Wanda Embermoor's Arc

Chapter 10 of 10

The mermaid's speed carried Wanda like a flung spark. Trees blurred. Elizabeth ran beside her, ginger hair streaming, both of them faster than any horse. But Wanda felt the borrowed magic thinning. Her legs grew heavy. The cold star-gift was draining out of her, and Leslie's cottage and Skeeter's lounge were still too far ahead. The pale man had left the bar an hour before them. He would reach her friends first. "It's fading," Wanda gasped. Her steps dragged. "Elizabeth, I can't hold the speed." Elizabeth grabbed her wrist and hauled her forward. "Then we use what's left," she said, clipped and sharp. "Not to run. To warn." Wanda understood. She stopped. She pulled fire from the crown, up through her charred hands, and threw it high into the black sky. A pillar of flame burst above the trees, gold and enormous. Every eye in StarVeil would see it. Leslie would see it. Skeeter would see it. So would the pale man. "You just told him exactly where we are," Elizabeth said. "I told everyone," Wanda answered. "Now they run to us." They waited in a clearing while the last of the speed bled from their legs. Wanda's fire lit the ground. Then a figure stepped from the dark, dressed all in white, silver braids in his pale hair, a gold dagger at his hip. Wanda's fire surged up her arms. This was the face from her vision. The hunter. But he raised empty hands. "I am not the one you fear," he said. His voice was flat, French, cold as the frost on Elizabeth's fingers. "They call me the Ghost. Blanchard Bellerose." Wanda did not lower her flame. "You wear his face. White and gold. Braids." "Many of us do." Blanchard's eyes moved to her burning hands without alarm. "The one you saw asked after a candy witch and a dancer of bones. So did I. We hunt the same man." He tilted his head at her fire-pillar, still fading in the sky. "You lit a beacon. He will come. But so did your friends. Look." Two shapes broke from the trees, running. Leslie in her cake-gown, lollipop eyepatch bright. Beside her, Skeeter's crystal bones flashed green, cane in hand. They had seen the flame and followed it home. "You're alive," Wanda breathed. She had raced the hunter and lost the race. So she had stopped racing and called her friends to her instead. "The dancer and the sweet one are here," Blanchard said. "The man in white is not far behind them." He drew the gold dagger. "I offer my blade. You gather your fire. He arrives soon." Wanda's speed was gone. But her friends stood beside her now, not scattered across the dark. The hunter no longer chased four separate targets. He would find them together, waiting, with fire and frost and a gold dagger between him and the crown.