“I’ll come too,” Etta offered. But Scarlett shook her head.
“We should all go. Ravens stick together; isn’t that what you just told us?” Reagan crossed her arms, scowling.
“You need to stay here to keep performing the spell,” Scarlett said. “I don’t know how long the spell will last and I need to be able to follow her until I find Tiffany.”
“Personally, I’m of the opinion nobody should go out there,” Sonali said. “Let’s at least wait until Dahlia gets back.”
“I’m going to find Tiffany. Now.” Scarlett glanced at Reagan. “This is something I need to do for me, not just for Kappa.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, she could hear Dahlia’s voice: You’re not acting very presidential right now. She wasn’t. Running off into the night, leaving her sisters here without guidance? But she didn’t care about the presidency or about doing what was proper.
She cared about doing what was right.
She and Mei traded looks. The other girl nodded, solemn.
“Shadow, trust me. Take me to Tiffany,” Scarlett said.
Mei repeated her words, and the other girls followed their lead until their voices filled the air.
The doors swung open seemingly of their own accord and the shadow began to move toward them. The spell was working.
“Stay here, lock the doors, and don’t let anyone but a Raven inside tonight,” Scarlett told Mei, feeling her urgency intensify. This had to work. The shadow-girl had to find Tiffany.
Scarlett stepped out into the night, trailing the apparition into the backyard. She heard the door shut firmly behind her with a click.
Storm clouds had begun to gather, low and thick overhead. The muggy air felt like soup. She practically swam through it, following the shadow across the backyard, past the carefully cultivated hedge maze, right up to the edge of the woods that surrounded Westerly’s campus.
The Spanish oaks creaked in the wind. Branches scraped together with a sound like broken violins. In the distance, thunder rumbled. Not close enough to rain yet, though the muggy air begged for it.
The shadow-girl beckoned Scarlett forward, pointing straight ahead, into the gloom beneath the trees. Fat tendrils of fog rolled through the woods underfoot. Scarlett could barely see the path well enough to keep her feet from tangling in underbrush and sprawling root systems. She picked her way behind the shadow-figure, who floated along in front of her, the ruby necklace glowing like a beacon.
After she’d walked a few paces, she peered over her shoulder. Already the lights of Kappa House were gone, swallowed by the trees. She could hardly see a thing. She pulled out her cell, tapped on the flashlight, and swept the forest floor for . . . what?
Tiffany’s body?
Scarlett couldn’t even let herself think it. It felt like a betrayal. The scrying spell would have told us. It would have given us some sign if she was dead already. Unless the shadow-girl was only leading Scarlett toward her owner’s body.
She’s fine. She has to be. In Scarlett’s mind’s eye, though, all she could see was Gwen. The horrible emptiness of her eyes. The smoke that poured from her lips.
The fog had thickened to a grayish-white mist now. Her shirt was soaked in sweat, sticking to her back, her chest.
And still the apparition, her pendant glowing, kept moving, urging her deeper into the woods.
She could hardly make out the figure in the swirling air, the shadow blending into the tendrils of mist. Her flashlight reflected weirdly off the clouds of fog, making it impossible to see through them, like high beams in a storm. Hell, she could barely even see her own hand.
The only thing drawing her onward was the glowing pendant, moving steadily in one direction, deeper into the bowels of the forest. Her heart hammered in her ears.
And then, without warning, the pendant vanished too. Scarlett cursed under her breath. Why had the spell stopped working?
“Tiffany!” She raised her voice as loud as she dared. The forest didn’t answer.
She reached out in her mind for Tiffany. Please, Tiff.
When the shadow didn’t reappear, she called out in her mind for Minnie, not expecting an answer but wanting one, needing her mentor desperately. Please help me find her.
She whipped around and around. She didn’t even know which way she’d entered. And now she had no way forward.
Where was the shadow? Where was her friend? She held still, listening. But Scarlett couldn’t hear anything. No crash of footsteps, no whispered voices. The longer she stood and listened, the more forest sounds came rushing in. The creak of the trees, and another hungry, long rumble of thunder.
For a split second, a bright flash lit the woods. Lightning. From the moment she’d stepped outside into the mist, Scarlett had wondered if she was the one causing it. Was the lightning an answer to her call for help? Or was it her losing control? Suddenly, Scarlett caught a glimpse of lights in the distance, far ahead.
Another flash illuminated a path through the woods toward the distant lights. A fire, she guessed, based on the way it flickered and danced, the red-gold flames cutting through the gloom of the forest.
Someone else was out here. Someone healthy enough to build a fire. Tiffany. Her heart practically exploded with hope.
I’m coming, Tiffany, she vowed, hoping her friend could sense her presence. She focused on that instead of on the fear that had begun to creep up on her. The nagging sense that something was very, very wrong here.
She kept pressing forward through the trees toward that dancing flame. Deeper into the unknown but closer to her friend.
Or what remained of her.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Vivi
The first thing Vivi became aware of was something sharp digging into her side, like she’d fallen asleep on top of her phone. Then came the cold. She started to shiver, but the movement caused her head to rattle painfully.
A bolt of electric fear shot through Vivi as she jerked her head up, suddenly alert and frantic, but something stopped her from getting to her feet. It felt like invisible weights were attached to her arms and legs.
Vivi wrenched her head to the side and felt the scratch of stiff grass. She was still in the clearing, but the sky was pitch-black. The only illumination came from the flickering candles that’d been arranged in a circle around her. It should’ve been a comforting sight, but unlike the small tapers she’d grown accustomed to, these candles were thick and tall, scattered in an uneven pattern like bloody teeth. And the white bones she’d seen earlier were now carefully arranged around the circle, creating the effect of a ghastly crown.
Dahlia was kneeling a few yards away, smearing something in the grass. In the faint light, Vivi managed to catch a flash of red-stained palms. Her shallow breath caught in her chest when she realized what Dahlia was doing. She was painting a pentagram. In blood.
With Vivi at the dead center.
Heart pounding, she strained to sit up, but her wrists and ankles were bound together by an invisible force. She muttered an escape spell Scarlett had taught her, but when she tried to reach for her magic, the familiar buzz wouldn’t rise to her fingers. She tried again, but the gesture felt empty and futile, like swiping at a phone that’d run out of battery.
“Oh, you’re up,” Dahlia said pleasantly, as if Vivi had just come downstairs for breakfast at Kappa House instead of regaining consciousness in the middle of the woods.