AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Hanna’s eyes glowed a poison green when she lifted them to mine.
“Oh, I’ll release him all right,” she said. Her hair began to fly around her head, blown by winds that seemed to affect Hanna alone.
Which, I had learned long ago, was a very bad sign. An eerie quiet descended over us, and I leaped between Hanna and Mark just as a blinding green light erupted from her fingertips and filled the room.
A deafening shriek pierced my ears, and everything went black.
Chapter Five
Chaos was the only word to describe the scene unfolding before me. Or rather, below me, as I seemed to be watching it from the rafters.
And I wasn’t alone.
“Do my hips look that big when seen from the ground?”
A slightly transparent version of Hanna hovered beside me, a ghostly hand propped beneath her chin. I followed the direction of her gaze and gasped.
We lay on the floor in positions that suggested a violent trajectory, our faces smudged with smoke and limbs thrown in all directions.
Sal had covered my nude body with her coat and furiously dug through her satchel while Mark howled from his cage, threatening to remove Sal’s entrails if she didn’t get him out.
“Ask your precious heir to let you out,” Sal sneered, nudging the witch’s limp body with her bow.
“Oy,” the witch’s ghost protested.
“Touch her again, and I’ll take your arm off,” Mark said as if sensing Hanna’s outrage.
Even now, his loyalty leaned toward the red-headed harpy.
“Not from in there, you won’t,” Sal shot back against the chorus of wailing cats darting across Hanna’s limp form.
“You’ve bloody killed us both,” I accused.
“Ballocks. I’ve only killed you,” the witch insisted. “You’re the one who killed me.”
“Hog shyte,” I retorted. “All I did was throw myself in front of my brother.”
“Aye,” she agreed. “And something within your heart deflected the spell back at me.”
“Love?” I asked.
Hanna’s spectral face wrinkled in disgust. “Feck no. Someone obviously put a shielding spell on your important bits.”
“But who would have—”
My words were interrupted by the rising column of glacial blue growing upward toward the roof. I saw Sal kneeling over me, her palm pressed over my heart.
I watched in wonder as the lines on her arms began to fluoresce, running upward like silvery water in a stream until they burst out behind her in gigantic wings. More like a moth’s than a butterflies, their spectral shape glimmered like the moon, deeply shimmering and luminescent.
“I knew it.”
“Knew what?” Hanna asked.
“That she’s not human.”
“What was your first clue?” Hanna snorted.
The way she made me feel the second I looked into her eyes.
