For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten

Author:Hannah Whitten [Whitten, Hannah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316592789
Google: SAQGEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0316592781
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2021-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

I t was like looking through a window. No, not quite— like being trapped in a window, folded into the glass. She tried to move and couldn’t, couldn’t sense her limbs at all. Her awareness was stretched thin, diffused and refracted into mirror-light.

Neve stood in the Shrine, behind the statue of Gaya. Her figure was smudged, but still Red could see she was thinner than before, her cheeks gaunt. A bandage wrapped around her left hand.

Red tried to scream for her, forgetting it would be fruitless, that this mirror was one-way and only for seeing. Distantly, she felt the work of vocal cords, but there was no sound, nothing.

Still, her shout seemed to spark something, like her desire strengthened the magic that made the mirror. Gradually, Neve’s image cleared, grew solid.

“We’ve been doing this for a month now, and she hasn’t returned.” Her sister was turned to the side, brows drawn down, dark eyes narrowed. Her lip disappeared between her teeth, an anxious tell she and Red shared. “Why hasn’t she escaped?”

Red couldn’t make out whomever Neve spoke to— they were blurred, shadowed. This mirror was built to show the First Daughter, and it did no more than that.

“It will take time.” The voice came muffled, barely clear enough to hear. “Great things often do. Patience, Neverah.”

“Is there no way to hurry things along?” Neve’s arms crossed over her thin chest. When her head lifted, firelight caught on the silver circlet in her hair. More ornate than the one she usually wore. Familiar in a way that tugged at the back of Red’s mind, that seemed somehow off.

“Perhaps.”

“Tell me what we need, Kiri.” Neve was no stranger to a commanding tone, but there was some new strength in it now. The voice of someone who knew beyond a doubt she’d be obeyed. “Tell me what we need, and I will make sure it happens.”

The pause stretched uncomfortably long. The line of Neve’s jaw tremored, once. She reached up and touched the circlet, adjusting it on her brow.

“I suppose you can do that with no restraint now, can’t you?” There was something sly in the muffled voice. Something that pricked at the entire length of Red’s spine. “Now that Isla is dead. Now that you are Queen.”

Queen.

Even in her strange and suspended consciousness, Red felt the air leave her lungs, felt the breathy half-cry crawl its way up her throat.

In the mirror, Neve flinched, just barely.

Red felt Eammon’s hands on her shoulders, knew he’d heard her, sensed something was wrong. His touch drew her from the vision, smoke and silver-bright eclipsing Neve’s image, but not before she heard one last thing from that muffled voice.

“You could always offer more blood.”

Then— the sharp bite of floor into her knees, the paper-and-coffee scent of Eammon bent over her. “Red?” His voice was calm but laced with barely leashed panic. “Red, what’s wrong?”

“My mother is dead,” she murmured, eyes wide. “My mother is dead.”

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