murmured to the Scourge, and they fell, landing in heaps on the floor.
Two of the maids stood frozen, slack-jawed and horrified. The other maids surged away as soon as the Scourge fell, but there was nowhere to go; they simply circled the room like frightened deer.
“Wait!” There were hundreds more Scourge massed outside who would fall on them now that Kessily wasn’t protecting them for her own twisted purposes. “I’ll get you home.”
“Honor,” Zehr warned me. “Don’t waste your power.”
“It’s not a waste to use my power for good. I’ll always find more.”
He scoffed. “I gave you that power.”
I reached for two of the girls, making eye contact with Ella and June. “I’ll be back for you. Stay calm.”
I trusted them the most, even though I also desperately wanted to get them out of this hellscape.
June jerked her head in a nod, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Calla, who was growling and pacing in the cage. My heart twisted, but I looked at the other two girls and said, “I’m going to take you back to Rylow.”
“Please,” one of them managed, and then I touched them, hoping I could indeed travel more than one at once.
The world blurred around the two of us, turned icy cold and prickled against my skin. Then we were stumbling on the cobblestone street in Rylow. It was either sunrise or twilight, the sun eerie after being under the bone mountain. Everything was quiet—no vendors calling out cheerfully—but the city itself seemed…undisturbed. The way it was supposed to be.
One of the girls started to thank me, but I was already shadow traveling back so the words faded into the darkness.
By the time I stepped out of the shadows in the dusky bedroom, the other two girls seemed terrified. I looked around wildly for the cause before I realized they were scared of me, and I raised my hands in a calming gesture. “I just took them back to Rylow.”
“How?” one of them demanded.
They looked at me like I was a monster, and a pit opened in my stomach, but I didn’t have time for my feelings.
When I grabbed their arms, they screamed. I clutched them anyway. As the cold and darkness washed over me, as the air seemed to be pressed from my lungs, I felt all those little horrors as if they were new. Those girls would think they were dying.
The next thing I knew, we were all stumbling on the street, and they looked at me sheepishly. Before they could apologize, I traveled back.
I stumbled in the castle when I came back this time. My limbs felt weak and drained, the way they did after a surge of adrenaline when I came back to earth.
“Honor,”Zehr said cautiously.“You really had me worried there.”
“You’re not my priority. You caused so much of this mess.”
“So did you.”
“No. My parents did.”I shook my head.“I’ll take the responsibility of fixing it, but I’m not going to take the guilt.”
“Honor, are you all right?” The words jolted me out of my reveries with Zehr, just before June wrapped me in a hug.
While I was gone, they must have dragged the sleeping Scourge out and barred the door, because the room was locked and empty and quiet—except for Calla’s wild growls.
