The Keep (The Secret of Spellshadow Manor #4)(3)

Finally, just as Alex thought his nerves couldn’t take any more, Lintz stopped them at the edge of a wide, bright common room. The walls were pale and dry, and sunlight shone on the flagstones. It would have been close to pleasant, had it not been eerily empty.

A sudden wave of nausea crashed over Alex, and a stabbing pain coursed through him. Wincing, he pressed his hand against the stone wall to steady himself, dragging air into his lungs, his vision growing spotty.

What’s happening to me? he wanted to scream. Underneath his palm, he felt an intense pulse of power. His anti-magic escaped, unbidden, from between his fingers and snaked into the wall, seeking out the source of the thrumming energy as snowflakes flurried from beneath his skin and drifted to the ground.

Turning back to the group, Alex saw the blood drain from Lintz’s face.

“Alex? Oh no, no—” Lintz stuttered. The professor looked toward the walls, which had suddenly begun to glow with a bright red light. The stone crackled, and something almost liquid emerged from within.

It was too late to run. The red fog surged toward the group in undulating waves. Lintz opened his mouth, as if to warn them, but the fog lunged toward him and poured itself down his throat, silencing his words.

Alex watched, horrified, as the fog swarmed around his friends, soaking into their skin, rushing into their eyes, flooding their nostrils and mouths, making their bodies shudder. He didn’t know what to do, so he just stood there, holding his breath.

Once the fog had faded away, returning to the stone, Alex glanced at each one of his friends in turn. Their bodies were no longer shaking. Sighing with relief, he hoped the fog had only been some kind of warning.

Then, the screaming began.





Chapter 2





The whole prison erupted in shrieks that made the very walls tremble. Alex gaped as the faces of his friends distorted into all manner of terrifying masks, their eyes flashing wildly, like those of spooked horses. They looked like changelings—twisted versions of themselves.

Panicking, Alex moved toward Ellabell, who seemed frozen to the spot, rooted by a paralyzing fear. Hoping to calm her, he reached out to grasp her hand. She whipped toward him and screamed directly in his face, clawing at his neck like a savage animal. When he tried to grab her by the shoulders, she howled, snapping her teeth at him. With the way her eyes darted around, like there were creatures all around her, Alex knew she wasn’t seeing him as he was. Whatever it was she saw, fear was driving her to fight back.

Alex skirted Ellabell’s frantic blows and retreated to the center of the room, breathing hard. His gaze trailed over to Jari, who was crouched and huddled in a corner, his hands over his ears as he mouthed silent words: “Go away. Please, go away.”

On the other side of the room, Natalie was staring blankly at one particular section of the common area, tears brimming in her dark eyes, a look of utter despair on her face. She raised a hand in the direction of whatever she was looking at, as if trying to reach out and touch it. Her eyes widened and she let out a harrowing shriek.

On the floor, Aamir was trying to physically fight something off, side-stepping and falling backward beneath the movements of some invisible demon. Lintz wept openly in the center of the room, whispering something that sounded a lot like “Derhin,” before collapsing in a heap, where he twisted and turned, as if consumed by fire.

Everywhere Alex looked, his friends and mentors were fending off unseen horrors, and he had never felt so helpless.

The only one who seemed to be mentally battling the illusions was Demeter, who was standing still against the far wall, his fists balled so tightly that his knuckles had turned a stark white.

“This isn’t real, this isn’t real, this isn’t real,” Demeter intoned, over and over again.

Alex couldn’t watch anymore. Running toward Ellabell again earned him a smack to the face and several keenly placed punches to the body, but he had an idea he hoped would work. He took a vicious scratch to the neck but managed to grab her wrists, feeding his anti-magic up her arms, focusing his mind to find the errant strands of fog that had taken hold inside her, before dissipating each one. Once they had all evaporated, he ran to the others, avoiding their flailing arms and hoping their deafening screams wouldn’t implode his eardrums as he fed his anti-magic through their bodies, forcing the wispy strands of red fog away.

The excessive use of anti-magic left him shaky. His weakened state was no surprise, really, considering that he had removed a small piece of his soul during the fight against Alypia. He was mostly running on adrenaline now, but he soldiered on, sweating profusely as his muscles ached and his lungs burned, bringing his friends back to reality one by one. Absorbing the fog made his skin crawl, but it didn’t seem to affect him the way it had the others. His Spellbreaker qualities, he assumed, were acting as a buffer, preventing the fog from seeking him out and putting its spell upon him.

After he had dissipated the last of the red strands, Alex sank to the ground, exhausted. The rest of the prison still echoed with screams from the other residents, the sounds burning into Alex’s mind.

Lintz was the first to rally the group. “With me!” he insisted, running for one of the doors.

They all followed, Alex falling behind, helped along by Aamir and Ellabell. Lintz hurried them out of the common room and through a door on the far side, entering a smaller, circular room that seemed to be inside a large tower of some sort. Lintz quickly urged them up a set of stairs to another room, above the first.