The bond between them was still missing. Sometimes he thought he felt it, some spider-silk-thin connection. But other times he couldn’t sense it at all in the impenetrable rubble of his fractured mind. They had been apart for so long. Maybe the time and distance had weakened it.
Three days after he’d stopped the masons’ treatments, another memory surfaced:
His human mate on the balcony of Maiden Hall, surrounded by growing plants. The look on her face when he’d destroyed them, like he’d torn out her heart and stomped on it.
But she’d been brave. She’d stood up to him despite barely reaching his chest, chin lifted like she was ready to fight him with her bare hands if necessary.
“I enjoyed this even less, I assure you,” he’d told her, the closest he could come to an apology given the circumstances.
The memory splintered to nothing there but more came the next night. Swooping down on her in the streets. The way she’d tried to duck past him. How desperately he’d wanted to know her true scent beneath all those mundane ones. Flying into the air with her in his arms.
And then, like a dam breaking, her name rushed through him.
Idabel.
His mate’s name was Idabel.
He was flying before conscious thought caught up, plummeting into the night. Foul weather slapped him in the face, but he barely felt it. He took the exterior route to Maiden Hall, landing on that same balcony where he’d first destroyed her world.
The roof was covered in a legal gardens now. Neat rows of approved vegetables soaked up the rain, nothing like the wild beauty she’d cultivated. His chest ached, seeing them. Seeing what could have been.
He barged inside, found his way to a hall where human women slept in narrow, curtained beds.Where is she?
A keeper appeared, lamp in hand and a lone clothes moth trailing after her. She squinted at him with suspicion from under her hood. “You’re not supposed to be here. What do you want?”
“Idabel.” Her name felt rusty on his tongue. “I’m looking for a human named Idabel.”
The keeper’s expression soured further. “No one by that name lives here.”
“She lived here. Before—” Before the war. Before he’d claimed her. “Six years ago.”
“Twenty-five generations!” the pesky little moth squeaked, not that the keeper could understand it.
“Maidens come and go. I don’t remember them all.”
“Surely you keep records.” But before he could press further, another voice whispered from a bed nearby.
“You mean the one who took up with a gargoyle?” A single eye peered out at him between two curtains. “Long, dark hair, worked in the Tower?”
Brandt nodded, heart thudding. The keeper hissed at the girl to get back to bed, but she pushed her bed curtain open even further. “She hasn’t lived here for years.”
His heart stuttered. He was so close, but still so far. “Do you know where she is now?”
“You need to go, sir. There are no males allowed in the sleeping areas. And you are dripping on the floor.” The keeper moved to block the woman from view, but she’d already pointed toward the Tower.
“The rookery. That’s what I heard. Got herself a roost there with her—”
“Bed! Now!” The matron shoved the woman back inside, yanked the curtains shut, then turned on Brandt. “Good night! If you cause any more disturbance, I’ll have a word with the Nadir.”
He had no doubt the self-important human would enjoy an audience with the Nadir, but he was already out the door and airborne, her protests fading behind him as the cold rain splashed against his wings.
The rookery. Why would Idabel live in the rookery? It was for low-ranking gargoyles, the clanless, the ones who hadn’t earned eyries. It wasn’t for humans of any station. Unless...
Unless she’d mated another gargoyle in his absence.
The thought nearly sent him crashing into the Tower wall.
Would she?Humans were different. Maybe when he’d been gone so long, presumed dead, and she couldn’t feel the bond anymore…
