Her scarred, oozing skin was nearly transparent over her prominent, protruding bones. Her skull, pink with healing scabs, showed through the few lank strands of hair that remained on her head.
Her body was filthy and bare but for a single, thin wire sinking into the flesh of her throat and a short, flimsy dress, the hem of which caressed the tops of her stick-thin legs. She’d been ripped to shreds. Someone had wrapped small, dirty pieces of once white cloth around the tips of her fingers where her fingernails had once been.
One of her eyes was partially covered with webs of scar tissue, and the other one protruded as though a mass of pressure sat behind it. One of her ears was gone. Her face was a roadmap of scars, crisscrossing each other, some red and raised, some thin and white.
When Rune had first caught sight of her, she’d forced her horrified stare away, eager to kill Wicked Abby herself.
And maybe she would, when the cruel, striking woman had helped her with the battle ahead.
She’d calmed down, but the image of the pathetic creature who had once been the magnificent Cree Stark visited her nightmares every night afterward.
“I’ll fight to the death,” Abby said. Then she shrugged. “I’m dying anyway. My time is almost up. And I would like nothing more than to take the witch with me. Or,” she said, smiling, “as many of her people as possible.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Rune asked. “You look as healthy as a person can look down here.”
“My time is up,” was all Abby would say. But when she parted her lips in a smile, there was blood coating her teeth. “I would like to redeem myself before my end.” She glanced at Cree. “I would like to atone for the things I’ve done. Perhaps I will yet move on to a better place.”
But she laughed, unconvinced.
None of them were convinced.
“The guards are coming,” Abby murmured. “Get ready, boys and girls. It’s time to leave this place or die trying.”
“Not a whimper,” Nikolai warned. “Give the waiting crawlers nothing. That is the secret to surviving them.”
Rune nodded. “Starve the fuckers to death.”
Abby took her hand. “No fear.”
She took a deep breath. No fear.
Only rage. Rage, her familiar mask.
She kept images rolling through her mind like a shaky film reel. Damascus. Karin Love. COS. Lex. Z. Black-haired baby. Cree. Berserker.
Damascus.
Damascus.
Damascus.
And then the heavy cell doors were clanging against the walls, and dozens of the witch’s guards were urging the prisoners to hurry.
“We’ll surround you,” Ellen said, the first guard into the cells. “We’ll do as much as we can to get you free before we’re put down. You will survive, you will escape, and you will defeat the witch.”
“What makes you so sure I will?” Rune asked, rubbing her arms.
“Because you have to, Princess.”
But the crawlers didn’t wait to see if Rune and the others would escape the prison.
Someone let them in—sent them to attack the rebel guards and the desperate prisoners.
Then the crawlers were upon them.
When the crawlers swarmed over the wet floor and attacked the prisoners, Rune kept calm and forced everything from her mind but her newly discovered power.
And finally, she smiled.
That smile had been a long time coming.
Because at last, through the terror and pain and worry, Rune believed.
She was the redeemer. She was the princess.
She would save the world.
But most importantly, she would defeat the evil that grew like a malignant tumor. She would cut it out and stomp it into nothingness.
She would see the witch dead.
She would make things right.
The crawlers bit and clawed and squealed, and she almost, almost, let her fear peek out. But she didn’t.
“Burn,” she screamed. “Burn!”
And to her extreme shock, they did.
She realized something at that moment.
She’d allowed the witch inside and though probably neither of them had understood it at the time, part of Damascus had clung to Rune and lay dormant, waiting to be used.
A trade. Monster for fire.
There was also the strange, yet to be wielded power she’d found hiding inside her.
Fire, and…whatever that was.
Rune called the power she’d discovered, and she called the power the witch had unintentionally given her.
“Burn…”
The prisoners rolled on the wet floor to rid themselves of clinging, burning crawlers, and Rune’s three companions stared at her with awe.
And hope. Most of all, hope.
But Rune could feel the power weaken each time she used it. She didn’t share that with the others.
“Princess,” Abby murmured, but beneath the awe, the woman was terrified. Terrified