escaping, it will keep her from tracking you wherever you end up. Be on guard. She likely knows your next move better than you do. I can do no more. Go now.”
The hag watched her until she turned the corner at the end of the hallway.
She hoped with everything inside her that Z wasn’t in the dim.
Z could not take the things that Owen had been forced to endure.
“Be okay, Z. Please be okay.”
She didn’t feel him with her.
She didn’t feel him, and that scared the fuck out of her.
If she had indeed been at the crawlers’ mercy for three days, the zombies and crows should have already arrived at the castle. Maybe they simply circled, waiting for Rune’s arrival. Waiting for a signal she had no idea how to give.
But she had a feeling that when the real battle began, all of Skyll would know.
Maybe all the worlds would know.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The cloaking spell might keep the witch from feeling her, much as she’d felt Z, but it would not keep anyone from seeing her if she physically walked by them.
She crept down the long hallway until she found the door to the backstairs the crone had told her to look for.
She passed no one until she quietly pushed against the small door that opened into the hot, overflowing kitchen.
It was full of people. People cooking, chopping, washing, mopping…no one was still, and there were at least twenty people inside the huge room.
She peered through the doorway until she finally spotted the cook with her tall white hat and spattered jacket. She shouted orders and insults and occasionally hit her gray-uniformed helpers with whatever utensil was handy.
Ignoring the other workers, Rune kept a watchful eye on the cook as she slipped from her hiding place to look for the exit.
She darted behind tall freezers, ducked beside wide tables, and paused beside or behind whatever would hide her when the cook turned her way.
And then, once the cook’s attention was on a pot of boiling soup or a greasy pan of meat, Rune hurried farther into the room.
She’d nearly reached the door when the cook turned toward her. There was nothing to hide behind, no table to crouch down beside, nothing.
And the cook looked right through her.
Rune stood unmoving and silent, waiting.
The cook frowned.
One of the workers dropped a handful of silverware. The cook immediately rushed toward the girl, berating her loudly, and Rune made her escape.
“This cloak kicks some serious ass,” she muttered.
The crone had been right—she recognized the dim as soon as she saw it. It looked similar to Brasque Dray’s dim, only larger.
That, and the exterior of the witch’s dim was covered with nailed up heads, hanging bodies, and so much blood and rot that the smell hit her before she actually spotted the prison.
Screams and moans and pleading voices were numerous and loud, and did not only come from inside the dim.
Some of the howls of agony came from the people who’d been put on display in front of the prison.
Rune pushed her knuckles against her lips. “Son of a bitch.”
People swarmed around her as she stood frozen with shock. They chattered and smiled and hurried along laughing and talking as though nothing at all was wrong.
But the longer she watched them, the more forced their smiles seemed. When she paid attention, she heard the near hysteria in their voices. She saw the strain on their faces and the stiffness in their bodies.
And those being tortured…
She saw a man who’d been stripped of his clothes and forced to squat upon a sharpened pole. He was nearly blue from cold and weakness. His legs shook as he strained to keep himself up—but even as she watched, his leg muscles gave out and he started a slow slide down the pole that would begin with agony and end with a slow death.
A broad woman with an indifferent face and dead eyes flayed a young man alive. His screams blended with the voices of the busy crowd and the cries of the other people being tortured.
There was a stack of tin plates next to a man who turned a charred, crispy-skinned woman on a spit over a low fire.
The horror was unending.
Brasque Dray’s torture paled in comparison.
Because the people being tortured on the witch’s land weren’t dying. No one had to tell her that they were kept alive by magic.
She wanted to destroy Skyll at that moment.
Wanted to end the entire world and try to pretend like it had never