Then I came back to the mannequin. There was a gem-studded brooch on her dress. It was a bee. Yellow and white diamonds. Onyx and jet. A ruby eye. A sapphire stinger.
I couldn’t let this brooch burn. First, it was beautiful. Second, it was a famous object of power. It made the wearer seem as sweet as honey, as alluring as nectar, as lovely as a bed of roses. All the famous Bard women had worn this brooch. It had graced the stage, the opera, and many palaces of the past.
Plus, if you pricked someone’s finger with the pin, making them bleed, then pricked yourself and held your fingers together, you became . . . entwined.
I unlatched the pin and drew it from the mannequin’s dress. “I hope you don’t mind that I’m taking this.”
“She doesn’t. But I do.”
I whipped around, my knife in my hand.
Luvic smiled from the dark.
I let out a sharp breath.
Luvic.
He wore a predator’s face. Hard eyes and hollow cheekbones. He was like the Bard mansion: no longer dramatic opulence, but instead a bleak darkness. I’d never seen him look like this—not even after weeks in the conjurer’s cage.
He’d always had a spark of mischief, a quick smile, an invitation to have fun. In the past, whenever Finn had gone quiet (thinking about his mom), or I’d died, or things had gone topsy-turvy at Hell Gate, Luvic had always been the one to bring us back to laughter.
Where had my friend gone?
He studied the knife held between us, and his smile grew sharper.
Maybe he was wondering the same thing.
I took a step back, dropping the brooch into my pocket with a sleight of hand. Luvic’s gaze remained on my knife.
“Is that the knife you killed Finn with?” His voice was melodious—a soft song. He sounded like he was asking what my favorite movie was, or whether I liked oranges.
I pocketed the knife. “No.”
“Hmm. What are you doing here?”
I studied his features. He stayed in the shadows. He’d been here the entire time. Or perhaps he’d come in from one of his hidden passages. All the same, I’d mistaken him for one of the mannequins.
He was in a silky black tuxedo, with a moonlit-pale white shirt. There was a white rose pinned to his chest. His face was obscured, but I could make out the dark bronze of his skin and the sharp beauty that had recently captured the world. In the past two weeks, a multitude of poems had been written about his lips. A song for his hands. There was a new fan club dedicated to his hair. That same black hair fell over his forehead in a glossy wave. His brown eyes glittered like a cat’s, shining gold in the dark.
My chest went tight, and pinpricks ran over my skin. “Me? Why are you here?”
I remembered how much Last had hated his beauty, and I wondered if she hated it now. Weeks ago, it had been a pure, perfect sort of beauty. Now, it was a sharp-edged, broken-glass beauty. He’d been shattered and glued back together, and the cracks were mesmerizing.
He smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling, and started across the room. He moved with a strange, catlike grace. An animal on the hunt.
I narrowed my eyes. This wasn’t how Luvic had moved before. This wasn’t how he moved at all. Luvic had always walked with a rolling grace, a carefree stride, a weightlessness. Not this . . . stalking prowl.
“I live here,” he said, still smiling. “You killed Finn.”
He prowled closer, winding around newspapers and sightless mannequins.
I pulled my lighter from my pocket. “You killed your brother and sister.”
A shadow flickered over his expression. “So is that it? Are we evil now, Mari? Is that what we’re doing?”
He stood in front of me, and the predatory, hunting-cat feel of him made me shiver. There was something not quite right with him. Something very wrong.
It wasn’t illusion. He wasn’t using any. It was just . . . him.
