“Anton, it’s here. Let’s go,” I shouted as the elevator doors began to part.
There was the sound of something colliding into something else. Anton flew past me to crash into the ambient lighting running up the column beside the elevator.
A red cap stalked toward me, his head coated in fresh blood and a mace held in his hand.
The elevator doors finished parting to reveal Saul waiting inside.
“We meet again. Just like I said we would,” Saul drawled.
A small object flew out from behind his ear. Before I had time to react, the pixie I’d caught spying on Alches and me at the mansion blew a handful of dust in my face.
“Nightie, night,” Nyx sang.
No.
My eyelids sagged as the dust invaded my lungs, diving into my bloodstream as my limbs started to go limp.
Before I lost consciousness, I reached for my magic breaking power in a last ditch attempt at saving myself. Even before my mind glanced off the glass shell cocooning my power and preventing me from accessing it, I could tell something was wrong.
The drink I’d had at the bar. There must have been something in it.
I crumpled to the floor as Vitus walked up to look me over with a disdainful sneer. “Well, well. This is quite the catch. Just like you said.”
Saul stopped him as he reached for my neck. “You can’t kill her. The king wants her alive.”
I enjoyed the cold look of rage in Vitus’s face as I struggled to keep my eyes open.
“Dahlia is going to kill you for this,” I whispered.
Sadness lurked in the back of the djinn’s eyes when he looked down at me. “She will try.”
Magic welled up in my throat. Almost like a clot of blood that I struggled to expel. It was the only bit of my power I could eke out from the deepest parts of myself, gathering it bit by bit as the words struggled to break free.
There was one last thing I needed to do.
“Oath breaker,” I sighed.
There. Sealed in magic and blood. Now everyone would know what he was.
Vitus kicked me in the head and the world blacked out.
twenty-four
I faded in andout of awareness, rousing only long enough to ascertain that I was being carried over someone’s shoulder like a sack. A floppy, limp sack of fluid and tissue held together by a container that was feeling increasingly fragile by the second. Like if someone applied a little too much pressure in the wrong place, everything might spill out.
My face felt like it had taken a pounding. Swollen and uncomfortable. One eye sealed half shut. I was pretty sure my cheekbone or eye socket was broken.
The skin felt stretched tight over my skull. As if someone had tried to pack too much stuffing into a bag that should only contain half the amount.
My arms and hair dangled toward the floor, swaying back and forth in time with my captor’s gait.
Through the crack in my eyelids, I could see the leather and fur lined vest that my face was currently pressed against. The rancid smell of piss and decaying blood brought bile to my throat.
I swallowed it down with difficulty.
“She’s waking up.”
I was dumped on the ground, barely having seconds to get a look at the Red Cap looming over me, Nyx hovering by his head, before a massive fist knocked me out for the second time that night.
