Despite the exhaustion, despite the distress, I sprang to action.
Cuffing her to the bed and force-feeding her the tincture we’d already prepared had never felt more devastating. This girl who was soft at heart, who was both the vast, dark woods and the glorious light of a full moon, who was angry at all the thousand tiny ways she’d been hurt in her life.
The moment we had almost shared, stolen by a world that would punish her endlessly for that anger.
It was too soon. Not even ten days since the last ritual. Alice was almost out of time.
I thought of her fingertips on my neck as she fastened the choker clasp, of the way she’d told Torquil the bookseller how smart I was, of the way she’d defended my honour to the hockey player who nearly killed me. I thought of all the unexpected ways in which she had become important to me, and all the ways in which I’d failed to save her.
When the monster started talking in its hoarse, awful timbre, detailing all the ways in which it wanted to kill me, I didn’t stay for long. I wrapped myself in Alice’s houndstooth coat, drinking in the red wine and rosemary scent of her, and left Willowood with a singular purpose in mind.
I’d had enough. I was coming for Dacre.