Hundreds of voices howled in pain.

  “You bitch,” snarled the entity, preparing for another attack. “I’ll kill you.”

  “Try,” Alice replied calmly, folding her arms across her chest.

  She was delighted with the effect of her last barrier. She felt the pane of the mirror grow even stronger. It was a wonderful feeling, almost intoxicating. As if she had become indestructible, immortal in her perfect armor. It struck her again that those pointless exercises with dust particles had not been time-fillers at all. They had truly helped her.

  “Remember to drain the energy,” her subconscious prompted.

  Alice gave a slight nod.

  The entity released power from its body again. This time, however, it was not a thin beam, but a powerful wave, strong enough to knock someone off their feet entirely. Alice felt it rolling toward her. She heard the sound of things breaking along the way, scattered chaotically by the manifestation. For a fraction of a second, she felt worried. Could she handle this too?

  She had to.

  She knew it, because if her shield broke, the bones in her body would be mostly shattered, and her skin and insides would be torn apart. That thought sobered her instantly. Yes, she was not omnipotent. She was not immortal. She was not even experienced enough to say for sure that she was safe. She had overestimated herself, overestimated her abilities, but that did not mean defeat yet. No. It was only a sobering thought, a warning from herself to herself, to be remembered later. Right now, she had to act.

  And again, without thinking, without asking questions, she let intuition take over and silently blessed the fact that thoughts did not need to be formed into sentences, and that even deep reflection could take no more than a fraction of a second. That was exactly how much time she had. A fraction of a second to stretch her hands forward and open herself to absorbing the energy.

  She felt pain.

  There was no time to wonder if it had worked. No time to doubt or assess. She focused only on absorption. Fast. Efficient. Life-saving. The wave released by the entity possessing the girl was powerful by human standards, and the pain upon contact was unimaginable, but a single moment was enough to oppose it. The more she drew in, the stronger she became, and the easier it was to push the rest away.

  At first, the entity watched with relish the suffering etched onto the young face, but it did not take long for it to realize what was happening. Hundreds of voices howled in outrage. Alice’s skeleton began to tremble from the force, but she herself smiled wider and wider.

  Again, it did not last long, though in her mind it felt like an eternity. The pain stopped. The wave was partly repelled and partly absorbed. This power was incredible. This power was intoxicating.

  The entity began to scream even louder.

  Now it was Alice’s turn.

  She closed her eyes to better feel the flow of energy around her and within herself. In her imagination, she recreated the beam sent by the entity during the first attack, then strengthened it further. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes, locked gazes with the entity… and then immediately dispersed the energy.

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  She could not do it.

  She could not kill the girl, or rather her body, in front of her parents. How would she explain that afterward? But what else was she supposed to do in such a situation?

  She felt powerless.

  Hundreds of voices laughed, sensing her hesitation. The energy thickened, coalesced, and began to form a new wave, bigger and stronger.

  Damn it all.

  No one had taught her how to deal with situations like this. No one had explained anything to her, and now fate demanded… nothing, actually. Fate demanded nothing. She was the mistress of her own existence. She made her own decisions, and she paid for them herself. Those same decisions had brought her here, and those same decisions would get her out.

  “Worth a try,” she muttered, stepping quickly toward the entity restrained in the chair.

  Sometimes simple methods were best. That was what she believed, what she repeated like a mantra as she placed her hand on the girl’s body and began draining the energy. She was not entirely sure who she was drawing it from. The entity? Or the girl? Whose soul was she touching beneath her fingers?

  “It doesn’t matter,” she thought. What mattered was leaving this house alive and not leaving a corpse behind.

  The entity howled and thrashed, but with every moment it grew weaker. It tried to break free, tried to strike back, but it was useless. The witch held it in a death grip. The strange being had underestimated her, and now it could not escape. Something in its desperation, in the way it fought for its existence, told Alice that she was draining the right entity. For once, her cursed luck held.

  Silence fell.

  The hundreds of voices stopped at once. The possessed girl fainted. Alice collapsed to the ground, curling into a fetal position. For her, the fight was not over yet. That thing was still trying to take her over, to possess her, and she could not allow that. What was it exactly? A demon? She did not know. What she did know was that she had not captured the entire soul. Damn possessions. A fragment remained somewhere far beyond her reach, probably in another dimension. She had no way to reach it.

  What she had absorbed, however, had to be dealt with. She had to split it, consume its power, and sever it completely from the rest.

  She had to survive.

  Several long minutes passed before the breakthrough came. She succeeded. The power that flooded her was immense, overwhelming, magnificent. So much greater than the power of human souls. The thought prompted a brief, somber reflection on how low humans truly stood on the ladder of existence, but she had no time for philosophy now.

  With great effort, she rose from the floor. Every muscle and bone ached. Blood trickled from her nose. She looked at the man slumped against the wall, then at the woman lying on the floor, and finally at the girl, still unconscious.

  They were alive. All of them.

  “What are you?” the girl’s father asked.

  Alice did not answer. She studied him for a moment, then took a deep breath and closed her eyes. At that exact instant, the mother screamed. The girl had regained consciousness.

  “She’ll be disoriented for a while,” Alice said quietly. “She may not remember much of her life. She may have lost some skills. Psychologically, she may be unstable. It’s difficult to assess how much damage the possession caused.”

  She almost laughed at herself. She had no idea how the possession had truly affected the girl. She might just as well end up a drooling shell, defecating on herself, or regress to the mind of a child. This had been her first case of this kind. How could she possibly know?

  And besides, she did not care.

  She had gotten what she came for.

  She wiped her face carefully, mindful not to smear her makeup, then turned toward the door.

  “Please have the payment ready by the end of the month. I’ll send detailed instructions and the exact amount soon,” she said, her voice tired, almost strained.

  She did not wait for a response.

  There were no thanks. No words of gratitude. She had not expected any. They were afraid of her; she felt it clearly in their energy. More afraid of her now than they had ever been of the thing that had lived inside their daughter. They might not understand what had happened. They might not know what Alice had done, or what that entity had done. But instinctively, they knew the truth.

  She had killed it.

  She had not banished it, redeemed it, or sent it back to God. She had destroyed it.

  And that meant she was stronger. More dangerous.

  It did not bother her in the slightest.

  She was, after all, the last witch in this godforsaken world.

  And she was very dangerous.