Beth Wonders's Arc

Chapter 15 of 29

Beth stayed on the floor a long time after the crack closed. Her cat pressed a warm side against her hip. The sealed stone still leaked a thin thread of her magic into the world beyond the wall — she could feel it, faint as smoke, drifting out through the seam like a bell someone had rung and forgotten to stop. Whatever was hunting her would smell it. She had bought minutes, not safety. She pushed up onto her elbows. "Toes," she said. The cat blinked at her, all six toes on the near paw splayed on the cold floor. "I need to move the scent. Not seal it — move it." She could not spend more magic on the wall. She had none. But she could carry the leak somewhere else and leave it there, like dropping a scarf in the wrong forest. She crawled to the vanity and pulled open the low drawer. Inside sat the angular crystal vase she had brought back from the tower, the last of her siphoned magic drifting inside it like glitter caught in slow water. She tipped the vase against the sealed crack. The thin leak bent toward the glass and slid in. The vase drank the trailing thread until the stone went quiet under her palm. Now she needed a door out of her own world that wasn't hers. She thought of the dead, rune-carved tree that stood at the edge of her half-built grounds — a traveling tree, older than anything she had made, one she had never dared feed. She stumbled to it with the vase held to her chest. The cat followed. The tree's hollow eye watched her. Inside it, curled in the dark like a comma of night sky, sat the void chef — worm-shaped, star-eyed, mouthless. She had met the creature once at the margarita bar and remembered its rule. It bargained for anything but coin. "I need you to take a scent somewhere far," Beth said. She held up the vase. "This. Drop it in a place I'll never stand. I'll trade." The star-eyes brightened. The worm tilted, considering. "My cat's name," Beth said. Her throat closed. "Not the cat. Just the name. You keep it. I'll call her something else." The void chef bobbed once. It slid from the hollow, wrapped the vase in a coil of night, and poured itself into the tree's runes. The carvings flared purple and teal. The tree exhaled cold. Vase, worm, and scent were gone. Beth sagged against the trunk. The pull under her ribs had stopped. Whatever tracked her would chase the vase now, into some far dark she would never see. She looked down at the brown cat with cream spots. "Hey," she said. The word came out empty of the name she used to hang on it. The cat butted her ankle anyway. Beth had bought hours. She had paid in something she could not get back.