by Sara Wolf
Something catches my wrist. It’s not strong, but it’s burning hot, searing in a way that demands my attention. I look over to see Lucien, his black eyes sparking out at me.
“No! I won’t let you sacrifice yourself again for me.”
I’m stunned, speechless, as Lucien puts himself in front of me, his fingers growing dark as he raises them, palms up. A strange, unnatural wind plays with his short hair, curling it around his face.
“This time,” his voice rings out, “I’ll protect you.”
My unheart squeezes painfully as his lips move with unheard words—his prayers to the Old God. Varia grows ever brighter, so bright I can barely see his dark outline against the light. But still he stands, and I have to fight every sacrificial urge in me not to run full tilt at Varia and take her off the mountain peak with me. But it wins out—I can’t let Lucien die.
I start forward, and Lucien barks, “Trust me, Zera. Please.”
“You have a life to live,” I spit.
“That life is not worth living.” His voice is hard. “If it’s not with you.”
All the air in my lungs implodes, and I turn my head around slowly to look at him. His gaze is deathly serious, but a smile pulls his broad lips as the darkness crawls into his eyes.
“I am the Black Rose,” he says. “And I have the power to protect you now.”
The witchfire springs out of nowhere—a roaring wall of it so high I can barely see where it ends in the sky. The black flames stretch in all directions, obscuring the light Varia’s giving off and the massive Bone Tree itself. The light struggles to pierce through the wall of black fire, still growing brighter in a terrible crescendo of luminescence. Lucien claws his fingers, the darkness stretching up his wrists and to his forearms, his biceps, up over his shoulders and crawling to his neck, sweat beading on his forehead.
“I can’t deflect it, only redirect it. You have to back up,” he barks. “To where Malachite and Fione are.”
“But you—” I watch his posture stiffen as he raises his hands higher, the flames growing denser and roaring louder.
“I’m trusting you with them!” he shouts.
Trust. Trusting me, after everything? Trusting me after I refused to trust him? Swallowing what feels like glass, I struggle through the snow back to the bleeding beneather and human. The Bone Tree is making a horrible noise now, a high-pitched shriek, like a crying wildcat mixed with a dying deer, and I splay my arms wide, dragging Malachite and Fione into the snow for protection.
“Luc—” Malachite starts.
“He’ll be fine!” I shout.
“But that fire won’t—”
“We have to trust him!”
Malachite stares into my six eyes, and then nods, once and with purpose. Next to me in the snow, I feel Fione slide her hand into mine and squeeze, despite how monstrous I must look.
Trust.
Here, in the silence, it’s so much easier to trust.
I could die. The explosion centering on Varia could obliterate her, and my heart. She could die. Lucien could crumble beneath the force building against him. I close my eyes and pray—to who, I’m not sure anymore. Just someone, someone who can listen. Someone who can listen to my words right now as they leak from my unheart, from my heart.
Please. Please keep us all safe.
The black witchfire wall blocks out the sky, spiraling up and up and all around us, like a protective bubble of pure fire. The snow melts at the flames, water pooling in the ground and soaking into our clothes. The white light starts to win, sucking in even the black flames of the witchfire. Lucien doesn’t move, his body stock-still and the entirety of his upper body now writhing with animate midnight, devoid of all color.
The Prince of Cavanos, the thief Whisper, the boy I fell in love with on the night of the Hunt, the witch named the Black Rose—all of them come together as I watch his shoulders, his heaving back. He lets out a jagged roar to shame even the witchfire’s noise, and the flames leap back to life, stronger than ever, dancing with newfound vigor and radiating an unholy black light.
The white light’s explosion rocks the ground. Even through the fire, the light burns on the backs of my six eyelids. I hear the mountain crack with an earth-shattering rumble, the ground crumbling away outside our fiery bubble shield. Fione shrieks, and I cover her ears and hold her close. The black fire and the white light tangle over each other, battling in midair, until every scrap of heat and energy tires out, fizzling into nothingness.
When my vision clears, the witchfire is gone.
We are in the middle of a perfect circle of earth—all that’s left of the mountain peak.
Lucien stands there, doubled over, leaning on a stitch in his side and panting uncontrollably. Malachite and I leap up immediately, sprinting to him, the muddy slush that was once deep snow splashing around our boots frantically.
“Luc!” Malachite looks him over. “Are you all right?”
My panic deflates when I see he looks whole, but his eyes are fixed—staring straight forward at something.
Fione catches up to us, her voice low. “V-Varia.”
I look to where the princess is, to the Bone Tree. It sits on the very edge of the circle of earth, clinging with its wavering roots. It hasn’t changed at all—no marks from the explosion visible. The bones are whole, untouched.
And there, standing beneath its branches with a calm ease, is Varia. Her curtain of dark hair shines, her smile discernible from even our distance. She looks whole, too, normal, as if nothing has happened at all—save for the fangs sticking out of her neck. Like a macabre piece of jewelry, like a choker gone wrong, a line of sharp, svelte fangs spreads down her neck in a perfect ring, fused to her flesh. Not big enough to be valkerax fangs, but identical in shape and serration.
She tilts her fingers up to the sky, and, horrifically, something rises. A low hissing swells like a wave as some hundred things rise from the mountain. No—thousands. Thousands of sinewy, wyrm-like white bodies rise slowly into the aether, feathered manes flared and tails lashing, whiskers undulating in the cloudless sky.
The valkerax.
A pillar of valkerax, writhing around one another.
“Well now.” Varia smiles at us all. “I believe this is where your work ends. And mine begins.”
END OF BOOK TWO
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Acknowledgments
After seven years of writing, you’d think it would get easier. But the struggle is half the fun—what would my little monkey brain do if it couldn’t feel that rush of accomplishment that accompanies solving a complex problem after three weeks of not seeing the simple solution on a nigh-constant basis? What I mean to say, of course, is that writing is a dream, but one of those dreams where you don’t have any pants on and you’re in high school and everyone can definitely probably extremely see your crotch right now. As a career author, I can assure you, it’s okay to not have pants on all the time. Sometimes people will even read what you wrote without pants on!
This little space feels silly sometimes to write in, but it feels less silly when I thank people. A very big thank-you to my agent, Jessica Faust, for being a steadfast presence in my life. A bigger thank-you to my father, Michael, and my mother, Deb, for believing in me with such candid fervor it astonishes me constantly. A wonderful shout-out to everyone at Entangled for bringing this little dream to life, and to Stacy Abrams and Lydia Sharp for being keen-eyed editors to the last word.
And most importantly of all, thank you, the reader, for soaking in these brain-words of mine. You are beautiful and worth every drop of love in this wide universe. Let reading and writing be your guide, your mentor, your muse. Make the magic, be the magic. You
are my magic.
About the Author
Sara Wolf lives in Portland, Oregon, where the sun can’t get her anymore. When she isn’t pouring her allotted life force into writing, she’s reading, accidentally burning houses down whilst baking, or making faces at her highly appreciative cat. She is also the author of the NYT bestselling Lovely Vicious series.
www.sarawolfbooks.com
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