The rain still pounded down. It felt like an appropriate accompaniment to the apocalypse raging across this town. For the screams of the wolf continued. And I had never heard such chaos in its wake.

  I had a somewhat fraught relationship with the ordinary mortals of this town. I primarily tried to stay away from them. But no one and nothing deserved this horror. Yet no one and nothing could stop it.

  Bram took us over to one of the old wells. Carved from stone, it was rimmed by rose gardens. Perhaps they had once been beautiful, but under the battering forces of the rain, every single rose petal had been torn off, and they were now strewn through the mud. A few were even caught by the wind and fluttered up around me. They were blood red. How very appropriate. For tonight only blood would run in the streets of this once great land.

  “Keep up,” Bram snarled. That was an invitation to Grace, not me.

  For Grace had a choice in this matter, and I very much did not. He grabbed me by the arm and tugged me roughly into the well. He leapt right over the stone ledge, and I followed his move.

  The well was deep, so very deep I did not for a second see the bottom. Then it flashed from underneath me, dark and deadly.

  I imagined Bram was just the kind of vicious monster not to catch me. But the curse caught me instead. Just as Bram landed down in his own magic, I felt the curse reach out and call to the rest of it in the very ground beneath me. Tendrils of dead energy rose up, snapped around my feet and wrists, and held me in place. It was hardly the kindest way to catch someone. But at least it was effective.

  Grace finally landed down beside us. “How did it catch her, do you think?” she muttered to Bram in a rare truce rather than screaming at him.

  “It would’ve been the curse, of course. Now come.”

  … They couldn’t see the curse manifesting through me, either? Just how blind were they? Just how significant were the limitations of their dead magic?

  I’d already claimed to you that I had never seen any magic as ordered as Grace’s. But order does not necessarily account for raw power.

  I watched them with a more careful eye, but it could not last. We hunted the old king, and Bram was unfortunately efficient.

  He dragged some device out of his pocket. I had never seen its like. It had a glass screen, and behind that, a trapped spell. Suspended in it was a small metal pin. It almost resembled a compass, but it was a wild one indeed. With one step, the metal pin would spin abruptly to the left, then with another, it would jerk uncontrollably to the right. But soon enough as he continued walking, its signal became stronger. It pointed reliably southwest.

  “He’s here. The old fool. I imagine he knows what’s going on, but he won’t leave his post. In his head, kings must go down with their sinking ship.”

  “That’s captains, fool,” Grace snarled at him.

  “It’s the same thing. Now,” Bram said darkly. “There.”

  The magical compass now reliably showed the southwest direction, and Bram picked up the pace and sprinted.

  He dragged me forward with every step, though I was starting to appreciate he had no clue what was actually dragging me. He obviously had control over the spell, but it was not nuanced, nor was it something he understood.

  The question rose, then – could I disrupt it?

  Did I have the power? Could I scrounge the strength?

  If you had asked me before this mess had begun, before I’d met and become indentured to one Winchester Stone, I would have told you no. Because back then I had firmly understood that the one way to limit one’s exposure to danger was to not court it. When you found it, you had to run away. There was no point in testing your magic against an opponent’s if the fight couldn’t benefit you.

  How could one run away now? Especially as Bram reached out and settled a hand on my shoulder. “You will move quickly when you see him. Rip his heart out. Do not dally.”

  Fear rose through me, hard and fast.

  I had only met King Li for a short period of time, but wasn’t that quite irrelevant? He’d helped me to save Winchester, and fundamentally, he no longer wanted to see his kingdom like this. Maybe he’d made mistakes. Perhaps he should’ve haunted the current king. But one cannot live in the past when they must try with all of their might to save the future.

  We walked around another tight turn in the corridor. For every turn in these basements was compact. The air felt more stagnant than it had before. I could tell why. It wasn’t for lack of airflow. This section was connected to the well. But the curse kept rising higher, destroying all of the natural air and sowing its horrid destruction. Leave it to rise as much as it wanted for as long as it wanted, and it would poison every single underground space in the kingdom, then swiftly move on to all of those above.

  “I’ve seen him. Just there. Run,” Grace commanded me.

  And just like that, with a single statement, she took over the curse. I must admit her control was much finer than Bram’s. He did not even have time to try to rectify his spell. It simply slipped out of his hands and was grasped up by Grace instead.

  And I ran. I spun around the corner to see King Li’s mournful face at the end of the tunnel. His head was far more visible than the rest of him. I imagined he chose to show his expression in this moment, the darkest his kingdom had ever seen. There was no point in showing his hands, for there was nothing to pick up, nothing to fight, and nothing he could save.

  My wet skirts flared around me, dead magic rising from the curse and soon drying them. But it did not do a good job. It made them more fragile as if it had dried them with some kind of flame torch. It felt as if, with one tap, they would break and fall into dust all around me.

  King Li continued to stare at me mournfully. All I did within my own mind was scream at him to run. Couldn’t he see me barreling down upon him? Didn’t he understand how fraught this moment was? Yes, he ought to go down with his ship, considering this was his kingdom, but if he failed to save himself when he knew his power could be broken down for the curse, he would only be condemning us.

  He waited until the last moment then drifted into the wall. He made eye contact with me. I saw his bottom lip slip down from the top one, and though it seemed to be hard, he muttered one word, “Free.”

  What did it mean? That he was about to run free? Good. But unfortunately, it did not mean that at all.

  “The wall, Grace,” Bram snapped.

  She shoved her hand out, opened her palm wide, and attacked the wall. It soon exploded in a great show of magic.

  And there, just behind it, was King Li. He hadn’t fled far yet.

  “Rip his soul out,” Grace roared. She had the bloodthirsty voice of somebody used to death sports.

  How exactly could she be her mother’s daughter? What had happened to Grace? She certainly wasn’t adopted. They had the same eyes and nose.

  What had driven Grace to this point? And was I right? Had she once been in love with Winchester? And not this, whatever it was? I would not call it love. It was a dangerous and violent lust.

  Every single person wants to believe that circumstances will never break them, that they have some moral advantage over everyone else. It’s not true. Take that from a dead practitioner like myself. I had seen such a range of people over the years that I could conclude the wrong circumstances could break even the most correct and upstanding of souls.

  But I didn’t get the impression something horrible had happened to Grace. She’d done this because she couldn’t get what she’d wanted.

  And now she would push others to do the vilest things possible all in the hope she could finally scrounge her way toward her final goal.

  King Li didn’t try to run this time.

  No. How horrible. He must escape. But he did not. And I reached him.

  Such a surge of hatred flowed through my body on the wings of the curse, I thought I had snapped and lost my ethics in one foul go.

  My hands reached his shoulders and pinned them. I felt the curse’s forceful anger rise up and shoot through my limbs. It coursed into my fingers as I bent them harder into his shoulders.

  And King Li simply mournfully stared at me. Right in front of my eyes, my attack started to break him down.

  Oh no, how ghastly. He couldn’t let me do this. I was holding on within my own body, as far from the curses I could get because I foolishly had a scrap of hope. This would burn it up and crush it under my feet.

  I longed to scream at him to get out of here, but instead I watched as he rediverted most of his ghost power to his lips. They twitched and opened wide. He whispered, “Free. You can get free. You must simply believe.”

  Bram and Grace had not reached us yet. They wisely chose to remain back, for what was the point in investing themselves in this fight? They had me, their perfect weapon. All they required was to stand back quite comfortably and control me.

  It wasn’t as if I could break free.

  But King Li seemed to think so.

  There must be a reason he did not fight, even though I knew he had the strength to try. He simply looked into my eyes all the harder. “Last chance. Yours, mine, and everyone’s. If you can’t break free, Lisbeth, it’s over.”

  Last… last chance.

  One should not be able to feel time. Yes, you can feel its effects, for it comes hand-in-hand with change. But it is not a logical and proportional relationship. That is to say, one does not change the same amount with every single second, and you cannot use change to try to count time.

  And I was telling you this why?

  Because I suddenly felt time as something different indeed. A… chance. Every second was not one that dragged me closer to defeat. Every second was the universe reborn anew. Every second came with an impossible-to-count wealth of opportunities. I just had to reach out and grasp them. I had to refocus my attention off what I could not do and onto the only action I could currently take.

  The curse’s foul energy continued to break down King Li’s form. It happened right in front of my face, and there was simply nowhere to go to get away from the violent sight. I heard this terrible cracking. It started in his neck. It revealed black lines of energy within. No. It wasn’t energy at all. It was some empty space, a vacuum perhaps.

  I had never questioned what was inside a ghost. This was it. They didn’t have a body beating with blood and throbbing with flesh. They had an idea, if you will. And, critically, a soul wrapped up around it. A soul that could not let go until its final needs were met.

  I think Grace snarled at me from behind to hurry up. I could feel just how much she wanted the king to break. Bram was no better. But I tuned out their voices as best as I could. I fixed the only strength I had forward onto the singular possibility of escaping. How could I do that? How could I do that when—

  I stopped myself from finishing that thought. There were a thousand things I could fill it in with.

  But fill it in, and all I would do was make it a fait accompli. Right now, I had the power to write my own story, my own ending too, or a new beginning.

  The curse ought to be impossible to fight. It was the strongest magic I had ever encountered. And with my own force rooted in the earth – with all dead practitioner magic ultimately rooted in the earth – surely it meant I should be more controllable and not less so? This curse had resided in the ground for God knows how long. And in the ground it had learned the secrets of everything around it. It had whispered to the earth, it’d danced with the insects, and it had claimed the dead.

  “One last chance,” King Li said. But he obviously did not believe I could take it, for I watched as, dramatically, one last time, he closed his eyes. His expression softened, and I could appreciate he was getting ready to relieve himself of this life. He had tried all he could. He had scrounged at every opportunity. But there must come a time when we give up.

  That time… that time could come tomorrow. Not today.

  I stopped telling myself I couldn’t possibly control the curse.

  I stared at the Ley lines converging around me instead. Everything appeared to come back to them. I had never appreciated how important they were for dead practitioner magic until I had stolen and briefly read Winchester’s book. He had conducted some epic scientific study mapping the Ley lines around the entire city. He knew where they were strongest, where they were weakest, and where they were growing. He’d even mapped them in the palace.

  The palace had some of the deepest veins of all. Quite sensible considering it had large crypts beneath it.

  But Ley lines could not be created by anyone living, could they? And what of the red Ley lines?

  Someone had crafted those. A dead practitioner – just like me. So why couldn’t I create my own?

  I stared at the Ley lines. This all happened in a split second as the curse finally rose all the way through me, its eagerness to destroy the king the loudest, vilest thing in existence.

  But before it could push all the way into my fingertips, course through his ethereal body, and break it down, I held on.

  For I, Lisbeth McQuarrie, started to believe I’d always been fated to win from the beginning.

  There must’ve been a reason Wintersmith had chosen me. And there must’ve been a reason I encountered Winchester.

  Perhaps that reason had not been destined from birth. But when you are powerful, you make your own fate and fortune.

  I screamed. In my head, in my soul, right in the center of my magic – I screamed and called out to the Ley lines. There was no way to move them and no way to control them. Yet.

  “Why is it taking so long? It should be over by now,” Grace began, but she had no idea about the war I was waging within and no idea of the battle I was about to win.

  Just when it seemed all was lost and I had no chance at all, I carved one right out of the heart of defeat. Internally, I screamed louder than I ever had, calling upon the very basis of my magic. I dragged it toward me with a shaking heart but a stronger soul.

  And around me, in a snapping motion I would never forget like the very heavens falling from the skies, the Ley lines converged. They twisted in like a vortex. I now understood previously it had looked as if they were worms meandering through the dirt, looking for some goal. That goal was me. Now they flocked around me, their power concentrating within.

  And just as they did, I regained control of my left hand.

  Bram was the first to notice, the only one with a keen eye, even though it was usually turned to the things he could take and not necessarily an objective view of reality.

  “What the devil?” he spat.

  It wasn’t the work of the devil. Trust me. This was the work of the soul.

  I screamed again internally as I finally forced my attention into my other hand. I pushed the curse back. I regained control of the most important parts of my body and instantly ended the spell digesting the king.

  His eyes had been closed, and resignation had set in, but now the slightest smile twitched across his lips. “Finish it. Break free of the curse’s control. You won’t be able to strip it from you yet. But you will be able to take your body and fight.”

  So take my body and fight I did.

  I flung the king back. I got him out of the way as I spun and thrust forward. Grace did not expect it, but Bram did.

  Bram, however, would not win. He had not won against me in the cemetery when he had tried to steal Sarah-Anne’s soul, and he could not win now.

  I forced a hand forward. The king was right. The curse still beat within me, still rose through my veins, still begged to be satiated. But its greed and force could be used, and use it I did. I channeled it into my punch as I locked one foot down, pivoted, and attacked Bram.

  It was just as he leapt into the air. I saw the fear and anger burning in his gaze. It was clear, in his books at least, nobody went against him. But there was nobody like me now, was there?

  I punched him out of the air. My solid blow sliced into his chin, and his head jerked back with a click.

  I was surprised when the coldhearted Grace actually locked her fingers around her lips and screamed Bram’s name.

  It couldn’t last.

  I’d thrust the king back, and the wise man had drifted through the wall, albeit slowly, as he was quite likely injured.

  But Grace wouldn’t let him go. And she certainly wouldn’t let me go. She roared, crossed her arms in front of her chest, and practiced some quick spell. She muttered under her breath, but I could not hear her words. I could only put up with the brunt of her attack as it surged toward me.

  I thought I would’ve looked impressive, and surely I must have. With all the Ley lines converging around me, I would’ve seemed blessed by the very heavens. But Grace was cursed by the very underworld. A fact she proved as she thrust her hand forward and interacted with the dirt beneath my feet.

  It was as if I was on a tablecloth and someone had suddenly yanked it out from underneath me. I jolted down, a dangerous fact as rocks started to rise. Jagged and half broken, they were the equivalent of Earth’s daggers. They shot toward my throat.

  Who knew what Grace’s plan was? Likely she hadn’t thought things through. Her reactive anger simply wanted to win and prove she was the stronger practitioner. But I had a secret now, didn’t I? Her mother’s own force.

  I had not appreciated until now exactly what Arlene had given me. I’d assumed it was simply the ability to interact with the forbidden grimoire. Now I felt her far keener sense for the earth expand through my fingers and shiver on my lips. It was as if I was one with it, a cave far, far beneath the Earth’s crust. A pocket of life amongst that which recycled it.

  Just before the rocks could slice across my throat, I forced out a hand and controlled the very ground right out from underneath Grace. If standing on it had been like having a tablecloth pulled out from underneath me, for Grace, it was like having the very earth pulled out from underneath her. For I dug down even deeper. I even reached a level below.

  Grace’s pretty blinking eyes stared up at me. Then she fell down through the darkness for several meters until I heard a thunk.