“Your magic would be superior to mine here, given my condition. The destructive force of revenant magic could shatter this easily.”
My keeper pulls an adorable face. “Too bad we’re short a revenant.”
I’m surprised. If she’s no longer a revenant, what magic did she use at the doors to get in here?
Then it clicks in my murky mind. As a demigoddess, she has holy magic.
My attention slips to the bounty hunter, who’s glaring at me. He can tell I’m guessing why he was helping her with the door.
Intriguing. Perhaps Asher Douglas is a saint. That might explain why he has no quintet despite being four years older than I am. I doubt saints typically become soldiers of fortune, but what do I know?
Turning back to Crypt, I again touch Maven’s blood amulet around my neck for an additional dose of clear-mindedness. Whatever the state of her magic, she wants me to retrieve theincubus I once loathed from this wretched snare of masterly death magic, so I will.
Or I’ll die trying.
Yes. Die here saving this scum like the fool you are,my father growls in my head.This one was the death of me, so it is only right that he should bring your end, too.
Ignoring the voices and bracing myself for what I might discover, I call blood magic to my fingertips and reach into the malediction swirling around the Nightmare Prince. At first touch, a flurry of familiar spells tingles across my skin, but foremost is a spell I studied at length many years ago, in the Sanctuary.
Dormiens mortem—the sleeping death.
As a cross between a suspension spell, prolonged death, and the deepest stage of sleep, the sleeping death is a brutally potent spell that the rest of this malediction was crafted around. Undoing it will require entering the spell itself by stepping into the victim’s dreams or memories to reach the heart of the spell.
The fortunate thing aboutdormiens mortemis that undoing the dozen other interwoven hexes will be less complicated than I expected.
The unfortunate thing is that less than half of the victims of the sleeping death wake from it without dying.
If I tell Maven exactly what malediction this is, she’ll likely know that and worry more.
So I don’t tell her. Instead, I shut my eyes and let my newly-revived blood magic take the lead, flooding into the sleeping death and taking my mad awareness with it—into the subconscious mind of Crypt DeLune.
18
SILAS
I immediately learnthis is not a pleasant place to be.
Whatever memory I just stumbled into, it’s stained with blood, cigarette smoke, and a putrid stench I cannot even put a name to. I’m in a crumby apartment strewn with the bodies of several dead men. Some of them are gathered around a table, wads of cash still in hand as their lifeless eyes are left wide open wherever they appear to have been stabbed or slashed wide open.
This is not a memory. It is your future if you do not flee this twisted mind,a voice in my head hisses.
Run! Run! Run!the other demons chant.
Following another trail of bodies that appear to have ripped each other to pieces, I find myself leaving out a rear door and into a back parking lot area. Three teenage women are here, hugging one another as they sit on the asphalt and await police sirens approaching quickly.
Something compels me to look up. When I do, I spot DeLune.
He appears to be fourteen or fifteen in this memory as he sits covered in the blood of those vile men, smokingreveriumon the rooftop of the building without a care in the world as he waits tosee the rescued victims safely off. He seems unaware of the imps dancing on his head, but they may be only in my mind.
From all my readings, the trickiest part of dismantlingdormiens mortemis locating the central memory on which the spell was placed. If I interact with versions of Crypt that are not from that central memory, I’ll easily get turned around inside his mind and lose myself in the spell altogether.
My head starts to ring, and hissing whispers skitter up my spine as I walk away, venturing outside this memory and into the next. Trying to shake off the paranoia, I realize I’m now standing in front of a stately, well-maintained manor in what appears to be the English countryside. It’s beautiful on the outside, but even from out here, I can hear Natalya Genovese shrieking.
Cautiously, I follow the horrible sound into the grand manor. When I come across a formal sitting room, I freeze.
What a sight, what a sight!mad voices in my head sing in an overlayed chorus.
A young version of Crypt is curled into the fetal position on the lush carpet, covering his head as the immortal vampyr throws a fit of epic proportions. She breaks furniture and screams and swears until Somnus DeLune enters the room beside Melvolin Hearst.
