She opened her eyes, skyfire sparking from her hands, and screamed into blustering wind, “Well? What are you waiting for? Come and get me!”

She stretched out her arms and used what little strength she had to send bolts of skyfire streaming up toward the seething storm above. In response, she felt a searing rush of hostility and hatred bear down on her from overhead.

She ignored it, blasting another round of skyfire into the air, though this time she could only manage one. A savage shriek carried on the wind, but when she looked up, she saw something incandescent in the sky above her coming closer.

It was so different from the last time she had been this close to the heart of a storm. Then it had been an innocent, cheerful skyfire storm that bore the soul of a child. This soul … the closer it came, the more she wanted to run. The spirit’s presence was foul and potent—she did not feel anger or greed or bitterness or any of the other usual emotions that rolled off the darker souls. Instead, it exuded a cruel curiosity. This soul wanted to cause pain not out of revenge or envy, but because it liked it.

She did not want this soul inside her, to become part of her. It would rot her from the inside out. But what choice did she have? If she refused, the Stormlord would know she had no intention of helping him and he would have no reason to keep her alive. He might even send the storm he had already created toward Pavan. If she managed to take it, and that was a big if considering how weak and cold she was at this point, that would mean one less dark soul for the Stormlord to put to use in his war against Stormlings. Though she knew he had many more.

As the gleaming heart approached—swirls of luminous light mimicking the larger storm that raged around her—she knew what she had to do.

In the desert, she had been able to control the skyfire storm to some extent. When a hunter took the heart of a storm, it was an all-out battle to see which heart was stronger—that of the human or the tempest. But with her first soul, she had ordered it to submit, and it had listened.

She did not know if the same would be true today. She had a feeling this soul would put up a much stronger fight. But all the same, she took a step forward, her bare feet sinking painfully into the drifts of snow.

“Come to me,” she commanded, drawing on that indefinable otherness inside that she used to communicate with spirits.

The storm’s heart moved even closer, hovering just an arm’s reach above her head now.

“Closer,” she demanded, pushing her will outside herself and toward the twisted, poisonous soul that controlled the still-falling snow.