Ares falters. His grip loosens. Confusion drags across his eyes, and for a moment I see the exact moment he questions everything he sensed.
“Liam?” I whisper, stepping out from behind him. I feel Ares pivot sharply, but he doesn’t reach for me, doesn’t grab, he watches, his tension coiled tight.
Liam exhales, a small huff of frustration. “I’ve been searching Anavris like a madman looking for you. Sebastian is losing his mind.” He crosses his arms, gaze sliding toward Ares with disdain. “And I find you hiding in an alley with him.”
Ares’s shoulders drop. His knife lowers. A tentative apology worksthrough his lips.
“I’m sorry… I thought it was something else,” he mutters, the embarrassment roughening his voice.
I swallow down the thundering in my chest. “Let me talk to him,” I say, barely audible.
I step toward my brother. His features soften the way Liam’s always do when I’m close, his smile brightening, his posture relaxing. But the longer I look at him, the harder something inside me begins to strain. Something isn't right. Something painfully small, a detail nearly invisible unless you’ve loved someone your entire life.
His eyes.
Where are the freckles inside them?
I freeze.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, but his tone is too smooth, too rehearsed.
“We should go.” Liam grabs my wrist, fingers digging deep as he yanks me forward so hard the sketchbook slips from my bag and smacks against the ground. His grip clamps like iron, his strength wildly out of proportion for his frame.
“Liam, cut it out,” I snap, trying to twist free. His fingers only tighten, digging into bone.
He looks at me. And then the world detonates.
He strikes me across the face, fast and brutal. My head whips sideways, the alley blurring in a sickening spin. His next words slip from lips that no longer sound like my brother's at all.
“There’s always a missing detail, isn’t there?” he hisses.
A sharp whistle slices through the air. Liam’s, no, the thing wearing Liam's face, jerks violently as a knife buries itself in the side of his neck. His body collapses backward, twitching. I stumble toward him on instinct, but Ares is already behind me, arms locking around my waist as he wrenches me upright.
“It’s not him,” he growls, voice frayed as he pulls me away.
A shrill, impossible screech erupts from the collapsed body. The sound rattles my ribs, curdles my blood. The creature kicks against the ground, peeling itself out of Liam’s skin like it’s shedding a costume. The flesh cracks. Splits. Sloughs off in wet folds.
What rises is a nightmare.
Empty black pits where eyes should be. A mouth sewn together with what looks like sinew and torn tendons. Its hands contort into hooked claws, bone jutting through patches of rotted skin. Its body droops and reforms, twitching as if it hasn’t fully decided what shape it wants to keep.
It grins at us, or whatever the closest approximation is, as pieces of Liam’s voice gurgle through its throat.
“He wants her back, Ares.”
A cold wave runs through me, pinning me to the spot.
The creature yanks the knife from its own throat with a wet scrape and plunges it into the dirt, as if marking territory.
“What… what is that?” My voice shakes so hard the words nearly don’t form.
Ares steps slightly in front of me again, wand drawn with deadly steadiness now that doubt is gone. His entire presence shifts, more predator than person, jaw tight, gaze unblinking.
“One of your father’s mutts,” he says, cold as steel. “A Fetch. A mimic.”
My eyes flick toward the fallen sketchbook lying just behind the creature, its black leather cover half-buried in dust and gravel. My stomach lurches. Everything suddenly feels connected, Sebastian, the theft, the message, the timing. All of it feeding into the same trap.
The creature tilts its head at me, lips cracking apart as another voice, my father’s voice, emerges from the torn mess of its mouth.
