Just in case a horror came in the night.
62
I slept restlessly, expecting somehow that Finn would find me. Not the Finn I’d been dreaming about, but the one in real life who shook the earth, hunted conjurers, and hated me.
That Finn was terrifying. It was as if every bit of good had been scraped out of him and he’d been filled with cruelty and hate. He looked almost the same, but he felt entirely different.
There was a creature who’d visited Hell Gate years ago. Jagger had business with it. I was only eight years old, but I remember clearly the dinner we ate together. The creature was served a live growling. It had long tentacles that drilled into the growling’s bones and sucked free all the marrow. Then it replaced the marrow with acid, which liquefied the growling’s bones and organs. It greedily sucked the juice free. When it was done eating, the growling was just a husk. All its insides were gone. But I could still see its face, its features, its growling-ness.
That was what this terrifying version of Finn reminded me of. His spirit had been sucked out in death, and his body had come back filled with something horrible.
Sadly, though, he might believe the same thing about me.
Griff and I slept from near dawn until early afternoon. At the sounds of the asylum waking, he moaned unhappily, his wings twitching. Then his father’s form retreated, and he rolled off the bed. The sconces woke up at his movement, casting a dim glow across the small room.
Griff padded barefoot across the stone and shrugged into the clothing he’d folded and placed on the floor last night.
I stretched, wiggling my toes and yawning.
There was the faint but tantalizing scent of blueberry pancakes, crisp bacon, and scrambled eggs. I smiled.
“Rou’s made breakfast.” My smile faded. “She’s probably excited about the wedding. I bet she’ll want to hear all about it. Luvic and Last, a match made in hell.”
Griff had been pulling his T-shirt on over his head. He snorted and then poked his head through the neck hole to grin at me.
“Well, it’s the truth.” I shrugged and climbed out of bed. The floor was cold, and I curled my toes, enjoying the feel. While sleeping with Griff was okay—his father’s form had short, soft hair like a horse—he was almost as hot as I was. I had fire in my veins because of Jagger, and Griff had fire in his veins because of his dad. I’d sweated buckets last night, and the sheets were drenched.
“Maybe Rou made iced coffee,” I said hopefully. “What’re you doing today?”
As far as I knew, I was the only one of Jagger’s creatures who’d been invited to the wedding.
Griff pulled free the notebook and pencil from his pocket. He scribbled a drawing: a raptor and six conjurers.
Six?
“Jagger has you hunting today?” A slow lick of fear pulsed through me. Griff was a lure, not a hunter. Every time Jagger sent him out doing what Justice had once done, Griff’s chances of dying increased exponentially.
Just look at what had happened the last time Jagger sent him hunting.
Griff smiled like he knew I was imagining all the accidents that could kill him today. A runaway bus. A phone dropped from a skyscraper. Falling down an escalator. Honestly, if there were such a thing as accidental death by pigeon, it’d happen to Griff.
“Who are you hunting?”
He scratched his stubbled jaw with the pencil, his brow wrinkling. We’d never made a picture for the different conjurer families. He drew three quills and then three guitars.
“Three Clarks? Three Bards?”
His head tilted in assent.
Jagger was really stirring the pot. Every time he had a conjurer killed, pointing the death at another family, it made them more suspicious, paranoid, and angry. He hoped it would make them stupid enough to kill each other. Sow the seeds, see what grows.
“You’re after offshoots? Cousins? Not a principal or his family, right?”
Griff would never be able to take out a principal or any close relation. He’d be dead in seconds.
He nodded and knocked his shoulder against mine, trying to dispel my worry.
I couldn’t stop Jagger from ordering Griff to kill, but I could tell Griff?—
