I wheel around, and although Cathal, out of everyone, doesn’t deserve my rage, he’s on the receiving end. “And where, do tell, would she have procured herself obsidian powder?”
His nostrils flare at the snap of my voice. “Perhaps when you allowed her to wander around the Fae lands!”
Our spat blisters the air . . . blisters our moods. I’m about to yell at him to interrogate every Crow within my walls when a shadow takes shape beside us—Cian.
The male looks more ragged than Cathal and me, even though his mate is tucked safely between our walls.
“Lore?” His dark eyes are downcast, fixed on his mud-speckled boots that he keeps shuffling from side to side.
“What paltry news do you bring, Cian?” When his lids close, my skin begins to crawl.
“Bronwen needs to speak with you.”
“She’s seen something?” his brother asks.
Cian palms his nape and gnaws his lip. When he still cannot meet my stare, frost radiates to my farthest extremities.
“Great Mórrígan, it was her,” Cathal murmurs. “She’s the one who gave my daughter the obsidian powder.”
“I’m sorry, Lore,” he croaks. “I only just found out.”
I burst into smoke and tear through the darkened hallways of my castle toward the rooms he shares with a woman I am about to erase from the bloody face of the earth. I find her sitting by a crackling fire, rocking in the chair that Cian strapped to his back to lug out of that derelict cottage in the woods she called home for five centuries.
Even though Bronwen is slight, the wood creaks as she sways. “Before you tear into me, Mórrgaht, you’ll want to hear me out.”
I loathe when she calls me Highness because it pitches me back to a time and place when her father was my general and she and I weren’t yet friends. Although,arewe even friends? A friend wouldn’t poison my mate and lead her to my enemy.
Heart feeling like a lump of pyrite struck with flint, I rumble, “Talk.”
She turns her white eyes in the direction of where I stand with my arms folded against the blood-soaked breastplate I haven’t removed since the carnage in the valley. Then again, I haven’t had the need to pitch it off for I’ve not slept, not showered, not eaten, not even fucking sat down. All I’ve done is prowl my stone floors and soar through my thunder-stricken air.
The bedroom door swings open. “Lore—please.” The feathers are still melting off Cian’s limbs as he stalks toward his mate to protect her from my looming wrath.
Although every Crow can morph into smoke, none, save for me, can hold the form for very long.
Cathal strides in after his brother, expression stamped with the same fury that swells my veins. “How dare you go behind our backs, Bronwen!”
“Do you remember when I told you that the Shabbins were ‘looking,’ Lore?” Her fingers fall to her lap, to a square package wrapped in cloth nestled in the folds of her red dress. As she rocks in her chair, she begins to unwrap it. “The day Antoni and his friends left the Sky Castle.”
“I forget nothing,” I say through gritted teeth.
Cian grips her shoulder. Is he giving it a squeeze to urge her to go on, or to remind her that he is present? What am I going on about? Unlike the two of us poor sods, their mind link isn’t broken.
“I told Fallon I could not feel who was using my eyes.”
Cian’s lids slip shut, and their corners crinkle—out of shame or concern, I cannot tell.
“Who?” My word is as vaporous as smog yet singes the brisk air like lightning.
She plucks aside one flap of cloth, then another. “Meriam.”
My gaze jerks to her face at the sound of that reviled name.
Silence. It buzzes, swarms, festers.
“She’s been looking for a while now. Ever since Fallon was a babe, she’s been using my eyes. Watching her grow. I grew wary and worried of her attention, even though I knew she was incarcerated in the Regio dungeon. Especially after Zendaya . . .” Her eyes glisten like the ice that frosts Monteluce in the dead of winter. “After Daya stopped looking.”
She untucks more eaves of cloth, pulling my tapered stare back to her lap. What the bloody underworld is in there?
