Heart in her throat, she tiptoed a little farther.
The gleam of white hair caught her eye, and she knew it was him.
Vengeance momentarily forgotten, she rushed forward, dropping to his side. He lay on his side, half over the outside line of the sigil. One arm was stretched out, and the other was trapped under him. His silvery hair fell over his face, hiding his eyes, but it was immediately obvious that he was unconscious.
And he was surrounded by a huge pool of blood.
Suyin wasn’t squeamish, but the sight of this much blood made her stomach churn a little.
“What the hell?” she muttered. This wasn’t what she’d expected to find at all. His upper body was bare, his white-gray skin even more deathly pale than usual. No breath from his nose ruffled the hair over his face.
She ought to have been relieved. He couldn’t kill her if he was unconscious. She’d made the right call, coming here without getting anyone else involved. Now all she had to do wasfind where he’d carved the mark on himself and cut a slash through it to break the magic. Then she’d keep watch and make sure he didn’t wake up and try to re-carve his mark before her own skin could heal. She should have been rejoicing. She would live.
Instead, a cold sense of dread rose within her.
She gripped Murmur’s upper arm, his skin ice-cold under her palms, and then pushed as hard as she could, rolling him onto his back. He flopped over, arm draped across his middle now, hair still over his face.
She gasped when she saw the marks on his chest.
His entire torso had been carved up with some sort of sigil. The dark red of his blood against his pale skin was grisly and made her cringe with unwilling sympathy. She gently swept his hair off his face. His eyes were closed, features slack. Those same black veins she’d seen before snaked out beneath his shadowed eyes.
“What did you do, Murmur?” she whispered.
He would regenerate. A demon couldn’t die from blood loss, even to this degree. He would wake up, and she needed to focus on doing what she’d come here to do.
The mark.She didn’t think the giant sigil on his chest was it. Moira had said it was simple, and that one was extremely complex. There was nothing on the stretched-out arm, so she lifted the one bent over his abdomen.
She gasped. There, in the highest part of his inner forearm, was a mark nearly identical to the one on her chest.
Except for the fact that there was a slash carved through it.
Her breath caught. He had interrupted the mark himself. He’d planned to kill her and then changed his mind. Setting his arm down, she stared at him, trying to understand, her mind reeling.
She’d been so ready to hate him, to despise him for eternity. She’d never felt an intensity of betrayal so deep as when she’drealized he planned to kill her. Her skin burned just thinking of it.
But here he lay in a pool of his own blood, having done some terrible unknown magic to himself. Having slashed over the sigil that would take her life.
She didn’t know how to feel. She couldn’t forgive him that easily. Regardless of whether he’d had a change of heart, he’d still come to her house and had sex with her in her bed, while planning to kill her. That was too fucked up. She couldn’t let that go.
But this … if this was what it seemed like to her … it meant something. It wasn’t enough, but it meant something.
Almost against her will, her hand stretched out, and she stroked the back of her claw along his cold cheekbone.
“Why did you do it?” she whispered. “Why do you make it impossible to be on your side?” She took a breath and then admitted what she never would have had he been awake to hear it. “You had me. You won our game. I would have done anything for you. I would have given you whatever you wanted. But you had to go and ruin it, didn’t you?” She shook her head. “It was probably for the best. I don’t think you’d even know what to do with emotions if you had them.”
She pulled her hand back and then stood, wincing at the blood that had soaked into her pants and stained her boots. She looked at him sprawled out on the ground, cold and alone, and her heart ached.
Then she turned and walked away.
She went to his desk, sitting in his well-worn chair and sorting through the mess of papers. If she wanted to figure out what had happened here, she needed to look for clues, and she had to do it fast. However he’d done it, Murmur’s spell had succeeded. Which meant Belial was going to show up soon, use the portal and open the door, and shit was really going to hit the fan. She needed to be long gone before that happened.
It only took a moment of searching for her to be sure there were no answers on Murmur’s desk. But they had to be somewhere. One thing she’d learned spending time with Murmur was that he wrote everything down. It helped him make sense of the chaos in his mind.
Blowing out a breath, she slumped back in the chair, staring at his still-unconscious form, sprawled in the middle of the sigil, surrounded by blood. Even as mad at him as she was, she hated seeing him like that.
She pushed back the chair, leaned forward, and buried her face in her hands, trying to make sense of the myriad of emotions in her head. Rage, confusion, fear, heartbreak, longing … She couldn’t even try to name them all.
And then she spotted it.
