Sorceress Read Online Free PDF Page B

hesitated. She was flustered, Asa noticed. For a girl her age, Nadia was uncommonly self-possessed. But there was something about her this evening—fear, loneliness, andlonging, too: Demons could almost smell that kind of need.
    Which made him think of Verlaine glancing over her shoulder at him, and of the one and only time they’d kissed . . .
    His train of thought was broken as Nadia took her place in the circle. “What kinds of spells? Dark magic?”
    “No. By now you must have realized much dark magic is simple. Elegant.” Elizabeth smiled. “Spells to influence the weather are not inherently dark, and they can be far more complex.”
    “The weather? This is all about the weather?” Nadia looked as though she wanted to laugh. Had she understood the work ahead, Asa thought, she would not have been so amused.
    Serenely, Elizabeth looked up at the ceiling—exposed boards and rotting plaster, laced with countless cobwebs—and held out her hands. Asa took one of them; Nadia the other. When he and Nadia joined their fingers in turn, they exchanged a swift glance. She looked bewildered; he tried to look sympathetic.
    “We are going to command the winds,” Elizabeth whispered. “We are going to still the sea. And then, we will summon the rain.”

3
    THE RAIN CAME DOWN, AND DOWN, AND DOWN.
    Endless sheets of it, sweeping like silvery curtains along the street. Nadia hugged herself as she stood with Asa and Elizabeth on Elizabeth’s porch, watching the gutters turn into small rivers, and the puddles in every yard welling wider.
    “You could at least have told us to bring raincoats,” Asa said.
    Nadia stifled her smile, but Elizabeth was, of course, unmoved. “If you can’t endure getting wet, the days to come are going to be beyond you.” She glanced sideways at Asa, her eyes cold and flat. “But we already knew that.”
    Asa turned away, casually, as though he hadn’t heard. But Nadia saw the tension in his shoulders, remembered how his expression had always darkened whenever they reminded him that he was “on Elizabeth’s leash.”
    I think he hates this as much as I do.
    “You can leave,” Elizabeth said to Asa, then turned away from him as though he were already gone. “Come, Nadia. You and I have more to do.”
    Nadia followed Elizabeth back inside the house, casting one glance behind her to see Asa’s reaction—but he was already gone. Probably he’d clapped his hands together and stopped time in the eerie way he had, then strolled home while dodging the raindrops hanging around him in midair.
    As they walked back into Elizabeth’s main room, Nadia said, “The days to come—what will they be like?”
    Elizabeth turned back toward her with a smile on her face that looked almost genuine. “After the One Beneath walks into this world? Glorious. The bridge between the demonic realm and the mortal realm will allow the demonic realm to triumph.”
    “Will they become the same? Like, just one place?” Nadia couldn’t wrap her head around the idea of the whole world becoming hell.
    “Not exactly. Humans will still live here. They will have the same feelings, the same wishes. But they will inhabit a transformed world. One that answers to no natural law, one where they will forever know the One Beneath in all His power and caprice. As He wills it, so shall they suffer, and from their suffering He will grow even stronger. His reign will be eternal.”
    The image in Nadia’s mind showed a world devastated and terrifying, but still itself. Like The Walking Dead exceptworse. As terrible as that seemed, she almost felt relieved. No matter how dangerous this world became, no matter how much pain people endured here, it had to be better than hell.
    “About time you started asking questions,” Elizabeth said. “Is there anything else you would like to learn tonight?”
    She thought of Asa, making jokes before he walked out into the rain. He looked like any other guy. Spoke like one. It was hard for her