“Downstairs in the vault.”
I pale.
“I’ll go.”
“You cannot go back down there. Dante wants you dead.”
“I’ll just . . .” His voice fades when he hooks his leather cord and slips it out of his slashed shirt. The vial with Meriam’s blood is shattered. He gazes down at his crimson-smeared torso. “I may have enough of Meriam’s blood on me to paint a key sigil.”
“There was a door.”
“It cannot be opened from this end.” He stares in its general direction. “If I cannot manage to blood-cast, then I’ll have you blow it up with your blood.”
“I can do that?” My hands prickle with the potency of the magic at my fingertips.
He nods.
Fallon?
Though wards need to be undone, mates need to be seen.
“Give me a minute.” Sodden dress clinging to my body, more crimson than pink, I hobble toward the door, close my fingers around the handle, and pull it toward me.
Something sharp shines in the indigo gloom of Lore’s storm. Something that arrows straight for me. I neither start nor angle my body sideways because it’s a beak, not ammunition. The Crow dissolves into smoke that puffs against the wards before reforming into a bird and swooping upward, toward a tornado of black feathers and gleaming talons. The caws that have been echoing since Lore launched his attack on the house peter out.
I start to reach out when Justus says, “Unlike the wards around Shabbe, they work both ways here. But only on those with Crow blood.”
When my nails scrape against what feels like glass but looks like air, my heart crumples. For the first time in my life, I wish I hadn’t been born a—
I stop myself from thinking it, from even wishing it.
“You’ll have to wait until I erase Meriam’s sigil.” Justus’s words bump against my nape, jagged like his breaths. “You’ll be free soon, Fallon.”
Free from this house but not from this nightmare. Not as long as the Faerie King lives.
I glance over my shoulder in the direction Dante disappeared, my mind whispering,He’s right there, Fallon, right beneath your feet.
If I returned to my prison armed with the right spells and the right blade, true freedom could be had tonight. Thunder booms and the sky crackles. I take it my mate’s no fan of my mad idea. In truth, I loathe it as well.
I turn my face back toward the blustering sky and await my midnight king, and as he rages, I finally calm.
Thirty-Four
Streaks of smoke plummet from the sky, banging into the rain-soaked earth with such velocity that a tremor shoots into the soles of my feet, almost knocking my legs out from under me. Only my grip on the door handle keeps me from buckling, but even that becomes tenuous when the smoke knits into a hazy figure with metal-toned eyes.
Lore’s name falls off my lips like a breathy whimper, and tears pop from my lash line and trundle down my cheeks. The door handle slips from my fingers, and I step toward him. Although his face is painted in shadows, his temper lights up his features, giving those golden irises of his a cold sheen.
Like an angry torrent, Lore’s shadows surge forward and smack into the invisible shield. This time, the ensuing quake is so potent that I lose my balance and bang into Justus, who grunts out a shallowoomph. The man may be alive, but he’s clearly in pain.
As Lore punches the wards with his spectral fists, thunder booms across the land, a deafening peal that agitates the green fronds.
“You must truly work on your motivational skills, Ríhbiadh.” Justus’s voice breezes over my damp cheek.
“What did he”—I swap out the wordsaywith—“show you?” After all, my mate cannot pour words into Faerie minds, only images.
“All the ways he’ll torture me if I don’t return you to him immediately.”
I don’t ask for specifics. My stay in Dante’s underworld may have tamed my squeamishness, but seeing the vigor of Lore’s wrath, I suspect I may swoon from a single peek into his mind.
