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Fabian saw them too, and all three of us—him, Jagaros, and me, watching from a distant future through the lens of a memory—seemed to rake in a sharp breath of horror.

What kind of dark magic was this?

Whether he thought it was part of his Final Test or not, Fabian didn’t hesitate any longer. Spinning on a heel, he ran, me in one arm, the knife in the other. Jagaros cast us one last longing glance before he twisted to face the oncoming horde of mimics, all of whom were snarling with gray saliva swinging from their lips.

“Hello, Mydusia,” Jagaros snarled back.

Then he morphed into a tiger and bared his fangs, ears flattened to his skull, tail whipping. He crouched. Pounced. Shredded flesh. Tore apart bone.

Killed the replica of his lover, the mother of his child, again and again.

Each time one of their dead bodies thumped to the ground, the corpses coagulated back into that strange gray substance, slithering into the air and zipping away like a ribbon of smoke returning to its owner across the sea.

By the time he was finished, Jagaros turned to find the street empty. Free of any signs of what had just happened.

He couldn’t bear to return to that classroom where the original mimic still lay heaped on the ground, momentarily unconscious. He couldn’t bear to do anything in the fresh wave of grief that made him slump to the ground.

Mydusia must have found her, his Chrysanthia, at last.

The bitch had taken her. Had tried to take me, too.

But both Fabian and I were long gone.

And the mist changed one last time.

Rain slashed down from the sky, thunder rumbling the ground from where a pair of piercing yellow eyes glowed between trees… all-too-familiar trees that made my stomach wrench as I traced the shape of the grove where Quinn and I would one day build a treehouse among the branches.

Jagaros, in his tiger form, crouched on the edge of Alderwick.

He squinted down at the houses lining the road below, focused on one particular cottage where the silhouette of a single figure moved beyond the kitchen window, a toddler in his arms. This must have been before Fabian had met Don. Back during the few short years it had been just him and me.

My heart ached. Or maybe that was Jagaros’s heart, splintering the mist of this memory into icy shards that cut into mine.

He had just picked up a paw when a sharp voice rang out from behind him, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

Jagaros whipped around with a hiss to find none other than Dyonisia Reeve standing in the shadows of the trees between two Good Council elites.

He didn’t wait to pounce. Those days were long over.

No, his paws slammed into one of the elites immediately, sending him sprawling backward into the ferns. The next second, Jagaros sprouted into that elite’s human shape with short, wiry hair and a cloak drenched in drips of rain.

“What are you talking about?” he snarled.

The other elite made to move against him, but Dyonisia held up a single hand. Instead of answering Jagaros directly, she sighed, “Out of all the five magics I gift my people, Shape Shifting is my least favorite. It’s so much harder to control than the others. So much harder to predict.”

“Explain,” Jagaros hissed. He circled her, treading like the island’s deadliest predator even in human form while Dyonisia turned in calm, casual circles.

“Well, for instance… you took the form of an innocent Esholian student so that you could meet up with my sister, who had mirrored my power to disguise herself as me on a magical level and slip through my dome. Then Mydusia sent a mimic to copy her form in order to trick you in your shifted form.” She massaged her rain-slick temples. “It gives me a headache just thinking about it.”

Both Jagaros and I knew Dyonisia wasn’t actually saying any of this to discuss the complicated layers of Shape Shifting. She was telling him, loud and clear, that she knew about me. About him and Chrysanthia. About everything.

To be honest, I wasn’t surprised. With all the Good Council elites on her side, any number of things could have witnessed what had happened inside and outside that abandoned classroom: the trees, the wind, spiders, bats.

Lord Arad, after all, had never claimed I was the first person to inquire about the events of twenty years ago.

A fact that didn’t bode well with Jagaros, apparently.

“What did you do to my daughter?” he asked in a low, deadly grumble.