Hecate's Spell (Monsters and Gargoyles #7) - Lacey Carter Andersen Page 0,22

Blaise’s confession, and my gut twists. I don’t blame the parents for being angry with Blaise, but I also don’t blame him for expecting such a terrible consequence. It’s nice in life when we can wrap everything up in a pretty bow. When we can say one person is good and one is evil. But in my experience, that’s not how the world is. Most of us exist in some kind of grey zone, where we’ve done bad things, but it doesn’t make us bad people.

I hope one day Blaise will realize that.

We explore the island for over two hours. Slowly, Blaise begins to talk again. By the end, he even manages to crack a joke. I can see in his face that he’s really trying to get back to normal, but I want to tell him, from experience, that revealing my own darkest secrets felt like expelling a poison. And that wasn’t something easily ignored.

“There!” he shouts.

I rush toward him, climbing over a few rocks tangled with roots. Following his finger, I freeze. Sure as hell, it’s a big raven sitting in the middle of nothing. But other than that, there isn’t anything unique about this place. It just has more rocks and more trees, just like the rest of the island.

My stomach flips as we move closer to it. When we look down at the base, we see a dark hole. It’s big enough for both of us to fit in, but there’s something creepy and unsettling about it. The wind rushes around us, and I swear I breathe in the scent of blood.

“So, Persephone’s visitors use this as a quick entrance in?” Blaise asks, kneeling down and inspecting the hole.

I nod. “So it has to be safe…”

He pulls a flashlight out of the side of his backpack and points it down. All we can see are smooth surfaces and rock.

I take off my backpack and peer down, really studying it, but there’s nothing alarming. And nothing to suggest this is an entrance to hell itself.

Blaise takes off his backpack and puts it on the front of his body, then glamors his wings away, still holding the flashlight out in front of him. “It looks like we'll be pretty much climbing, and partially sliding, all the way down.”

I grit my teeth and move my backpack to the front of my body. I don’t like this one bit, but if it gets me to my brother, I don’t care what’s down there.

“I’ll go first,” I tell him, knowing that if I slip and fall onto him, it’s going to hurt like hell.

Blaise nods and holds the flashlight out for me. I take a deep breath and go to the hole, stretching my legs out on the smooth surface. It feels strangely like I’m about to go down a slide. There’s a small moment where I wonder if this is all a trick by the monster, but I push aside the thought. This is our only chance. I can’t afford to have any doubts now.

Taking a deep breath, I push away from the outside world and into the darkness. I keep pushing along, and I hear Blaise behind me. The beam from his flashlight hits my back, slightly illuminating the space in front of me. Still, when my legs start to tilt more and more down, I can’t make out what’s ahead of me until suddenly, I’m sliding forward.

A gasp slips from my lips, and I reach out my hands to try and slow my descent. It works a little, but it also hurts like hell. I shift into my stone form, and then it’s like I’m plummeting straight down into hell. Blaise screams behind me, and the light bounces all around. But no matter what we do, we’re just going faster and faster, the world whipping away.

I know my stone form can handle this, but my gut clenches at the thought of Blaise’s fleshy body sliding at this pace down the stone. And yet, as horrible as the thought is, there’s nothing we can do now except keep going and hope we aren’t crushed when we reach the bottom.

10

Andros

Around me, people scream and scream. But it isn’t a constant sound. That would be far easier to deal with. Instead, it’s like a chorus of suffering that rises and falls like a song meant to tear at your heartstrings. One man’s fingernails are ripped from his hands every single hour on the dot. A woman is hit by a car,