Page 91 of Spirit Storm

Nobody speaks.

Because there isn't anything to say. The weight of it is perfectly, terribly clear.

Every lockstone. Every location the original Key had carried alone for a lifetime, that her descendants had never written down, never preserved, because the knowledge was never meant to leave one person—all of it was known to the demon who had spent years engineering precisely this outcome.

I handed it right to him.

Not carelessly. Not through negligence. I had fought and bled and tried everything I could, and it hadn't mattered. The game had been fixed before I was born, and every single choice I'd made had moved me one step further along a path Tharuzel had already laid out.

Lily squeezes onto the bed beside me and wraps her arm around my shoulders, and I feel Violet's hand on my knee. Asher is watching me, and Wylder is still leaning forward with his elbows on his knees and his worried green eyes steady on mine.

All of them here. All of them knowing what I’d done. All of them looking at me with so much compassion and pity, I want to scream.

"I need you to go," I say.

"Poppy—"

"Please." The word cracks right down the middle. "I just… I need a minute. Please."

There's a long pause, then quietly, they get up and move toward the door. Wylder's hand brushes my shoulder as he passes. Asher pauses at the door like he might say something, then thinks better of it and follows.

The door closes.

The latch clicks.

I pull my knees to my chest, press my face into my hands, and fall completely apart.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Time passes, but I'm lost to it. I don't know if it's been minutes or hours since I asked to be alone, just that my entire body is shaking, the pressure inside my skull is pounding the more I cry, and my chest is so tight, I can barely force air through my lungs to keep from passing out.

Tharuzel is loose in the world because I failed.

The thirteen lockstone chambers are exposed because I failed.

I signed a blood contract to keep my sisters safe, and I failed at that, too.

Not that any of that will matter soon. Tharuzel has the locations of the thirteen lockstones, and I have no doubt he's out there on a mission to bring them all down.

What have I done?

The knowledge of every single location was pressed into my ancestry like rings in old wood. I didn't know I carried it, and couldn't stop him from taking it. He told me he'd won the moment I signed the contract, and he was right. I accepted the blood bond because I didn't see any other choice and thought I could manage it.

I thought I was being strategic.

I thought I was protecting people.

I pull my legs tighter into my chest and still feel like I've been shoved off the edge of a cliff and am in freefall toward Hell.

Energy tingles over my skin and the room shifts.

It's nothing dramatic or alarming. One moment I'm lying on a recovery bed in the Arcana Academy infirmary with the smell of antiseptic and healing herbs filling the air, and the next, I'm lying on a lumpy green couch with the smells of lavender, cinnamon, and old wood enveloping me.

I sit up and adjust the crocheted throw.

I'm on Birdie's sofa… the one with the permanent dent on the left cushion where she always sits. It's draped in approximately seven blankets of clashing colors and lined with small, embroidered pillows shaped like cats.

Wind chimes hang in the window above the radiator, and three shelves of troll dolls line the far wall, their absurd hot pink, lime, and fluorescent orange hair backlit by the warm glow of the lava lamp in the corner.