by Cate Corvin
It felt like a thousand tiny worms brushing against my skin. A visceral, nauseating disgust churned my stomach as I threw myself to the side, narrowly avoiding a downward thrust from Ivy’s blade.
The twins’ emotions were a jumble of anger and hate, twisting into my own shock and fear until I couldn’t tell where my emotions ended and theirs began.
All I knew was that no matter what I told myself, I was going to die here. I was no match for the years of skill she’d built up.
“I expected a little more fight from you, coven-sister.” Ivy’s arch tone cut through the heartbeat pounding in my ears as she stepped over the crushed remains of a potting table. The individual vines were twining together into thick ropes that grew from floor to ceiling, destroying everything in their path as they conjoined.
It felt like standing in the heart of a green creature, pulsing with malevolence.
I pushed my wildfire into the practice blade, careful not to let too much through. If those vines had woven the door shut, I’d be just as susceptible to smoke inhalation and structure damage as she was.
She gazed at the embers crackling through the wooden stick. My stomach lurched. That’s all this was, a wooden toothpick against an enemy with a spelled sword-
“I tried to teach you, but you didn’t want to listen.” A vine tripped me up and I moved backwards, regaining my footing. Ivy slashed at me, scoring another thin line across the chest of my shirt. The fabric parted like smoke, a thin line of pain zipping through me.
I hissed through my teeth and she kicked out, burying a foot in my stomach. I retched and stumbled as the shock of the impact blasted through me.
The emotions on the other end of my mate-bonds grew darker, seething red with vengeful rage.
“Maybe you should’ve listened a little better in class,” she suggested. “Hubris. Dominic wasn’t the only one with something to teach you.”
I slashed at her with my sword, growing sloppy with my burgeoning panic, but she drew back and it passed through the air harmlessly, burying itself in the wall.
Flames licked over the dry wood, and half the blade crumbled away into nothing.
She cut again, almost lazily, taking off another four inches of my sword’s pathetic blade. A second kick hit my thigh and I dropped like a rock. Her vines pushed through the floor, snaking around my knee and holding me in place.
Ivy rained blows down on me, backhanding my face with a sharp crack, stomping on my calf. Pain was everywhere. She didn’t just want to kill me- she wanted me to feel agony before I died.
Something cracked in my left hand and I screamed. The last of the sword I gripped fell away in a puff of white ash.
I wasn’t dying like this. Not at Ivy’s hands.
I needed the wildfire, even if it burned me too. Luckily, Daphne had taught me one of her tricks. I could learn from my enemies.
I took a deep breath, the fresh air mixing with the red-hot coals in my lungs, and blew a torrent of blazing fire at Ivy.
She threw herself aside, the acrid scent of scorched hair hitting my nose, but the wildfire mushroomed upwards and ate into the ceiling. Flames boiled overhead, superheating the air in seconds.
The vines around my legs wriggled away from me. Pearls of sweat beaded Ivy’s forehead. Her mascara was running with it, making her look almost grotesque for once.
I climbed to my feet, every muscle in my body weak and leaden, my hand swollen, but there was no way I was going down on my knees again for Ivy.
But where the fuck were her plants going?
The conservatory groaned, the walls shifting and creaking around us. Ivy slid her rowan sword into its sheath, slammed it home, and raised both hands. Her fingers contorted in ways I’d never seen a witch do before, bending into unnatural shapes.
Something slammed into the roof and it buckled overhead.
Ivy smiled and I dashed for freedom, stumbling over the buckling floor.
The vines had pulled back from the door. I spilled out onto the lawn, heaving for breath as I dashed from the conservatory.
I made the mistake of looking back over my shoulder. The conservatory was sagging, scorched with wildfire and covered in vines like a half-organic, half-manmade monstrosity, but that wasn’t what disturbed me.
Ivy walked out of the building just before it collapsed, raising her bent hands overhead. A sinister rustling filled the air, the earth groaning under us.
“What are you doing?” I shouted. I didn’t have anything more coherent than that.
A titanic shape loomed in the darkness overhead, growing, evolving. My mouth fell open as I looked up… and up… and up.
The rose garden was gone, leaving nothing but patches of dark, furrowed earth behind. The thing Ivy had made was almost forty feet tall, a sinuous, winding creature of burrowing vines and grasping brambles.
Roses bloomed over its surface like a cloak, beginning with the small white tea roses crowning its head and descending into a cape of bloody red roses down its amorphous back.
I might’ve thought it was beautiful, if it didn’t raise an appendage made of woven vines and punch right through the conservatory, collapsing the remainder of the structure. Wood screeched and glass broke in a chaotic harmony.
My stomach surged as the creature’s ever-twisting vines roiled side to reveal something: a mummified body. The shock of white hair was still visible.
The thing held Professor White’s corpse trapped in its depths.
Ivy saw the look on my face. “Oh, him,” she said. The vines churned and the professor vanished again. “Another schemer, clinging to my coven’s greatness.”
The only thing he’d schemed was to secure Holly’s freedom in Whitefawn. My lip curled back over my teeth as the bramble-golem flattened what was left of White’s beloved conservatory with a massive crunch.
When that was gone, it focused on me. The thing didn’t have eyes, but I felt its cold, malicious regard anyways, the sense that it wanted to sweep over me in a tidal wave of thorns.
It was chilling. I felt like an ant facing a monster, without so much as a sword.
A wash of yellow roses bloomed over its chest as it crawled forward, wood and metal screeching as it moved over the conservatory’s remains and pummeled it into the ground. The vines slithered along the ground, aiming for my feet.
I turned and ran.
A strange sort of clarity pushed through the fog of sheer panic and the storm of emotions coming through the mating bites.
Ivy was a strong greenwitch, but her wellspring of magic would run out at some point- keeping the green-golem alive would suck her dry. In contrast, my wildfire was a force of nature. I could explode into flames all day and never run out. The only question was how much I could withstand.
It would have to be enough to burn this golem to the ground first.
Sharp pains shot through my legs as I limped, and my hand flared every time I took a wrong step. My ring finger was canted at an awkward angle, definitely broken and starting to purple. My chances grew a little slimmer with every minute that I didn’t strike back with everything I had.
I pulled the wildfire to the surface, stumbling over a deep furrow in the lawn where a hedge had been only minutes ago.
The embers raced through my veins, lighting me up with incandescent joy. I coughed out a rough breath and sparks flew from my mouth.
Now we were talking. I dashed over the white gravel where I’d chased Roman, streaming fire as he goaded me for letting Ivy get the upper hand. Right now was the perfect time to take his advice: swing at her like I knew I was going to take her head off.
The wildfire seemed almost tentative by how explosively I wanted it to flare, used to being shoved in a box in the corner of my mind. I coaxed it forward, my skin flushing as the heat ran through me. Come on, let go and burn everything.
The flames ripped through me and spilled out of every pore, licking the grass and blackening it under a shimmering heat wave. I limped to a halt and turned to face t
he brambly green-golem.
The behemoth moved slowly, churning up a wave of destruction under its thousand creeping vines, tearing a wide swath across Cimmerian’s lawn. The colorful wave of roses had bloomed and withered. Clumps of jasmine and honeysuckle were blooming now, the sweetness of the scent belying the creature’s cold malice.
I raised my hands, pushing the embers of wildfire towards my fingertips. With the heat of the wildfire flowing through me, I barely noticed the sharp pain of my broken finger, or the dull ache of the bruises spreading across my body. It consumed everything until I was fire.
The flames happily cascaded over the lawn, eating away at the golem’s creeping feet. The monster paused in its unstoppable forward push, sending vines to the sides like it wanted to surround me.
I was vaguely aware of Ivy at its side, carried along by a ripple of vines. She moved her hands with precise movements, her face screwed up in concentration as she directed the thing on how best to kill me.
I would kill her first, if I got the chance. This time I didn’t bother with embers or sparks. I dropped to my knees, grabbing two handfuls of searching roots and pushing my wildfire into them.
Flames rushed over the creature’s lower half and it retreated, but a hundred more vines and roots just seemed to take its place. I needed to get higher and destroy its heart.
Another wave of wildfire rushed out of me, incinerating vines into pure ash as it crawled towards the golem’s center. The massive being retreated several feet, its vines trying to pull away as they died.
“No, Lucrezia.” Ivy raised another wave of plants to push through the layer of ash. “This is my greatest work; you’re not going to ruin it that easily.”
I pushed a desperate rush of wildfire over the vines, sizzling them just a little higher. But it was so fucking huge, towering almost over Cimmerian now, seemingly torn between the desire to retreat and the need to obey Ivy.
A flash of red caught my eye near the North Entrance. Daphne rushed outside and stopped in her tracks, her mouth hanging open as she took in the destruction of the garden and the enormous golem towering overhead.
“Daphne!” I screamed. Embers floated out on the air with my breath, and my throat felt scorched. How much wildfire could I channel before I burned up, too? “Bring your witchwind!”
Thank all the old gods Daphne was quick. She sprinted the gravel path, jumping ditches as the breeze picked up around us, and skidded to a halt as close as she could get without my fire touching her.
A wind whipped overhead and witchblades punched through the golem, but they left insignificant holes in its body. Ivy looked painfully smug as new vines wove through them. “That’s not going to work-”
“Pick up my wildfire,” I gasped. I raised my hands, sending the flames surging into the sky.
Daphne spun up a fierce, screaming wind, sending the witchblades flying through the wall of flame.
They caught fire as they passed through, and this time the holes in the golem’s body began smoldering at the edges, bursting into flame and eating their way through its heart. The massive creature let out a hissing noise that sounded like a thunderstorm about to break loose, but the wildfire was finally nestled in its core, eating its internal structure away into ash.
I saw the body of Professor White amid the churning, thrashing vines, consumed by the fire within seconds. All that was left was a blackened, crumbling skeleton.
I released the wildfire and smoke drifted off my skin as the golem entered its death-throes. “That was so fucking cool,” Daphne said, reaching out to help me up. She stopped a foot away from me. “You’re about ten thousand degrees right now, Darke, sorry.”
My skin was still lambent from the fire, bones showing through my skin like an X-ray. My broken finger was snapped clean in half at the first knuckle. “Where’re the Frosts?”
“Carmen’s filled half the building with carnivorous plants. They cleared a path for me to get through, but they’re still trying to get to her. She jumped us as soon as you left with Ivy.”
Of course the little suck-up had been there to help Ivy out. I looked up at my coven-sister, but got an unpleasant shock instead. She’d abandoned her green-golem to suffer alone in its death throes, and a low groan trembled through the air as she beckoned to one of the trees at the edge of the forest.
Pale roots ripped out of the ground, slamming into the earth as the tree yanked itself from its moorings and walked forward on thick, worm-white taproots. The branches rustled in protest.
“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me,” I muttered. The last thing I wanted was to set fire to the entire forest. This place was going to be ours. I didn’t want to see it destroyed.
Daphne dropped to a crouch, as close as she could get. “Gilt’s coming!” she hissed, and for once, hope flared in my chest when I heard that name.
“Hide in the forest,” I hissed, jerking my head towards the trees. “Get everyone out of Cimmerian and into the woods. The twins will help you.”
“What about Carmen?” Daphne’s eyes flicked over my shoulder.
“Do what you need to do.”
The Flora greenwitch had thrown her lot in with Ivy. Everyone else needed to get to safety.
My only concern was for the immediate future and how much wildfire I could channel through myself. Now that Ivy had made a bid to kill me, we weren’t just going to Gilt’s office to hash this out.
We were going below, to the patriarch.
“Go now.” I stood up on shaky legs, cradling my injured hand to my chest. “While she’s stopping Ivy.”
The Headmistress barely cast a glance my way as she rounded on Ivy. Gilt raised a hand, clenched her fist, and the tree stopped dead in its tracks and fell to the side, crashing on the lawn.
Daphne ran silently into the forest, and I stepped through the carpet of ash and withered vines to take my place at the Headmistress’s side.
Chapter 13
Lu
“Ivy. Grandfather will be extremely disappointed in your conduct.”
Even though I knew I’d reached the end of the line, my stomach still sank at those words.
I’d wanted to go with my men to face Albrecht, but instead I’d be going alongside my hated family. In a way, I felt peaceful with it: they wouldn’t suffer at Albrecht’s hands.
I closed my eyes, reaching out for my familiar’s mind as Gilt chastised Ivy with cold, hard words. The cat wasn’t in my room. A spark of panic flew through me before I found him clinging to Dominic’s shoulder with tooth and claw.
I slipped into my familiar’s head and watched what he saw from a Dom’s-eye perspective. The cat turned his head at my direction, taking in the jungle of choking plants that filled the North Entrance and half the cafeteria.
Dominic was looking for a way through to the twins: both were caught in a net of tangling, thorny vines, raging towards Carmen. My heart ached when I saw the blood pooling beneath them, the raw fury in Shane’s eyes.
Dom had found the twins. But now I needed him to know we were going below, and my familiar wasn’t experienced enough for me to use his body language to signal.
There was every chance I might not be coming back up this time. Did I want them working their way through the darkness to the Cage, where Albrecht could feed them into the Vita Machina?
No. I’d rather die alone in the consuming wildfire I’d unleash than let them die there, too. Do whatever you can to stop them, Demonseed.
The cat immediately climbed to the top of Dom’s head and dug in with his claws. The professor swore colorfully, tugging the kitten away. It was a meager hope, but it was the only one I had.
I left his mind and returned to myself to find Ivy kneeling in front of Gilt, tears streaming over her cheeks. “She’s not one of us!”
“That’s not for us to decide.” Gilt sounded almost gentle, but the steel was still under the maternal warmth in her voice. “Grandfather has lived for two hundred years, and he hasn’t wronged us yet. You have so
little faith in our patriarch, Ivy. All you can do is throw yourself on his mercy now.”
She beckoned Ivy to her feet and turned on her heel. We followed her obediently through the ruined rose garden, and an enormous white plate of stone set in the ground caught my eye. Dirt was thrown over it in heaps, but the faintly sparkling runes carved in it made its provenance clear: it was the waystone Roman had found.
My hands were shaking with anticipation. I clenched my unbroken fist at my side. Soon, I’d turn Albrecht into so much charred debris, too.
We went into the school through the East Entrance, the glittering foyer of marble and crystal chandeliers, and Gilt opened the black door leading to Locke. Ivy went first, twitching with me on her heels and letting out a sniffle every so often, and I held back my own sounds of pain as every bruise on my body seemed to throb.
I needed to stay strong and keep a clear head. As soon as I was within arm’s reach of Albrecht, I’d incinerate everyone with everything I had left.
It was the only way to stop him for good. Even though a small part of me screamed that I was going to die, that I’d never see the ones I loved again, it’d be worth it to know they could never be hurt by the Cage.
We reached his tunnel, and Gilt stepped over his abandoned chains without comment. She led us right past the exit leading to Moira’s Forest, and the tunnel eventually smoothed out, paved with neat gray stones that gave it an almost dungeon-like feel.
There were deep scratches gouged into the stone, ending at the edges of a black iron door. Gilt rapped on it several times, forming a monotone musical pattern, and the door creaked open.
When I passed her, her hand shot out and grabbed me. “What are you doing-?”
I barely had time to struggle before she shoved another slimy magic-binding charm between my open teeth, where it dissolved almost instantly.
I glared at her as panic ate at the edges of my thoughts, sorting through every possibility that called for me to rely on nothing but myself to get out alive. I hadn’t counted on being without wildfire for my second descent- did Albrecht not trust me enough? Even after I’d proven myself to Gilt?
