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Crouching, I stepped inside and, looking around, I made sure it was the same passageway I saw in my dreams. Straightening to my full height, I fumbled my way to another set of stairs, which should lead to the basement. I had already taken the first step down when I saw that someone was waiting for me below.

She was missing one eye, her lips were the same grisly shade of red in the photo I had seen of her, and patches of her vein-less skin had been burnt to a crisp.

Elsa.

Once, she was a mentally abused girl whose parents had killed her by encasing her in a wood, turning her into a doll, before burning her alive.

Now, she was a ghost who left her wooden shell every night, not understanding that her little games had turned the place she grew up in into a ghost town.

Behind her, the shadows moved.

Elsa was not alone.

Whirling around, I ran as fast as I could, but Elsa suddenly popped up in front of me, in the way only ghosts could.

I stumbled back with a scream and felt myself falling, tumbling down the stairs.

Then everything went black.

I WOKE UP WITH MY HANDSand feet bound on the floor. A fire roared from the fireplace, and the sight arrested me. I could almost feel the whole world turning orange as I continued looking at it.

“I knew you’d come.”

My head snapped towards the sound, the hairs in the back of my nape standing up as I tried to search for the voice’s owner in the shadows. It was a female’s voice, but that was all I could tell.

Alexandru? Master?

“Don’t bother contacting your Master with your blood bond. It won’t work here.”

I tried not to show how her words terrified me. I really was alone then.

“You’re quite the headstrong girl,” she remarked in a chillingly pleasant tone. “You remind me of someone I hate. You’re also remarkably, irritatingly selfless, and you know what that makes you?” The woman in the dark chuckled, the sound making my skin crawl. “Predictable.It makes you predictable, and so I knew, if I kept to the plan, it was only a matter of time before you’d have your visions and you’d come to try and save everyone alone.”

“Who are you?” I squinted my eyes, trying to see her, but she was one with the darkness. In the periphery of my eye, I saw Elsa in the opposite corner, playing with her hair, watching us speak with a bored expression on her disfigured face. I forced myself to look at her, making contact. She was my Plan B in case something happened and I needed someone to help me.

When the woman in the shadows didn’t answer, I said, “You made the demon your familiar, didn’t you?”

A hiss, and I knew I had guessed right. This woman, whoever she was, sounded too bitter for a pure demon. It was too human a feeling, and pure demons only typically knew of anger and greed.

“Why would you do something like that?” I asked, buying myself time as I put Plan B into action. “It requires so much sacrifice and—-”

“And yet you ruined it,”she hissed.

Something in the shadows started to move.

“It was a great sacrifice, a risk I took because there was something I needed.”

“Me?”

“Yes,” the faceless woman spat.

“Because I’m what I am?”

Another cackle. “You mean a soul seer?”

I didn’t answer.

The cackle turned into a soulless laugh. “How naïve you are. You think not answering will confuse me? I wouldn’t have come this far, Zari Baltimore, if I were unsure. You are a soul seer—-”