Wanda Embermoor's Arc

Chapter 8 of 10

The crown dimmed a shade in Wanda's hand. Skeeter's warning still hung in the dark lounge. She could feed herself fire now, but the eye still hunted her, and she had no name for whoever sent it. Until she knew the hand behind the eye, she could not stop the chase. She would burn out running before she ever ruled a single ember. Elizabeth pressed her cold palm to the crystal wall. "They'll circle back," she said. "They always do. We keep moving and we die tired." "Then we stop moving," Wanda said. "We catch the eye instead of running from it." Leslie shivered. The candy witch clutched her lollipop eyepatch. "You want to bait the thing that keeps finding us?" "I want to trap it," Wanda said. "An eye only watches. Someone reads what it sees. If I hold it, I hold the wire back to them." Skeeter tapped his cane on the floor. His green eye flared. "A lamp that walks catches moths," he said. "But a lamp that waits catches the hand that lit it." He crossed the lounge and lifted a charcoal torch from a bracket. Its flame burned steady, ember-bright, unkillable. "Old thing. Never gone out. Fire like yours knows fire like this." Wanda took the torch. She drew fire from the crown into her charred hands and fed it into the torch's coals. The flame roared tall and gold, brighter than any forge she had lit. She set it at the lounge's open door where the whole hillside could see it. "Come look," she whispered. Minutes passed. Then a shape swept down from the dark. The winged eye, its red iris wide, drawn to the blaze like a moth to glass. It hovered at the flame, drinking the light, reporting what it saw. Wanda closed her fist around the crown and pulled everything it held. Fire poured up her arms. She hurled it, not at the eye, but around it, a cage of flame that sealed the creature in place. The eye thrashed. It could not fly. It could not report. "Hold it," Elizabeth said, and frost crept up to pin the cage still. Wanda pressed her black hand to the trapped creature. Fire and eye met. In the flame she saw a flash of what the eye saw before her, its last master. A pale face. Silvery braids. A gold dagger at the hip. All in white. The eye burst. Ash scattered. The crown dimmed two shades darker for the cost. Wanda stood in the dark, breathing hard. She had a face now. The one who hunted her dressed in white and gold, calm and cold. She still did not know his name. But she knew what he looked like, and she knew he would come. "We're not running anymore," Wanda said. "Now we find him first."