More doors clicked open in the hallway. Amethyst rushed out of her bedroom and opened a nearby door. “Emie! Did you overturn a candle again?”
Bleary-eyed Emeralda emerged from her bedroom, her dark curls mussed. “Why do you have to blame me? Maybe Garnet isexperimentingagain!”
Another door across the hall opened and Garnet’s hand entered the hallway, flashing Emeralda a poignant middle finger.
One by one, the doors of the Hyton family chambers opened…except the doors with the carved bulls.
My feet were moving before I could think. I raced down the hallway and pushed open the familiar carved doors.
“Derrick!” I shouted.
No answer. The blankets on the bed were undisturbed. The couches and chairs were empty.
I stood in the center of the dark room as my heart thundered. Where was he?
A warm hand rested on my shoulder. Brietta.
“Sera, Pearl overheard shouting,” she said. “A fire started in the ballroom. We need to get out of the palace.”
The ballroom, where poison flowed as freely as wine.
A shiver rattled my chest—Derrick set the fire.
I looked up at Brietta and my voice sounded hollow as it reached my ears. “He found out about the Darkest Night.”
Her face blanched. Her free hand flew up to the center of her chest, where the magical bond that connected her life to Derrick’s must have twisted and turned beneath her ribs.
If he burned, she burned with him.
Without saying another word, I raced down the hallway, weaving through the princesses in their nightgowns. My feet carried me through the halls and down the stairs as quickly as my heart pounded. The horrible sting of char filled my nose as I got closer to the ballroom.
Some of the fleeing maids and servants tried to stop me, some even pulling on my arms, but I tore away from them.
I had to find Derrick.
Smoke curled from the seams of the ballroom doors. Heat flashed through my skin as I grabbed the handle, but I hissed through the pain and flung the door open.
I might as well have opened the door to an oven.
Thin smoke filled my chest and I coughed. The door slammed shut behind me. I opened my eyes to a tall shadow snapping a violin bow in half.
“Derrick,” I called, my voice stifled through the sickly sweet smoke.
My eyes burned as I approached the flames that raged from shattered bottles of liquor on the floor. Blazing streaks of syrupy Cupid’s Blood burned holes in Anders’s coronation portrait. The gilded frame cracked under the heat.
The dark wood of Derrick’s harp splintered as it smoldered. Each string that Derrick had lovingly plucked writhed in the flames like dying snakes. His crushed violin sang one last time as it sizzled at the bottom of the kindling.
His music…his song and his voice…was all turning to ash.
He looked over his shoulder at me, his face an unrecognizable shadow. “Is this how I finally kill him?”
I glanced down at the burning instruments—the “him” did not just mean his dead father. He was fighting Alastar…even if that meant destroying parts of himself.
I grabbed his hand and tried to pull him away. His arm was limp—he did not resist, but he did not yield to me. His eyes were fixed on the fire, watching every part of his guilt die in front of him.
“Come on!” I cried, pulling him toward the ballroom doors. My magical commands pushed through his skin, but nothing responded. I was banging on the door of a paper castle engulfed in flames.
I let go of his hand and swept through the ballroom with my magic. Only a couple of tears in the air sparkled—the intense heat had banished all of the moisture from the air.
