Behind her, the shadows moved.
Elsa was not alone.
Whirling around, I ran as fast as I could, but Elsa suddenly popped up in front of me, in the way only ghosts could.
I stumbled back with a scream and felt myself falling, tumbling down the stairs.
Then everything went black.
I WOKE UP WITH MY HANDS and feet bound on the floor. A fire roared from the fireplace, and the sight arrested me. I could almost feel the whole world turning orange as I continued looking at it.
“I knew you’d come.”
My head snapped towards the sound, the hairs in the back of my nape standing up as I tried to search for the voice’s owner in the shadows. It was a female’s voice, but that was all I could tell.
Alexandru? Master?
“Don’t bother contacting your Master with your blood bond. It won’t work here.”
I tried not to show how her words terrified me. I really was alone then.
“You’re quite the headstrong girl,” she remarked in a chillingly pleasant tone. “You remind me of someone I hate. You’re also remarkably, irritatingly selfless, and you know what that makes you?” The woman in the dark chuckled, the sound making my skin crawl. “Predictable. It makes you predictable, and so I knew, if I kept to the plan, it was only a matter of time before you’d have your visions and you’d come to try and save everyone alone.”
“Who are you?” I squinted my eyes, trying to see her, but she was one with the darkness. In the periphery of my eye, I saw Elsa in the opposite corner, playing with her hair, watching us speak with a bored expression on her disfigured face. I forced myself to look at her, making contact. She was my Plan B in case something happened and I needed someone to help me.
When the woman in the shadows didn’t answer, I said, “You made the demon your familiar, didn’t you?”
A hiss, and I knew I had guessed right. This woman, whoever she was, sounded too bitter for a pure demon. It was too human a feeling, and pure demons only typically knew of anger and greed.
“Why would you do something like that?” I asked, buying myself time as I put Plan B into action. “It requires so much sacrifice and—-”
“And yet you ruined it,” she hissed.
Something in the shadows started to move.
“It was a great sacrifice, a risk I took because there was something I needed.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” the faceless woman spat.
“Because I’m what I am?”
Another cackle. “You mean a soul seer?”
I didn’t answer.
The cackle turned into a soulless laugh. “How naïve you are. You think not answering will confuse me? I wouldn’t have come this far, Zari Baltimore, if I were unsure. You are a soul seer—-”
“You won’t be able to make me speak of my visions—-”
She laughed again. “Ah, but that’s exactly why I want you dead. You, soul seer, are destined to see, but I don’t want you to see. And the only way to stop you from seeing is to kill you.”
It made perfect sense, even if it did involve my death. “If you want me dead, then why burn the school down?”
I could feel rather than see her smiling at my question, as if knowing that she’d cause so much death pleased her. “Why do you think, soul seer?” she taunted. “Can’t you see the reason?”
I shook my head.
A dark blur of movement and then I was screaming as I felt someone crouch behind me. Whispered words crawled into my ear. “See for yourself.”
Hands from the back crept forward and covered my entire face.
I saw.
RED.
It was the color of her hair, a beautiful shade that had everyone in the small village she was born to gasp in wonder for they had never seen such a thing.
Red.
It was her favorite color as she grew up because she realized it was the color of blood.
Red.
She was fifteen when she painted her entire village red, killing them all single-handedly. She invited everyone to supper, and they all came to celebrate the day she was born, not knowing that it would also be the day they would die. For everything had poison in it and one by one they dropped to the ground like flies.
When it was over, she slit their necks for the blood to run and turn the nearby river into the same shade of red. Then she threw her hands in the air and forsook God before throwing herself prostrate on the ground and offering her soul to the Devil.
There was no rhyme or reason to what made her evil.
Some people just were.
When she left, she thought it was all over. But she was wrong. A child had been left at home for her parents thought she was too young to join such celebrations. And so that saved her life. When she came to look for her parents found death surrounding her, she, too, fell to the ground, crying.