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“Lily!” Drummond cried again. His beautiful friend was like something from a nightmare, rivulets of blood running down her face, her teeth bright white and bared in agony.
Drummond took a step sideways, trying to get past the woman to help Lily. The woman ignored him as Wagner and Yasmin spread apart.
“Who are you?” Yasmin demanded. “Do you know what you are doing? Do you know who we are?”
No answer came. As Drummond hurried toward Lily, he sawYasmin nod once and close her eyes. This was how she used the Book of Light. A bright yellow glow appeared, framing Yasmin like an outline.
“I will blind you,” she said, as much a warning to her friends as a promise to the woman. As Drummond turned away light erupted behind him, like a star exploding. He crouched down by Lily, her face damaged and broken, the book grasped tightly to her chest.
“Let me help,” he said, reaching for the book.
Lily rolled away, her eyes wide, white holes in her red face, her mouth a shocked O of horror and pain. She shook her head through her agony.
“Please!” Drummond begged, horrified by his friend’s torment and desperate to help.
Lily shook her head once more, a stern message:You can’t help me! Whatever is happening, it will happen to you too.
Drummond became aware of the light suddenly dimming behind him, and when he looked, he saw the space where Yasmin had been was now a cloud of dense fog and mist, like the weather had suddenly gathered around her and was containing the hot, white light.
“Oh god,” he muttered, scampering backward.
A little farther away Wagner and the woman were circling each other, as if in the first few steps of some sort of ballroom dance. Wagner was wary, Drummond could see, undoubtedly shocked by how quickly and how easily the woman had incapacitated two of his friends. The woman appeared relaxed, that same coy smile playing at the edges of her lips, her hands clasped behind her back.
Drummond was paralyzed, wanting to help his friends but not knowing how to. None of them were fighters. They carried only books that could be used to defend themselves if needed, not to attack. Drummond carried only the Book of Shadows, which granted the ability to disappear and slip away.
He looked at Lily again. Her wailing had turned to whimpers, obscured by the blood that was in her mouth, the mess she had made of her own face as she continued to beat it on the ground. If Lily had a book, Drummond didn’t know where it was. Yasmin was lost in the storm that engulfed her, the Book of Light struggling with the darkness. He couldsee her moving, pacing, and trying to escape, but the cloud moved with her, coiling like a snake.
“I don’t know what to do, don’t know what to do,” he gabbled, helpless and terrified. He was a child alone in his bedroom when the monsters came to visit, a child with no parents to chase the monsters away.
Wagner’s panicked eyes glanced to Drummond. There was a message there, a bravery:Protect the books!And then Wagner turned his gaze back to the woman. Drummond reached for the Book of Shadows, ready to vanish into the night. Before he could do anything, a grunt punched the air. Drummond saw Wagner down on one knee, clutching his chest. The woman stood immediately in front of him, having moved in the blink of an eye, one hand on Wagner’s shoulder. Wagner grunted again and gasped, his face agonized, and he collapsed onto his side and jerked a few times as if having a fit.
Then he was still.
“No!” Drummond cried, his stomach vaulting. He turned away and vomited, half-digested dinner splattering onto the concrete, even as Lily’s whimpers still sounded in his ears.
When Drummond faced the woman again, she was still standing over Wagner, as if watching as the last of life left him. Blackness fell over Drummond like a cloud, despair and terror gripping him and paralyzing him.
The woman ran her eyes around the park, Lily now lying unconscious but still trembling, the roiling cloud that was swallowing Yasmin’s light. Drummond saw an expression cross the woman’s face, a flicker of anger and hatred, like a light switched off and on again, and his blood seemed to hesitate in his veins for a second, his heart stuttering and then racing. He had seen evil, he knew, absolute inhuman evil, and it was dressed in the skin of a beautiful woman.
The storm where Yasmin stood collapsed in on itself suddenly, like an explosion in reverse, and there was a scream of agony, a horrifying crunching of bones like a butcher cutting through the breast of some animal with a cleaver, and a squelching of blood and tissue, and then the scream was suddenly cut off. The mist dissipated, releasing Yasmin’s battered body. She dropped to the ground as liquid in skin, all of her bones crushed to powder.
“No!” Drummond yelled to the sky, unable to stop himself, seeing what had become of his brilliant, funny friend. This woman, this incarnation of evil, had turned her into meat, had taken away from Yasmin all that had made her special. Drummond’s eyes filled with tears as his stomach somersaulted and his bowels trembled with fear. He shoved a fist into his mouth and bit it, trying to silence the scream that was building in his chest.
The woman walked to the mess of skin and gristle that had been Yasmin and she reached down and retrieved the Book of Light. She inspected it for a moment, and then she turned to look at Drummond.
“Drummond Fox,” she said, her voice low and husky. It was almost a whisper, almost a tease.
Drummond wanted to scream. He wanted to run. He wanted to stay perfectly still and hope that she wouldn’t see him, even though she was already looking directly at him. In his pocket, a trembling finger searched desperately for a page of the Book of Shadows.
“Give me the Fox Library,” the woman said, walking casually over to where Lily lay in her own blood. She looked down at Drummond’s friend for a moment and then jumped up into the air and landed heavily on Lily’s stomach with both feet. Air and blood exploded out of Lily’s mouth.
“Stop it!” Drummond yelled reflexively, flinching away in horror. “Fuck!”
The woman looked at him over her shoulder, still standing on Lily’s stomach. “Give me the Fox Library,” she said again, with a tone suggesting she was losing her patience.
Drummond shook his head, his eyes flicking to Wagner’s prone body, the mess that had been Yasmin, Lily’s bloodied and broken shape. These had been his friends, the people he had loved. These had been people who had never hurt anyone in their lives. They had been magnificent and funny andsoalive, and now they were not; they were full stops at the end of a beautiful poem.
He backed away, hating that he was leaving his friends, but knowing that they would want him to survive, to keep the books from this woman. In his pocket his fingers finally found a page of the Book ofShadows. In front of him the woman stepped off Lily and wiped her shoes on the tarmac. Then she turned to face him.
