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“Lady, if you think we’re just gonna trot on upstairs when you just told us the Darkness is waiting, you must be even crazier than we thought.”
“Oh, you could try to run, of course, but I really wouldn’t recommend it,” Bernadette said seriously, and stepped back from us a step or two, sweeping the folds of her cloak back so we could see what she held in her hand. It was a knife, a small one, no bigger than a letter opener, but with a glint that promised it was wickedly sharp. She’d been holding it the whole time, and not one of us had noticed.
“There are four of us,” Eva said, with as much bravado as she could muster. “You think we couldn’t wrestle that out of your hands, four against one?”
“Perhaps, but certainly not without getting cut a few times.” She held the blade up so that we could see it better, and even she couldn’t take her eyes off of it. Her pupils were enormous, like great black tunnels in her face. “This blade has been dipped in Siren’s Tongue, the deadliest poison in the pages of the Claire Coven grimoire. If I draw even a drop of blood, no magic or medicine on this earth can save you. Would you care to risk it?”
Eva seemed to shrink beside me. Nova threw me a sharp glance, which I understood to mean that she had heard of Siren’s Tongue and we were, under no circumstances, to risk it. Zale didn’t miss the look, and so replied, meekly, “Right, so up the stairs it is, then. After you, ladies.”
I didn’t miss that he was purposely putting himself at the back of the group, closest to the danger, and I could have cried and hugged him for it, if this had been any sort of moment for such a thing. Instead, I linked my arm through his as we walked, snaking my fingers down to find his and squeezing them. He squeezed mine back.
We ascended the winding stone steps, moving very slowly and carefully in the crackling, uneven light from the torches, which had been lit and hung in the old, rusted brackets that still protruded from the walls, even as the gas-powered lanterns hung dark, like shuddered windows, beside them. I had one wild, fanciful thought fly through my head—that I was a child again, dreaming of fairytale princesses in towers, and how this was likely as close as I was ever going to get to being the damsel in distress of my childhood fantasies. It had always seemed like it would be fun and exciting. Now I knew, too late, that it was only cold terror and the burn of uncertainty, fire and ice chasing each other through your veins as your mind buzzed with panic. I had a fleeting urge to reach back in time, snatch up every one of those princess stories, and rip them to shreds. We had to rescue ourselves or not at all, and it would be a fight all the way. Those stories were nothing but lies to keep us helpless.
Princesses abdicated their power. Witches claimed it.
Because, of course, theyhadpower. How could I claim what I wasn’t even sure I had inside me?
That was all the time I had to ponder my own inconveniently timed existential crisis, because at that moment, when my self-doubt was causing me to panic, we arrived at the top of the stairs. Eva was leading the group, another gesture of bravery in honor of our barely formed friendship, and she hesitated uncertainly in front of the closed door we found facing us.
“Go on then,” said Bernadette from behind us. “Go on and open it. It’s perfectly safe, I assure you.”
Eva snorted her disbelief, but pushed the door open anyway, because what choice did we have? The poisoned dagger was still pointed at our backs. The door swung wide, and as we stepped through it and faced what lay beyond it, I had to slap my hand over my own mouth to keep from screaming.
The room was narrower than the one below, and also perfectly round. The only permanent structure in the room was a great ladder that projected through the trapdoor in the ceiling above, through which I could see the great light apparatus that signaled danger to ships when the fog rolled in. But I couldn’t take even a moment to wonder about the workings of the lighthouse’s light tower above—I couldn’t take my eyes off the ladder.
My mother was tied to it.
Her head lolled to one side, her form kept in a crudely upright position solely by the rope wound round and round her body, like a violent cocoon. A wound bled freely on her arm, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe, thinking of Bernadette’s knife. But then my mother let out a soft groan, and though the sound was one of distress, I rejoiced at it. She was alive. It wasn’t over yet.
That tiny, kindled spark of hope nearly extinguished again as I let my eyes take in the rest of the room. My mother had been placed in some kind of circle—there were sigils and symbols around it that I didn’t recognize from my extremely rudimentary introduction to magic. The expressions on my friends’ faces confirmed that whatever we were looking at, it was a long, long way from the magic they practiced. Candles in closed lanterns had been placed at the four points of the compass around the circle, and it all hummed with a dark, powerful energy that fairly screamed at us to turn and run from it—a warning I completely ignored as I reached for my mother.
“What the hell have you done to her?” I cried, and it was only Eva’s quick reflexes that kept me from stepping right into the circle. As it was, a strange sizzling sound began as I reached forward; and as Eva yanked me backward, I pulled my hand to my chest, the fingertips throbbing and red from momentary contact with whatever intention that circle had been formed with.
Bernadette locked the door behind her with a key—a key that was just one of many on a ring that I recognized with a sinking heart.
“Where did you get those?” I asked, the words squeaking their way out through my tightly clenched teeth.
Bernadette cocked her head to one side and smiled a little at me, as though the answer ought to have been obvious. “I found them in your bedside table.”
“You broke into my house?” I shouted, though it seemed the least of the evils I’d already known her to have committed.
“Certainly not,” she said, sounding almost offended even as she passed the unconscious form of the woman she had kidnapped. “I was invited in.”
“But who—oh.”
Of course. She’d been with Persephone. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to slip her something to make her sleep, and then steal the keys when she kidnapped my mom.
“Poor Persephone,” Bernadette whispered. “She was in need of comfort, and I’m sorry to say she has always looked for it in the most dangerous of places.”
I’d learned by now that Persi had a reputation for breaking hearts—but this time, it seemed, she had been the one whose vulnerability had been taken advantage of.
Bernadette slipped the ring of keys into a pocket in the inside of her cloak. I felt all of our eyes on it as it disappeared into the deep purple folds of velvet. We all knew that we would somehow have to get our hands on those keys if we were going to get out of here. Beside me, I heard Eva grind her teeth in frustration.
I looked back at my mother and felt my anger rise again, the sharp tongues of it licking at the heels of my fear. “What have you done to her?”
“I have done no more than I needed to do to bring her here,” Bernadette replied.
“She’s bleeding!”
