out of your body. I will drink every last drop until you’re a dry husk. You can choose to build a new life with me, or flitter away into nothingness, into ash and dust and bone and blood.”
The sounds of her hideous shrieking was like a hot needle in my eardrums. The reeking odor was making me nauseous and dizzy, but I paused in the next room, grabbing folders full of research and notes from a metal cabinets before rushing back up the broken stairs. One of them snapped beneath my weight and I nearly fell through, clutching the rusted banister.
Now that the spell had been broken by elixir, the whole house had changed. Vines crawled in through the broken windows. The floor and walls were bent at unnatural angles, and scorch marks and charred wallpaper clung to the walls. The roof to the second floor was missing in parts. I was surprised it was even standing.
Luke was at the table, smearing some kind of black paste on moldy bread. I slapped it out of his hands.
“Hey, I was going to eat that,” he said, his pupils wide and dark.
“No, you weren’t,” I said. “Come on, we’ve got to get everyone out of here. Now,” I added, kicking his chair so hard the leg snapped and he tumbled to the ground.
I roused the others, they were still dazed from the glamour but they followed me outside.
“What about the cure?” April asked, once we were outside. “Did we find it?”
I ignored her question, staring first up at the ruined house, and nearly tripping over the pile of skulls and bodies surrounding the grate by the front entrance.
The missing children from Sezomp. I wished I had time to bury them. Some looked decades old, some more recent, growing into the soil and ash. A skull, a ribcage, their bodies hidden in the bushes.
“The cure...” I murmured, pulling on my mask against the falling ash, cursing the skies.
The cure didn’t matter anymore.
Maybe it never did.
23
I didn’t know where I was going, I just had to get the others away from that house. I’d led them here. All of this was my idea, and it had nearly gotten them killed. If I hadn’t drunk the elixir, we could have all ended up on the pile of bones. Beecham was right. The lurks were dangerous, we should never have come.
The town seemed to fold in on me as I stumbled through the streets, past the falling houses and buildings, the broken cars and wreckage. So much concrete and metal; twisted, dead tokens of life before the Culling. A life in the open, where humans could live free – and King Philip had destroyed it for everyone, starting with his own family. In trying to save his wife, he’d spread a cancerous plague through the whole world.
I didn’t know how long we’d been in the house, but from my stiff limbs and empty stomach, I was guessing longer than three days. We’d gone several miles before Trevor dragged me to a stop.
“You need to slow down,” he said, glancing behind him. The others were at least a hundred feet behind me, spreading a long, haphazard line across the wrecked landscape. Tall oak trees pushed up through the concrete, hurling defiance at the charred skies, but the area was mostly flat. Wide grassy plains stretched between the trees, nearly obscuring the crumbling remains at the edge of the town.
We were too exposed. I’d been in such a hurry to get away I hadn’t noticed anything of my surroundings for the past hour. I took a deep breath, relaxing my shoulders and pushing out my awareness, looking for any trace of Mrs. Hartman’s compulsion, but it was gone.
I checked my homemade bracelet. I’d only taken a few drops of elixir before, and it was already drained to nearly zero. The effort to break through the glamour must have been immense. I looked around at the featureless meadow, trying to get my bearings as the others caught up to Trevor and me. A tire swing hung from a gnarled branch nearby, spinning slowly in the wind.
I’d set off without consulting the map, and I realized suddenly I didn’t know where we were. In the distance over the trees, I could see the tops of a massive structure, tall pillars linked with thick cables of wire. We were near a small stream, barely a trickle of water, connected by wide, flat puddles. As I approached, bullfrogs with six legs and