Circle of Enemies

I glanced down and saw pale, shapeless forms swirling in the darkness below. “Get out of here and close the door behind you! Run for your lives!”

It was a ridiculous thing to say, but it worked. Maria rolled to her feet and scooped Jasmin off the floor. With both hands free, I lifted myself halfway into the room. The door slammed shut.

My ghost knife was gone. I tried to reach for it with my thoughts the way I’ve always called it back to me, but I was scrambling out of the hole in the floor, and the shapes below were getting closer, and I was frightened, and I hated myself for my fear. I couldn’t concentrate.

I’d lifted one leg out of the void and onto the solid floor when one of the sudden pulses dragged me back. They hadn’t let up the whole time, but just as I was about to be free I was hit with one so much stronger than the ones before that it nearly sucked me in.

I cursed and scrambled upward again. I had one leg out when something heavy and soft struck my trailing foot. I rolled onto the floor, outside the void, just as another, even stronger pull started. I’d made it back into the world, but I wasn’t safe.

There was a pale glob on the lower half of my left leg, like a small blanket bundled around my foot and ankle. And it was creeping upward.

I leaned over the opening into the Empty Spaces. The shapes were closer than ever now, and two were very, very close. I held my hand over the darkness and closed my eyes. There. I could feel my ghost knife in the darkness below. I called for it, desperately.

God, I had a predator on me, and it was already making the skin on my leg burn. I didn’t even have to watch it move; I could feel it.

One of the drapes rushing out of the void faltered, and a moment after that I had my spell in my hand again.

Just as I rolled away from the opening in the floor, a drape rose out of it and rushed at my face. I shut my eyes and slapped my free hand over my nose and mouth.

The predator hit me and knocked me back; my iron gate suddenly burned white hot. A sudden rush of despair sapped my strength and my thoughts became confused, but I knew it was something the drape was doing to me, and I did my best to shake it off.

The first one creeping up my leg suddenly squeezed so hard that I almost gasped in a mouthful of slime. They began to pull in opposite directions. Christ, they’re fighting over me.

I laid the edge of the ghost knife against my cheek and began to slash at the drape. It flared back, clearing a space from my mouth and nose, but I didn’t dare take a breath. Not yet. I could feel it holding on to my head and neck, burning my already tender skin.

If one broke my neck, would another opening appear in the floor?

I scraped my spell across my throat just as the predator tried to squeeze. It pulled away, releasing me, and the one on my leg began to drag me across the floor. I opened my eyes in time to see the drape float away from my face. A third came through the gap in the floor, then the gap closed. The opening to the Empty Spaces was gone.

There were still three predators in the room with me. The third one moved unsteadily. It took me a moment to realize my ghost knife had already passed through it once when I called it from the void.

I twisted onto my stomach and slashed my ghost knife through the one that had just let go of my face. I swiped through it four, five, six times, but it wasn’t dying fast enough. It retreated along the floor, too badly wounded to fly.

But the first drape around my leg was still pulling me in the other direction. I scrabbled with my elbows after the second one, then dug my untrapped foot into the carpet and launched myself after it.

I plunged the ghost knife into it. The drape tried to wrap itself around my hand, but I was already twisting and wiggling my spell, cutting it with every tiny move, and it quickly turned to sludge and died.

I spared a second to look at it closely, hoping to see a brain or an eye or some other vulnerable spot on its now visible body. I wanted a way to kill the thing in one shot, but I couldn’t see anything

I rolled onto my back. The first predator had reached higher than my mid-thigh, but the effort it had put into dragging me away from its competition had slowed its progress. Still, it was much too close to my crotch. There was no way I was going to let this damn thing crush and dissolve my nuts.

I scanned the room for the telltale shimmer of the other one, knowing that it would be invisible if it had landed on something solid.

It hadn’t. It hovered at the edges of the apartment door as though trying to figure out how to get through. I had to kill the third predator before it reached open air and a victim of its own, but first I had to give this first one something to think about. I sat up and slashed at it with my ghost knife.

But pain and panic had made me sloppy. I saw the edge of the spell cut through the thin flesh of the drape, and I saw my pants split apart, and I felt the ghost knife cut my leg.

My iron gate flared with white-hot pain—every tattooed spell on my body, even the two tiny ones on my neck that I never think about, suddenly burned as though they were made of napalm. A scream erupted from my throat.

My head was filled with roaring: Cut cut cut cut it screamed, over and over. It was a compulsion—a fury—to slash and splinter and tear and slice. The ghost knife had a desperate hunger to cut and destroy, and it ached to cut the spells on my chest, the spells Annalise had put on me.

I moved the spell toward my stomach.

A tiny voice in my head resisted. Those spells were precious. They’d saved my life many times, and I wouldn’t last long without them. The burning of my iron gate slowly brought me back to myself.

But the compulsion from the ghost knife was unbearable. It had a powerful will of its own, and it needed to destroy everything, especially the magic on my body and in the predators.