The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [252]
But if that was true, why was she still here? Why hadn’t the flames come?
“I’ll take care of the little nit,” Mr. Murtaugh snarled, holding out his big hands, moving toward Grace.
“No,” Mr. Holiday said, stopping the groundsman with a look. “Leave that to … the visitor.”
The metallic light grew brighter and the humming louder, so that Grace thought the sound would scramble her brains. The black cloth with the symbols fluttered, then moved aside as something tall, pale, and impossibly slender drifted through.
The adults fell back to either side. Even Broud and Holiday looked on with a mixture of fear and hatred. Grace could not move as the being drifted toward her.
The wraithling was grotesque and beautiful. Its huge head balanced on a spindly neck, and its eyes were like great black stones in its mouthless face. The wraithling drew close, stretching out delicate arms to deliver its fatal embrace. Grace’s breath fogged on the air. The shadow pressed in from all sides.
Don’t let it touch you, Grace. Her own voice was dull and distant in her mind. You’ve got to make the flames come.
It was too hard to move. The cold of the wraithling had turned her flesh to clay. She felt the first chilling caress of its slender fingers. The shadow seemed to pulsate with glee. It was going to eat her alive.
No, it isn’t, Dr. Beckett. Because you’re not going to let it. Don’t give up on your patient just because she happens to be you.
Doctor, heal thyself.
Somewhere, deep inside of her, a spark flared to life. It was not anger, nor was it hate. It was simply regret at so many years spent hiding from shadows—years that had kept her from the light as well. But she had escaped them as a girl; as a grown woman she could do the same. They had stolen her life from her once. Grace would not let them do it again.
It was time to banish her shadows.
She lifted a hand, and the air of the room burst into brilliant flames.
The wraithling raised its spindly arms, its head thrown back in a soundless cry of pain as the fire wrapped around it like a shroud.
Grace backed away. The door swung shut before her, muffling but not silencing the crackling of flames and the cries of human pain. There came a scrabbling on the other side of the wood. Grace glanced at the doorknob, and it melted into a shapeless lump. The door rattled but did not open. Black smoke poured from beneath it instead of silver light.
Slowly, calmly, Grace walked down the corridor away from the door. Flames followed in her wake, licking up the walls, dancing on the ceiling like joyful blue ghosts, consuming wood and shadows alike. She paused to pull the handle of a red fire alarm on the wall, and at once a shrill wail split the air. The others—Sarah, Nela, Lisbeth, Mattie, and all the rest—the children would have time to escape. But only the children.
The entire corridor was burning. The last wisps of the shadow burned away like curls of black paper, yet the flames pulled away from Grace like a gleaming curtain as she passed. But it was her fire, was it not? She had called it, and it had come: the first true spell cast by a thirteen-year-old witch.
Grace descended the burning stairs and left the shadow and the sound of screaming behind her.
83.
Travis pushed against the peeling picket gate. Rusting hinges creaked, and the gate lurched inward, sloughing off chips of white paint like flakes of dead skin. He stepped through and started down the weed-choked path. Weeping willows sighed as he passed, and the house glowed in the purple air of the Illinois twilight as if it were made of bones.
Why had he come here? He had never been back to this place, not since the sweltering day he turned twenty, when he left the farmhouse where he had grown up, had turned his face west, and had never looked back.
But that’s not true, Travis. You did look back. Every day you looked back.
And now he was here again. But how? He had been in