“Your ignorance is truly astounding,” he said with a sneer. “And I thought yourmotherwas stupid. I’m speaking of magic, girl! Your people fled here with what they could—a brother and sister, Omen and Sabina Bone. But they’d left much behind. This land was all they could afford, yet they were barely strong enough to work it. And so bound to their precious, hoarded remains that they could scarcely make a run to trade for sugar and flour.
“They scooped my ancestor up. A man by the name of Callum. A drunkard and dullard on the edge of death whom they promised the world. They used their power to restore his health, and their money to educate him. The binding spell between himand them reversed his pallid fortunes and tied ours to yours in perpetuity. As you cannot leave this land, so we cannot leave you. At least, not for long. We have been your bondsmen generation after generation. But no more.”
Cordelia started to take another step back, and he glared at her. “Where exactly do you think you’re going?” he asked, slamming the end of Hella’s staff into the floor. It dented the stone slab, chips of rock flying.
“Please,” she told him, not daring to move again. “I need to check on my sister.”
“Yes,” he said coolly. “That was a lucky break, I’m afraid. I didn’t realize she’d be in the fox when we set out to erect it on a spike. Not that it matters. It’s tidier this way, really. And of course, it’s not the first time. My grandfather managed something similar decades back when he killed a pair of ravens your aunt was riding. What was her name again? The sad one?”
“Morna,” Cordelia said darkly. All the fear she’d once felt suddenly shifted into anger on Morna’s behalf.
Bennett smiled again. “Yes, her. Anyway, that’s the problem with beast riding, I always say. You’re vulnerable inside the animal. The birds flew too high, beyond the reach of any protection. And it broke her to be in them when they fell. She was never the same, didn’t know up from down. It was easy to talk her out of a window after that. There are limits to what the bones can do,” he said sagely. “We thought then we’d finally found the loophole we needed.”
Cordelia heard approaching footsteps, and Gordon stumbled through the open gates, Eustace hanging limply in his arms.
“Ah, here we are,” Bennett said.
“I came as fast as I could. I didn’t want to hurt her, and I had to take the IV out,” Gordon panted before noticing Bennett Togers and Han. His eyes shifted as his arms flexed to keep a firm hold on Eustace’s body. “What’s going on here?”
Bennett gave him a patient smile before answering. “A transfer of power, I’m afraid. One that’s long overdue. Set her down just there, if you will, Mr. Jablonski. And back away.”
Gordon looked to Cordelia, a glint in his eye. But Bennett was faster. A jerk of the staff, and Cordelia was flung toward him. He spun her around and held the staff to her throat.
“Please,” she told Gordon. “Just do what he says.” She’d already seen the staff dent stone; she didn’t want to find out what else it was capable of. Not when her sister’s life—and her own—hung in the balance.
Gordon laid Eustace down on the crypt floor carefully and took several steps back. He looked at Han. “Arkin, you’ve always been a good kid. You don’t have to do anything here that you don’t want to.”
Bennett shook his head. “How very noble of you, Mr. Jablonski. But this is not Arkin, you see. This is Han. And Han, I’m afraid, has quite the appetite for destruction.”
“His twin,” Cordelia said to Gordon, the staff rough against her skin.
Gordon’s eyes met hers, and she knew he was making the connections she already had. Connections that would explain his mother’s death, her final words.Beware the pair. Beware the heir.
Bennett tensed behind her. “Your mother was collateral damage, regrettably. She was nosy, and we couldn’t let our little family secret out,” he said, glancing in Han’s direction. “We take them out one at a time, you see. And no one’s the wiser. But she saw them together, and the boys needed the practice.”
Gordon’s hands curled into monstrous fists.
“Ah, ah, ah,” Bennett warned him, squeezing Cordelia. “Between the staff and my nephew, you’d never get close.”
Han leaned toward them, his eyes fixated on Gordon’s hulking form, and Cordelia watched helplessly as Gordon clutched at his head in agony, crumpling to the ground.
“Make him stop,” she begged. “Whatever he’s doing, make him stop!”
“Very well,” Bennett said, and Han released his invisible grip on Gordon. “Shall we continue?”
“Please,” Cordelia tried again. “Surely there’s a way to break the binding spell. Without hurting anyone.”
Bennett sighed behind her. “I’m sorry, but that’s just not going to be enough. You owe us a debt. And we’re here to collect.”
Cordelia whimpered. In the cramped interior of the crypt, she didn’t dare conjure a wind or a lightning storm. She would never be able to control whom it impacted, and she wouldn’t take a chance on hurting her sister.
“You can blame your mother,” Bennett told her cruelly. “When you meet her on the other side.”
At that, Han let out a wretched laugh, sinister and dense.
Cordelia knew that laugh. She’d heard it in her dream. Han was the shadow in the parking lot, the one who cut her mother’s protection away. They killed Maggie and probably hoped that Eustace and Cordelia would never make it long enough to find out this place existed. “My mother? What did you do to her?”
“What didIdo toher?” Bennett questioned. “My dear, you have it all wrong. It’s whatshedid tome.First, she was born. Something my father, Munro, worked very hard to impede. He jabbered endlessly in that foolish little ear of your grandmother’s convincing her that a home birth would be the death of her. He convinced her that her boyfriend Alton, the future botanist who was pressuring her to deliver in a hospital, was a great man of science and knew better than her own family of simpletons and shut-ins, living in primitive seclusion.
