I Only Summon Villainesses

’I know. I can feel it through you.’ She paused. ’Trust Cindy.’

’I’m trusting a horse that looks permanently angry with me through a storm of shadow creatures in a collapsing spirit gate. I should consider writing a book on Trust.’

’You are being dramatic.’

’I THINK THE SITUATION WARRANTS A LITTLE DRAMA, KASSIE.’

The darkness thinned.

But not all at once, gradually, like surfacing from deep water. First I could see my hands. Then Cindy’s mane. Then the outline of the canyon walls, but wrong, different and wider. The air tasted different too.

Then light poured into my vision... real light, not Maggie’s flames or the sickly glow of the dying gate, but actual open sky pouring through a gap in the stone ahead.

Maggie was already through it.

Cindy burst through the gap and the world opened up around us. Wide sky and open air, the canyon behind us was groaning, stones tumbling inward, the entire structure folding like a house of cards collapsing in slow motion.

The shadow creatures poured out alongside us, spreading across the open ground like spilled ink before thinning, dispersing, sinking into the earth and the cracks of the rock and the natural shadows of the world outside the gate. Within seconds, they were gone. As if they had never existed.

I pulled Cindy to a halt. The destrier snorted and stamped, her hooves leaving scorch marks on the grass.

Maggie stood ahead, Nisha and Milo still draped over her shoulders. She was watching the gate collapse behind us with an expression that might have been curiosity.

I slumped forward on Cindy’s neck, pressing my face into the white-smoke mane. The heat was almost comforting now.

’We made it.’

’Yes,’ Kassie said through the Link. Her voice carried something that I could almost, almost call relief. ’You did.’

I lay there for a moment, breathing. Feeling my ribs complain and my lungs burn and every part of my body protest the last hour of existence.

Then I lifted my head and looked at the three unconscious girls draped behind me, at Nisha and Milo slung over Maggie’s shoulders, at the collapsing mouth of the gate behind us still spitting stone and dust.

’That storm of darkness... it led us out.’

It had not attacked or consumed us like I thought it would. Instead, it had escaped and also helped us escape too.

’Why?’

The gate groaned one final time, and then it folded inward on itself with a sound like the earth swallowing its own tongue. Stone crushed against stone, dust erupted outward in a final breath, and then...

Silence fell on the atmosphere... and the gate was gone.

And I had far more questions than answers.