Two girls. Two secrets.
Only one can survive.
Years before Nelle Wychthorn plans her escape, Tabitha Catt may unearth something in a Horned God's lair that is the key to freedom.
Desperate to save her beloved aunt from a dark curse, Tabitha is out t...
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I leaned against the sheer rock face. Ivy cushioned my back and protected me from the sharp, frigid stone. It wasn't the wind, cruel and unpleasant, that had me shivering, it was what I was forced to do to protect everyone from what lived inside my aunt when it was drawn out every full moon to take possession of her body and mind entirely.
My aunt and I had been coming up here since I was a child and had been given into her care. Before I'd encountered it, the evenings leading up to the full moon it had revealed itself, not physically, but as a sinister mental presence that hissed and whispered in my ear while I pretended to sleep, confused and terrified of its strange, cruel voice.
When the first full moon had climbed high into the night sky, I'd been roused by a low guttural moan and a crack of bones. It sounded as if it was coming from beneath my bed. Across the small room, my aunt's bed was empty. My heart beating as fast as sparrow wings, I'd peered over the side and under, my hair dangling long. Spine-chilling horror pricked my skin and froze the air in my lungs.
My aunt had peered up at me from under my bed with unblinking pin-prick pupils. My aunt and yet not my aunt. I'd watched in paralyzing terror as she'd transformed into something truly horrifying. Something that laughed low and wicked.
I'd leaped out of bed and ran.
My feet had slapped upon the worn floor of the Servants' Quarters, darting down hallways, still unsure of the layout of the Deniauds' home and too panic-stricken to scream. It had chased me. Not on the floor, and not with two legs, but many and high above. It scuttled along the ceiling like a spider.
I'd lost myself in the twists and turns of the lower levels until I found myself tripping down a winding staircase with pitted-stone steps to a place where there was little light and no warmth. The dungeons and its many cells were empty, not even a single guard present because the Deniauds worked for Upper House Battagli in their money laundry schemes. They had no use for dungeons, yet every House had one beneath their modern mansions. I'd run in a mindless panic, across a small manhole with a rotting wooden covering that broke beneath my weight.
I shrieked as I'd fallen into a deep pit, my fall broken by a thick weaving of webbing spanning wall to wall, that had slowed my descent enough that I'd landed with merely the air punched from my lungs at the very bottom of the dark, cold pit.
The webbing had been spun by a small swarm of krekenns that had built a nest within the narrow hole and fed off the rats that scampered in the connecting pipes and tunnels that led from the mansion to the outside.
The creature pounced, and leaped down into the pit, crawling down the damp walls. But sticky, silver threads trapped its many limbs like an insect in a spider's web, and the krekenns, hungry and chittering, couldn't resist swarming to bind and trap it.
I'd lain there in the darkness with the thing struggling against the silver threads, hissing and roaring, terrified that it was going to find itself free and eat me, or the krekenns would turn on me too.
