My fingers twitched to unbolt the door.

“Cruel,” she chided. “I know time and magic have made me monstrous, but there is no need to look at me like that. Open the door, Imogen.” Her lovely voice turned sultry—covetous, possessive. “I’d like to see my king.”

My own possessiveness seized me. The blood bond scalded me from the inside out. Without taking my eyes from her, I reached behind me and searched for the latch. I slid the bolt, and the hut flooded with gray morning light.

“Hello, Theodore.” She spoke to him like a lover, her voice laced with the memory of shared private moments. The tips of my fingers burned as my nails stretched into talons. “Look how you’ve grown. From a sweet-faced boy to a hardened man in so few years. And still just as beautiful.”

Theodore didn’t look at me. Didn’t touch me. Instead, he placed his body between mine and the Mage Seer’s. His voice was knife-edge sharp. “Hello, Rohana.”

“Oh no. You can’t still be angry. After all this time?” Rohana hummed, eerie and low. The notes curled through the air like perfumed incense, intoxicating, stifling. A Siren’s song. Panicked at the sound, at what it could do to Theodore, I gripped his shirt. As if that small restraint could stop him from being pulled toward her.

He didn’t budge. “Not this time,” he said.

Fury beat through me. What had she done to him?

Her song broke into a tittering laugh. “Of course not. Not now that you have her protection. Are you certain you want to give that up?” Rohana’s smile was beastly and snarling, her mouth studded with sharp, blue-tinged teeth.

There was a long pause before he finally spoke. “Yes. I do.”

“Shame.” The orbs of light hovered around her. They were made of nothing but faintly glowing air, swirling and thick. The rattling of her vines filled the room. They wove around themselves, raising her to stand. They coiled around her emaciated legs, around her gauzy, stained wrap, and rolled her toward a rough carved bowl protruding through the floor. It was made of the same rock as the island, as if the hut had been built around it. “Come, then. Give me your blood and your payment. And I will give you guidance.”

I moved my hand from Theodore’s shirt to the bulk of his arm and held fast. My body hesitated at the thought of bleeding myself into yet another ritual bowl. “What will you do with it?”

“You would be worried about that, wouldn’t you?” Her laugh changed. It was rough now, like sand on glass. “I remember the first day I tasted your blood in the water. You must have been just a babe. You’ve been quite generous with it since.”

My fingers dug deeper into Theodore’s arm. “Answer my question.”

“I will not feed off it the way Eusia does, dearest. We will forge no bond. I simply need a drop of it so I can see you clearer. So I know how to help.”

My head went light from quick breaths. I looked up at Theodore, who already watched me. His eyes were grave, but he gave me a small encouraging nod. We moved together toward the rock bowl and Rohana. Something clattered around our feet as we walked. Theodore kept his stalwart gaze up, but I looked down.

Bones. Human bones. And animal. Strewn all over the floor. The orb light caught on their yellow-white shapes, their broken ends, where it looked like the marrow had been sucked out. A whimper shook through my throat. Theodore pressed his arm around mine, pinning it harder to his solid torso.

At the bowl, I finally looked up, directly into Rohana’s eyes. Up close, her face was even more repulsive. The large bags of skin beneath her eyes were rippling and white-lined. They drew up to her eyelids, marring the delicate skin there too.

“It’s from the smoke,” she said abruptly. “From hundreds of years of prophecies. My eyes used to be the same gold as yours. Hair like yours too.” Bitterness colored her words. “We always give something up for power, don’t we?” A vine wove through the air and dropped a small jagged-edged knife into the empty bowl. “Blood.”

I let go of Theodore’s arm and placed the crude blade on the lip of the bowl. I pressed my talon tip into the end of my finger instead and squeezed until a single drop fell into the basin.

“And you, my king,” Rohana said, cloyingly.

I took Theodore’s hand and gave him the same puncture wound. He let a drop of blood fall. Two more vine tendrils snaked toward us. In the coiled end of each was a small vial of black liquid.

“Drink.”

“What will it do?” I asked.

“It will make you float.” Her voice was beautiful, lit by a sinister smile. “It will loosen your lips and free your mind. It will unstring your muscles so that I may truly know you. I do not give prophecies that cannot be received. You must open to me, dearest. You must let me in.”

I could think of nothing more terrifying. My tendons were strung taut, and I shook as I forced myself to take the vial from its coil.

Theodore took his and clamped it in a fist. “If the smoke makes her ill, you do not touch her. You will not rip at her hair or pick at her skin. Your foul mouth will not touch her body. She owes you nothing for your prophecy.”

“Payment is req—”

“Yes, I know.” Theodore’s voice filled the crooked hut. “But she is not yours to take from. She is mine.”

Rohana grimaced, showing her stained teeth. “Not for long, Your Majesty.”

Theodore was terrifying in his stillness. “Agree that you will not touch her. Or I’ll cut your head from your shoulders myself.”

Rohana held his stare for a moment before she gave a sharp nod of agreement. He lifted the vial to his lips and drank. I took his hand to stop mine from shaking and drank from my own. The liquid was thick and muddy and foul. It coated my tongue, my throat. I swallowed, coughed, gagged, trying to clear it, but it clung and only grew thicker. Theodore squeezed my hand as a prickling feeling filled my chest. A boom of thunder rocked through my head. I pressed at my temple, desperate for the feeling to ease.

Another coiled vine rose into the air and emptied the contents of a third vial of black sludge into the bowl where the drops of our blood had fallen. It hissed, bubbled, and then Theodore let go of my hand. In one slime-coated breath, he fell to a knee and groaned.

“Theo?” I took his face in my hands. His skin was cool and slick. “What’s wrong?”

“Sick,” he grumbled. Then he was tilting backward, toward the bones that littered the damp wood floor. I did my best to guide his dead weight down slowly, but he was too large. I slipped, sending us both to the floor with a rattling crash.

I moaned from the pain, but it was the blood bond in my gut that had me clambering, fighting my way back to Rohana. “What did you do to him?” I seethed at her through the tendrils of smoke that were lifting from the bowl.

“He’s all right, my sweet,” Rohana said, lowering her face to the smoke. “He expected it.”

“Expected it?” I lunged for her, but her vines yanked her back. “Undo it.”

Whatever I’d drunk from that vial was beginning to affect me too. It made me feel like I was sinking. Like time and the world around me were suddenly submerged in thick water, rippling and slow. I blinked, trying to clear the way Rohana’s visage began to blur.

“I slipped him some hedera. I cannot undo it.” Her empty eyes locked with mine. “Payment is required before we begin. Magic must be fed, Imogen, and I know my God-king very well.” She gave a chuckle that only stoked my blistering anger. “He’ll prefer paying me while unconscious.”

The three glowing orbs winked out. There was abject darkness, filled only by the slithering, rattling sound of her vines. My senses were so overwhelmed that I couldn’t place where in the little room she was. Then Theodore’s body jerked at my feet.

I looked down to see the faintest bloom of yellow light. A pale arm, snaked in vines, hooked over Theodore’s torso. Rohana was there, sliding her decrepit body up his. Her bony fingers dove into his thick hair, gripping like she would pull some of it out. Her lips scraped up his cheek, teeth settling against his ear.