LAILA
Laila had never felt more alone.
Around her, the grotto burned with cold. Icicles lay shattered on the floor, and in the eerie blue light of the snow-packed walls, the smashed wings of the Mnemo bug bled watery rainbows. A knot rose in her throat, and she squeezed the diamond pendant in her hand, wincing at the sharp pain of its angles.
In the hour since Séverin had left with Ruslan, she hadn’t moved. Not once.
She kept staring instead at the bodies of Enrique and Zofia sprawled out on the ice, not three meters from her. She didn’t want to leave them, and she didn’t want to get closer either. If she touched them… if she closed their eyes to make their death appear like sleep… it would be like breaking the fragile skin of a dream. One touch, and she would have made this horrorreal. And she couldn’t allow that.
She couldn’t allow herself to hold the truth wholly in her heart: Séverin had killed them all.
He’d plunged a knife into Enrique and Zofia. Maybe he’d done so to Hypnos too. Poor Hypnos, thought Laila. She hoped he’d at least been stabbed in the back so he’d died without knowing that the person whose love he wanted most had betrayed him.
Séverin had known there was no need to subject Laila to the same fate. There was nothing he could do to her that time wasn’t already planning. Laila blinked and saw Séverin’s cold, violet eyes staring down at her as he wiped his knife against the front of his jacket and said: “She’ll die soon anyway.”
Light caught on her garnet ring, the number displayed within the jewel impossible to miss:Ten. That was all she had left. Ten days before the Forging mechanisms that held her body together fell apart, and her soul came loose.
Maybe she deserved this.
She’d been too weak, too forgiving. Even after everything, she had let him—no,wantedhim—to draw her down to him and intersperse their heartbeats with kisses. Maybe it was a blessing that he had not played the divine lyre, for how could she live with herself knowing she had encouraged a monster?
Monster, not Majnun, she told herself.
Yet some selfish part of her broke from knowing how close she had been to life. She’d touched the very strings that could have saved her, but they would not move for her.
Séverin had been cruel enough to want to show her. Why else would he have left the Mnemo bug beside her, and the diamond pendant he had once used to summon her? Laila smashed the Mnemo bug’s wings once more, watching whatever memories it held expire with a sigh. Again and again, she knocked it against the ice, gripped by a fierce desire to destroy any sign of Séverin. An odd, choked laugh ripped out of her throat as plumes of colored smoke rose in a thick fog, distorting the grotto around her.
As she stared through the veil of fog… a shape on the ice stirred.
Laila reared back, horror filling her. She had to be seeing things. Shehadto.
Séverin must have driven her mad.
Because right before her eyes, Enrique and Zofia stirred to life.
3
ZOFIA
Zofia woke to a shrill ringing in her head. Her mouth felt dry. Her eyes kept watering. Add to that the sticky raspberry-cherry jam on her shirt—and she did not like raspberry-cherry jam. Slowly, her eyes adjusted to the sights around her. She was still in the ice grotto. Several smashed icicles lay around her. The oval-shaped pool where the leviathan named David had once rested was now empty of the mechanical creature, and the water was very still. A colorful fog rose up in the place where Laila had once stood…
Laila.
Panic grabbed hold of Zofia.
What had happened to Laila?
The past hour flew back to her. Ruslan—who had lied to them, pretending to be their friend—shaking Laila, demanding she play the divine lyre, only to find out that Séverin was the one who could. And then Séverin walking toward her holding the knife imbued with Goliath’s paralyzing venom. He had grabbed her, whispering:
Trust me, Phoenix. I will fix this.
She barely had time to nod before the world had gone black.
Through the colorful fog, someone ran toward her. The lights of the grotto still stung her eyes, cloaking the figure in darkness. Zofia tried to throw up her hands, but they were bound with rope. Was Enrique still safe? Where had Séverin gone? Had anyone in Paris remembered to feed Goliath?
“You’re alive!” shouted the figure.
The person dropped before her: Laila. Her friend grabbed her in a fierce hug, her body shaking with sobs and then, unaccountably, laughter. Zofia did not normally like being hugged, but it seemed that Laila needed this. She held still.
