Drawing myself back to the present, I flinch away from a luminescent bat that tries to land on my head before I focus on the others. Everett is on the bed studying a map, and Baelfireis setting some kind of steaming bean-and-rice dish on a small table in the room.
“I mean, she isliterallyheartless,” I clarify.
Before Maven returns, I quickly explain what I overheard, omitting the arousing encouragements that I hope will give our keeper new filthy ideas.
When I finish, we're all quiet. Everett brushes frost off his hands as Baelfire grips his own head, scowling.
Crypt pulls out his enchanted lighter, flicking it open to study the flame. “Amadeus’s head necromancer has Maven’s heart. He went on the run with it when he deserted the Nether after the Divide fell.”
We all stare at him.
“Hang on, her original heart still exists? How do you know that?” Everett demands.
“A little birdie told me.”
“Share the true reason,” I snap. “If it regards our keeper, it regards all of us.”
Crypt glances at me and then away, pensive. “Like our girl said, her would-be-father owns a sadistic sense of humor. He preserved her heart and kept it on display on his mantle. She told me that herself,” he mutters.
“Ondisplay?”Baelfire snarls, as incensed as the rest of us have quickly become.
Crypt nods. “It was what I went looking for last, before Syntyche hunted me down. I wanted to have every remaining trace of her here, at her honorary grave. Since Silas was useless, I persuaded another Nether escapee necromancer until he made me a spell to track her heart.”
So that's what he was trying to get me to track when I was deep in the throes of insanity.
Baelfire snorts, looking at the incubus. “By persuaded, you mean tortured.”
“Naturally.”
“And you killed him the second he handed the spell over,” Everett guesses.
“Of course,” Crypt huffs. “What do you take me for? An amateur? At any rate, the spell led me on a wild goose chase. I pieced enough together to understand that Dagon was obsessed with what he called hismasterpiece.”
Dagon.
I remember that name, from Crypt’s memories of Maven’s past nightmares. Recalling some of the horrors that obsessive necromancer inflicted on my blood blossom, I grit my teeth.
Crypt sees my ire and nods, his own expression darkening. “When he caught wind of what became of her, he stole her heart from Amadeus and went on the run with it. I had only barely scratched the surface of his true whereabouts when Syntyche caught up to me. Poor timing, that.”
We’re all quiet for a moment, considering this new information. I begin pacing, swatting aside a few imps as I think. But the more I think, the more my ire multiplies.
“That necromantic prick tortured Maven for years,” I seethe. “He oversaw her entire experimental transformation into a revenant and enjoyed her pain.”
“What?” Everett snaps as the room instantly grows colder.
Baelfire snarls in fury and quickly grips his head as agony crosses his features. It’s clear that he’s struggling to stay coherent instead of falling to the beast’s control once more.
“How the fuck do you know that and more importantly, how are we going to kill this motherfucker?” he demands raggedly.
Crypt shoots me a warning look. It’s easily interpreted as a violent threat to harm me if I breathe a word about seeing inside his past memories of Maven’s dreams. So instead of expounding on the matter, I focus on Baelfire’s latter question.
“We’ll track him again,” I decide, stopping my pacing. “If I use some of Maven’s DNA to track her heart, we can?—”
“English,” Baelfire reminds me.
I realize that at some point, I swapped to something between the Nether-tongue and…I’m not even sure what that was. Probably a language the mocking fools inside my head devised. Carefully choosing my words this time, I look at each of my fellow quintet members.
“Maven would never ask this of us. She would handle it herself, alone, to prevent us from being in harm’s way at the hands of this necromancer. But I will not allow that decrepit, twistedscútrácheanywhere near her again. I’ll cast the spell. We’ll retrieve Maven’s heart, and then we’ll end his putrid existence.”
