you try to gaslight me! I have damn well lived with enough of that.” I twisted around to take a swing at Louis, just because.
He jerked away from me and hid behind Clovis. Clovis threw me ahead of him. “We are here.”
On my hands and knees, I looked up to see a tomb in front of me. Big, square, ugly, and made of a dull gray stone.
“Touch it,” Clovis said.
When I didn’t move, he picked me up and threw me at the tomb. I hit the stone hard and rolled. A flash of light and the air heated for a split second as a spell ripped open.
I blinked up at the tomb, which was no longer big, square, and ugly.
What I saw made me reel backward. It was as if I had been transported back to Savannah—impossible, I know, yet that’s how it looked.
Even Louis sucked in a breath. “It cannot be.”
The tomb was the mirror image of the one that presided over the Hollows’ training area. Right down to the broken wing, albeit it was on the right side instead of the left.
Clovis let me go. “This is the place. This is the tomb where the witch hid the angel wings.”
He stepped forward and Louis was forced to go with him. I should have been worried, except I wasn’t, not for an instant.
You see, I’d realized something they couldn’t possibly know.
Gran wasn’t here.
Which meant this was not where Gran’s spirit had gone to protect the remaining angel wing or wings. It was a ruse of Gran’s. A diversion, just like I’d done with the fairy cross to keep it safe. I stared up at the angel statue, daring to put a hand on the marble base. There was no warmth.
The warmth had been in the matching statue in the Hollows.
Damn it, Gran, why did you stay quiet then?
The buzzing in my body had slowed even more, and then it stopped all together.
We were wrong.
You must flee.
Danger comes.
Only I just sat there, my butt in the grass, watching as Clovis raised his hands above his head and begin to intone words that sounded Latin, but were deeper, darker and, if I were to guess, far older than simple Latin.
“Aperta. Revelare. Potestas mea.” Clovis boomed the words and Louis repeated them in a whisper, his head bowed and shoulders shaking.
“Louis! Don’t help him!” I pushed to my feet, my legs and body my own again.
I would have taken a step farther, but someone grabbed me from behind. I spun and found myself looking up into the eyes of a wraith.
“Ah, duck me,” I whispered.
The wraith dragged me away from the tomb as Clovis worked to get it open. Stone on stone shrieked through the air as the tomb was slowly pulled apart one piece at a time.
If the wings had been there, they weren’t anymore, I was sure of it. But Clovis didn’t know that. I could keep him believing that for a while longer.
The wraith’s hands dug into me, and that awful sucking sensation overcame me, as if all the energy was being siphoned from me, ice and fire at the same time. The ground beneath me softened, and my legs slid impossibly down through the solid path.
Fight, I had to fight. I didn’t know if Suzy and the others had managed to keep up, if they’d followed. Or where Crash was if he was indeed in this cemetery. Even Robert was gone.
I was alone in that moment.
“Let me go!” I growled the words, struggling to find the magic I possessed. The wraith tipped its head to the side as if considering my request.
“Not the right words,” the creature said in its whispery voice. “Must be the right words.”
I struggled against the wraith even as my energy drained out of me, my magic being stripped away.
The right words?
I twisted around to see Louis staring at me. Was he doing this? The ring he’d given Eammon was cool against my skin, and I scrambled to get it off.
I was up to my waist now in the ground, and there were bones under my feet, which wasn’t great for my nerves, even if they were harder than the soil and cement around me. I managed to get my fingers around the ring and rip it free from the chain, which sent my Gran’s amulet onto the ground too.
The ground stopped trying to suck me down. That was good, wasn’t it? Nope, the wraith kept coming.