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Fia couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t believe what he was telling her, even as the truth of his words slammed into her.

What he was. What her mother had done.

Lightning is raw with magic. That was what Sable had always believed. That it was brilliant and eager to strike.

Fia wanted to run to him and also run from him. Sable was dead, but her spellbook had come to life.

“Sebastian…,” she whispered.

“That’s a name scrawled in a book of fairy tales. Something borrowed, not my own.” His smoky eyes darkened. “Like the Willows. Like everything else.”

Paper and ink and ash. He smelled of those things because that was what made him. An abrupt entrance into the world—what had it looked like to him when he’d opened his eyes beneath the lightning-struck sky? She thought of him at the Bramble Ball, dull eyed and uncomprehending, telling her he’d wanted to meet her. As if trying to understand what her mother saw in her.

Saw in life.

It was strange and sad and frivolous and frustrating, and he knew nothing of how wonderful those very things could be. Or how fragile.

Penbrook.

He lay still at her feet, well beyond the promises she’d given him. A single tear rolled down her cheek, and Sebastian’s mouth made a flat line. Maybe it was because he wanted to feel something, anything, but found nothing where his emotions should be that he widened his mouth, letting free a curl of ash as he said, “You pulled them from me, you know. The curses.”

Fia flinched at the thought. That in calling so feverishly for her mother’s spellbook, she’d lured the magic out of Sebastian, just as she’d lured the song from Dermot Stone’s head. Unwittingly, but no less disastrously, she’d had a hand in raising the reflectionless mirrors and waking the statues and conjuring the golden spiders.

The gargoyle shifted on Fia’s ribbon—such a small thing that tried to protect her even now from the smoke fuming from Sebastian’s mouth. But she realized the creature had never watched over her heart. It had always lain on her chest, like the gargoyle slung across the window of the archives, guarding her spells. All the ones she’d written, then burned, collecting the magic inside her.

She went a little off-center. Wasn’t she a spellbook of sorts, too—one made of skin and bones, just as the diviner had foreseen for Penbrook?

Her throat closed up. Her heart was racing for them both.

Curses cannot be broken… until they have already come to pass.

They’d had no chance of preventing his death, but the curse had lost its claim on him now. And Fia didn’t have to let it end like this.

Watch that you don’t reach for too much.

But she wanted to reach for everything. She wanted to claim the very sky and bring lightning crashing down. To clash with death and force it to return what had been too early stolen.

Tonight called for whatever mayhem her magic would bring.

Fia clutched her gargoyle charm, yanking it from its ribbon as ash fell at her feet. “I need you to guard something else now.”

With all her might, she threw the stone, and its magic awakened. The gargoyle arced through the air, wings unfurling. It flew through the ash spewing up from Sebastian’s throat, and then it descended.

Sebastian groaned, fingers scrambling for the small beast.

On each of its wings, on the edges of each fold, a small claw extended and latched onto Sebastian’s skin. It enveloped his mouth, suffocating the ash, locking away the worst of his magic.

“Give me the spell.” Grace would have said Fia was being reckless, and Sable would have said she was being dangerously impractical. That Fia should run, looking out for only herself. But what good was a life without caring for others, risking everything so that you might keep them safe?

She was still afraid. Wasn’t sure she’d survive the spell she hoped to cast. But Penbrook needed her.

And she needed him.

“Give me the last spell my mother wrote. The one to call lightning.”

The one that killed Sable and made Sebastian.

His eyes narrowed to slits.