The Blood Spell (Ravenspire, #4)(65)

“I never come down here.” Blue’s throat felt like it was stuffed with cotton, and the panic took over again, sending shivers across her skin. She looked away from Dinah and tried to simply breathe.

Dinah released Blue’s hair and cocked her head. “Are you afraid of this place? Is that why you tried to refuse me?”

Blue clenched her jaw and remained silent. Hang this monstrous woman and her demands. What Blue felt, what she feared, belonged to her alone.

“What happened, Blue?” Dinah’s voice was soft and compelling. “Did you get locked in here as a child?”

Blue drew in a deep breath. “If you find what you’re looking for, will you leave me alone?”

Dinah’s smile prickled the hairs on the back of Blue’s neck. “Oh yes. When I find what I’m looking for, I’ll leave.”

Something about Dinah’s tone left a slick, oily coat of unease in Blue’s stomach, but she ignored it. If all Dinah needed from her were a few of Mama’s old spells that used rare ingredients, Blue would somehow find the courage to turn the root cellar inside out searching for them. As far as Blue knew, Mama had never designed a dangerous potion, so while Dinah might be able to make some coin off it, there would really be no harm in letting her take it.

Not that Blue could stop her anyway.

“I guess we should start with the crates. I think they’ve been here the longest,” Blue said.

Hours passed as the two dragged down crate after crate. They found old clothes that might have belonged to Blue as a child. Books full of childish drawings and early attempts at recipes, all with a big B scrawled in the lower right-hand corner. Parchment with old bills of sale from the shop, Wintermass decorations, and a dusty supply of knitted socks with holes in the heels, a darning needle threaded through one of the socks as if someone had stopped repairing it midstitch.

“This is useless.” Dinah glared at Blue as if holding her personally responsible for their failure to find any of Mama’s things. Dread sank into Blue as she watched Dinah turn from the crates to size up the chests in the center of the room.

She couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit on the packed dirt floor again, pulling items from the chests as if the thing that lived in her nightmares wasn’t pressing into her skin.

“It’s past bedtime,” Blue said, her voice shaking. She pushed the last crate back against the wall, her hands like ice, her breath clogging her throat as the room started collapsing in on her.

“There will be no sleep until we finish searching this place.”

Blue tried to stand. Tried to find her balance as the walls rushed toward her and darkness loomed at the edge of her vision.

Her heart was thunder trapped in her chest.

A noose of panic was tightening around her throat, cutting off her air.

She closed her eyes, and wintermint saturated the air. The ladder twisted away from the wall. And Mama . . .

Blue’s eyes flew open.

“I can’t stay here.” She choked the words out as she stumbled past Dinah, her vision going gray at the edges.

“Blue!” Dinah reached for her, digging her fingers into Blue’s arm, but panic was a monster with teeth and claws, and Blue wrenched herself out of Dinah’s grip.

“You come back here this instant. We have to go through those chests.” Dinah’s voice was full of fury.

Blue rushed for the ladder, smacking her knee into one of the chests and nearly toppling to the floor.

“No, no, no.” She breathed the words under her breath. Latched on to them as if the litany could save her from the nightmare that was closing in on her.

Mama lying at her feet, broken and bleeding. Blue screaming for help that never came. Magic in her blood that couldn’t do a single useful thing on the day she needed it most.

Mama trying to smile at her. Singing for her one last time.

And then Mama’s chest falling silent, and her face going slack until she barely resembled Mama anymore at all.

“I will punish you in ways you can’t even imagine if you leave this cellar!”

Blue’s hands found the ladder’s rungs. Hung on with desperate strength, though her palms were slick with sweat.

She moved up a rung, her body trembling like a leaf caught in a rainstorm.

The darkness pressed closer, and there was a strange ringing in her ears.

She couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t stay in the root cellar another instant.

Dinah screamed at her as Blue scrambled up the ladder and burst through the door into the kitchen. Her knees gave out, and she collapsed onto the floor, but the panic that owned her wouldn’t let her stay there. Climbing to her feet again, she ran out of the kitchen and down the hall toward the front door, Pepperell at her heels.

The house was dark and quiet. Halette and Jacinthe had long since retired for the night. Kellan had made it clear to Dinah that Blue should have her bedroom back again, and Dinah had grudgingly told Blue she could sleep on the floor while Halette took the bed, but Blue couldn’t stand the thought of being inside. Of having walls around her or other people close by.

Snatching her summer cloak from the hook beside the door, she let herself onto the porch, closing the door after Pepperell, who hopped down the front steps and began sniffing the puffer bloom bushes, whose flowers were slowly opening to the moonlit sky.