“LOOK OUT!” Célie’s unexpected shriek nearly rent the sky, but it was too late. We couldn’t stop it. Paralyzed with fear, we stood rooted as Morgane rose up to meet us. As she lifted her hand to thrust a dagger in my heart. As Claud blasted us backward, and her lips curled into a macabre smile.

“Oh no.” Her ghostly laughter reverberated through the grove. “Oh no, no, no.”

The ground beneath us began to quake.

“It seems you’ve broken the rules, darling.” Tutting, she shook her head. “Old ones.”

Sickening realization dawned. “He’s intervened,” I repeated on a whisper.

As one, Coco and I turned to Claud, who stood alone in the street, his face a mask of calm. The cobblestones cracked and fissured around him. The earth trembled. He looked us squarely in the eyes. “Run.”

The Chasm

Reid

“Would you run?” Incredulous, I glanced over my shoulder at Beau, who lagged behind. He clutched his ribs with one hand. With each stride, he nearly impaled himself with his Balisarda.

He’d stolen it from Philippe.

We hadn’t bothered to free him.

“You run.” Panting, he gestured around the empty street with his other hand. It held another knife. “I can’t fucking breathe, and if you haven’t noticed—there’s no one here!”

I scowled and pushed onward.

He had a point.

This street—that street, every street we’d passed for the last quarter hour—had been virtually empty. We’d succeeded in sequestering most pedestrians inside their homes, inside shops. Inside any buildings we could fortify. Father Achille and Johannes Pan had converted the boucherie next door into an infirmary. They treated the injured there. They gathered the dead.

The witches had . . . withdrawn.

It’d happened slowly. Almost imperceptibly. One moment, we’d fought scores of them. Too many to count. Werewolves and huntsmen, men and women—even melusines, rising up from the Doleur like sea serpents—had fought tooth and nail to contain them. As the hour had passed, however, each had slipped from the fray one by one. Slipped through our fingers. As if answering some unspoken call.

My own breath quickened with each step. They couldn’t have simply vanished.

My voice hardened with resolution. “We need to find them.”

“We need to find our wretched little sisters.” Waving his knife for me to stop, Beau clutched his knees. I scowled, doubling back, and pulled him onward. We would find them. If not, we’d regroup with Lou and Coco, with Father Achille and Jean Luc and Célie, and we’d determine another strategy.

When we rounded the corner, however, all plans of planning fled.

At the end of the street, a horde of witches collected in the shadows.