The whispers coiled around me like smoke, curling through the black.
“She is becoming more… more…”
Their voices hissed over one another, broken and jagged, until they formed a chorus.
“More powerful. More dangerous. Ours.”
Figures pulled themselves out of the dark—hunters, their eyes hollow pits, their mouths stretched too wide. They moved like shadows with teeth.
Something dragged between them.
A woman.
I froze.
Aunt Marie.
Her hair flew wild, her lips shaping words I couldn’t hear, spells half-formed as her arms flung out desperately. She was still fighting, still trying to hold them back. But the hunters laughed, shrill and cruel, their shadows rising taller as they closed around her.
“No!” My scream was swallowed in the dark.
They tore into her. Light erupted from her chest—
