Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,58

And ‘destroy.’”

“‘Destroy,’ or ‘create’?” Her rosebud lips frown deeper. “You have to be precise—they have nearly the same shape order, but different occulants over the verb—”

I look at Lucien, but he hasn’t moved—his whole body still as a deer, his onyx eyes wide and searching the walls frantically, as if seeing something I can’t. And then he looks up.

And so do I.

Above us, the granite wall swells, cracking with hairline fractures.

“We don’t have time,” I blurt. “Just take the gamble and the godsdamn book.”

Fione breathes in and darts her hand out, pulling the green book from the shelf. Like snapping out of a trance, Lucien grabs my hand and darts for the staircase, strides so long and fast I can barely keep up.

The sound comes first—screeching. Not valkerax screeching, not anything alive or organic. Not anything with a tongue, or teeth, or a voice box. It’s a sound made without flesh, the screech of something dragging slowly, achingly across glass. The walls all around us swell, dozens of bulging rounds of stone pushing at the seams, straining.

The explosions come second.

Glass.

Raw glass bursting from the walls, cloudy and thick and moving like fast river water. Like vines alive.

Like roots.

The tips are ground down instantly as the roots burst through, the shattering sound of a dozen glass vases being dropped and infinitesimal shards sparkling out in clouds, raining down on the glass floor and our hair, our skin, our clothes. Blood.

“Spirits!” Malachite snarls, trying to brush the glass off, but it digs deep, the shards embedding in his face and nose and long ears. Fione’s barely better, having just covered her eyes in time—her mouth bleeding and hanging open, her scalp oozing red. Shit—did she inhale? After all the pain I’ve endured, the faint burning and scraping as the glass shards work their way all over my body is almost nothing, but it’s enough to make me wince. Once.

“Lucien!” I turn to him. The glass caught his neck, blood oozing down his throat, his collarbone, his covering halfway soaked with it. But his eyes are clear, hot, and focused on the enormous glass roots now writhing readily all around us. His fingers blossom with midnight up to the knuckles, and he throws his hand out, a massive fireball exploding from the tips and sucking in all the air as it flies, smashing into a glass root. The thing recoils like it’s alive, melting rapidly into nothing more than a flailing stub half peeking out of the wall. The pool of red-hot glass pours down on the glass floor, eating a hole into it. The night rushes in, wet with rain and cloud and the thin smell of high air.

A beat. Glass undulating around us like a nest of vipers. And then the roots strike all at once.

12

AS THE

WYRM FLIES

Malachite snarls and flings the broad of his blade with power, a brutal arc, and the shriek of glass on metal resounds as two of the roots deflect off it. Lucien thrusts his palms up, completely dark now, and a wall of animate witchfire springs to life in front of him, blazing hot and giving the roots pause. They writhe slowly just in front, looking for an opening, angling for weakness.

Fione makes a gasping noise beside me, and I lunge to her.

“Did you inhale it?” I ask. Her blue eyes dart up, withering with pain. It’s all the confirmation I could want. She needs healing, and fast.

“We have to get to the door!” Malachite bellows. “You three move, I’ll watch the flank!”

“You’re coming with!” I snap.

“Obviously!” He deflects another root with a powerful swing, the brutal impact skidding his low stance backward. Our escape route is the way we came in this morning: the little island west of Windonhigh, connected by the cloudbridge. Lucien assured us it was a magically charged space; it would be a simple matter for him to teleport all of us down to the ground from there without exhausting himself. But how are we going to make it? These roots—they’re vicious. Attacking viciously, as if in ironic retaliation for the tree we uprooted.

you invaded, the hunger insists. invaded where no one should, with your human pride and your human blood…

And then it hits me. Varia is the Bone Tree. If Varia can control the Bone Tree’s power while being eaten by it, then the High Witches being eaten by the Glass Tree…can they control their tree? Are they the Glass Tree? Is that why Lucien was afraid of being