by Tess Adair
“So, uh,” she started, glancing nervously at each of them, “it kinda seems like you guys came over here to hide out, maybe. Was there, I don’t know, a reason for that, or—”
“If there was,” said Alexei, with cold contempt, “what makes you think we’d tell you?”
Jude found herself tugging on the loop of her backpack, which now sat awkwardly at her feet. She sighed audibly.
“Guys,” she began, “you did say that once we got here, I could let her know—”
“Technically, I never agreed to that.”
Jude turned her gaze directly toward Knatt instead.
“Knatt?” she asked, her own voice rising in exasperation. “You remember, you said—”
“I am aware, Jude, yes,” he answered steadily. He paused before continuing and took a deep drink from his cup. “But the truth is, we aren’t entirely sure yet what we’ve gotten ourselves into here, and—”
“Come on, not you, too!” In her quickly rising anger, Jude found herself leaping to her feet. “You guys, Eliana has done nothing but be nice to us, and show us around, and offer to help out, and now you’re saying that it’s okay for us to drag her here with us, but we can’t tell her why? How is that fair?”
“Uh, guys—”
“All I’m saying is that it might be better if we waited until the morning, or at least until we hear from Logan—”
“Guys—”
“Honestly, though,” said Alexei, shifting his lean from one side of the chair to the other, “do we even have to tell her anything at all? I mean, why choose now to start working on our radical honesty, hm?”
Jude whirled on him.
“If you’ve got a problem with Logan’s secrets,” she fumed, “then you should bring that up with Logan.”
“I never said—”
“GUYS!”
Jude and Alexei stopped dead, their attention immediately pulled away from their argument. Instead, they found themselves staring down at Eliana, who still sat in the same place on the couch. But for some reason, she was now hunched over, and she grasped onto her own stomach like it was in pain.
“Something is wrong,” she said. Every syllable sounded like it cost her something. “Something is very wrong.”
Jude knelt down beside her and carefully placed a hand on her knee, in what she hoped was a comforting manner.
“What is it?” she asked softly. “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
In response, her body went rigid, and she tumbled forward, onto the floor. Jude was with her in an instant, bringing a hand up to her forehead as if she could actually tell her temperature that way. It was an automatic impulse, something she’d seen her mother do when her siblings were ill—
Knatt was beside them in an instant, kneeling down on Eliana’s other side and taking her hand, possibly feeling for her pulse on her wrist.
“Miss Blake,” he said, his tone gentle but firm, “you have to tell us what’s wrong, so we can help you.”
Instead, Eliana’s eyes went blank. Her body convulsed, her head shaking uncontrollably back and forth. As Knatt reached out to keep her steady, she went still again. Then her eyes popped open. She stared up at the ceiling in horror.
“It’s…Atherton,” she rasped, her voice devoid of the life and charm it had held only moments ago. “He’s—he’s in danger. We’re still…linked…from the binding. I can feel his life force.” Her body convulsed again, but only once. Her eyes still stared up at the ceiling, but Jude got the impression that she couldn’t see what the rest of them saw anymore.
After several long moments, she spoke again.
“I can feel him dying.”
On her other side, Knatt didn’t even move when he spoke.
“Mr. Marin—”
“I’m already gone.”
Jude barely registered his movement as he rocketed out of his chair, grabbed some weaponry, and flew out the door, into the hallway beyond. She thought briefly of his earlier nonchalance, and wondered if he had simply been waiting, that whole time, for the moment when he could spring into action.
The answer didn’t matter to her much right now, of course.
Eliana was convulsing again.
Logan had never seen anything like it, and she hoped she never would again.
While the crowd stood in silent, breathless horror, James Atherton’s mouth wrenched wide open, his whole body shaking with the movement. It looked like an invisible giant had grabbed hold of him, pulling open his jaw and forcing his face to turn up toward the sky. The scream that left his mouth only lasted a second, but even as it faded, his expression remained tortured and contorted.
Then came the spiders.
A strange gurgling sound emanated from him, somewhere between a rumbling stomach and a guttural growl. His body convulsed one more time, and his already wide eyes bulged.
Then a tiny, furry, spindly leg poked out of his mouth, dragging its way out into the open.
It was a spider. A spider crawled out of James Atherton’s mouth. For a moment, it was alone.
Then a million more followed.
Before the crowd realized what was happening, hundreds upon hundreds of tiny spiders poured forth from Atherton’s rigidly locked jaw, flowing down his body, across the dais, and into the crowd, spreading outward in every direction.
Stepping out from the safety of her pillar, Logan raised her voice and called out, “Everybody, get back!”
But even as she tried to pull the people around her farther away from the High Prophet, the person to her left began to scream incoherently, unleashing their own terror into the room with violent cacophony.
After that, everything was chaos. A few people took reasonable, measured steps back, but others panicked. The first person who screamed set off another, who set off another. For a crowd of fewer than thirty people, they managed to froth themselves into an impressive melee in short order.
Why am I always right? Logan asked herself as she pushed through the increasingly riotous crowd, aiming for the center.
If she could get to Atherton fast enough, maybe she could figure out what was happening and put a stop to it. It was a gamble, considering her limited understanding of this ritual, but she didn’t see any other choice.
Somewhere behind her, a voice called out.
“The door is locked!” She didn’t recognize who it belonged to, but she registered the unbridled panic in its tone. “WE’RE LOCKED IN!”
The crowd roared in unison, hysteria rising like a chorus. Logan found herself pushed backward on a wave as several bodies pressed into her.
“Aren’t you fuckers supposed to be professionals?” she asked out loud.
A few people turned to stare in response, their faces turned to portraits of uncertainty. Logan felt her frustration with them swelling into a fever. So with a growl, she crouched down—and launched herself forward, pushing violently through the last ranks of people standing between her and the High Prophet.
When she broke through the wall of people, Clément had already reached Atherton and begun to mumble a cast under her breath as she took his pulse, tugged on his arm, attempted to physically shake him out of whatever had a hold on him. The spiders at last ceased their terrible skittering waterfall out of his mouth, though at least a thousand still scuttled across the floor, climbing over people’s shoes and disappearing into crevices.
Each of the three Bound knelt in place, still frozen in mid-ritual stance.
Logan stumbled forward again, her eyes locking on Atherton. His face bore an expression of shock and horror, his mouth still wrenched unnaturally open. In fact, his entire body seemed immovable, as Clément’s continuing attempts to revive him proved ineffective.
And yet…his eyes moved.
As she watched, his bulging eyes tilted, irises searching for something—until they fell on her, and their gazes locked.
She got the sense that he wanted desperately to tell her something, but she had no idea what.
Then
his right hand twitched, and the obsidian blade dropped to the ground.
The obsidian blade.
Her eyes tore away from his, pulled incessantly toward the gleaming black blade, a line of demon’s blood still clinging to its razor-edge.
Obsidian has one very important special quality, said Knatt, in the recesses of her memory. Can you tell me what it is?
Obsidian. Born of the change of state, from one form to another, answered her 14-year-old self. As a reflection of this dual nature, obsidian can serve dual masters.
So you must be careful when you use it, Knatt had warned her. You can only trust an obsidian object when you’ve secured its loyalty. Fortunately for us, loyal objects can, in fact, be passed down through family lines.
In her mind’s eye, she saw Casimir Volkov, pleading with an unnamed Adept, working security for the Summit. The Adept had taken something from him—a piece of contraband, as it were.
“It was only a precious family heirloom.”
“What heirloom?”
An obsidian blade.
It was Volkov. It had to be. He must have known about the dual nature of obsidian, so he had deliberately brought an obsidian blade—an old, loyal blade, passed down in his family for generations—and he had gotten himself caught—gotten the Order to take that loyal blade and store it among the others in their care. How hard would it have been, then, to convince someone inside the Order itself to switch the two blades out, to make sure the one Atherton used for this binding ceremony was not his own?
It had to be Volkov. And he’d danced with her—expressed interest in her, admiration for her, like he knew more about her than he let on—
He was the outsider who’d tipped the scales.
Volkov was the Wolf.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Rise and Fall
She turned away from Atherton and Clément, who was still trying desperately to save him. Instead, she turned on the crowd, which had, at long last, begun to flee the scene, searching for a way out. At the first two people who came within her reach, she stretched out both hands, grabbed hold of their hoods, and pulled.
Their heads were freed, revealing pale, terrified faces—but no Volkov.
This will take too long.
She paused, took a step back. Closed her eyes and emptied her mind. In a moment, the switch in her head was flipped, and she heard every sound, smelled every scent. She let it all hit her, a cacophonous array of sensation that put the crowd alone to shame.
But she knew his scent now. She had danced with him, had spoken to him alone on the terrace, no other animals around to confuse what belonged to him and what didn’t. She had watched him smoke. She had shared his cigarette. She had his scent, all right.
In fact, she had it right now.
Once she smelled him, she could hear him, too—hear him whispering an incantation, sotto voce, underneath everyone else’s radar.
This time, she used the chaos of the crowd to her advantage. He’d assumed they would give him cover, obscure his movements and his sounds. But she had a lock on him now, and she knew he hadn’t noticed it yet. She slipped through the crowd, calling shadows to her without a sound, feeling herself disappear into the noise and confusion.
Within seconds, she was on him. The blade from her ankle already in her hand, she came up right behind him. She was silent, and, for all intents and purposes, invisible.
Ripping off his hood, she put the knife to his throat, pressing hard. If he moved half an inch, it would draw blood.
“Funny meeting you here,” she said.
He said nothing. Just stood there, hands falling limply to his sides.
Grinning a monstrous, victorious grin.
Knatt stood running a hand through his hair, over and over again, the other hand perched on his hip like a stern schoolteacher. They had gotten Eliana back onto the couch, where she now lay on her side, clutching at her abdomen and occasionally letting out a low groan. Jude knelt beside her, patting her head and feeling useless.
“Are you sure there isn’t anything I can do?” she asked, her voice low.
With some effort, Eliana shook her head.
“It’s just—part of the binding.” Her words came out in short, pained bursts. “Can’t be stopped. Can’t be helped.”
“You don’t mean it will never stop, right?” Jude tried to sound lighthearted, but she was finding it difficult to keep the panic out of her voice.
Eliana, however, seemed to have reached the end of her ability to vocalize. She shook her head again, clenching her hands where they lay, and said nothing.
“It will stop when Atherton is safe,” said Knatt, from his hovering spot near the fireplace. “Or when he is dead.”
Jude turned to meet his eyes, and the fear she saw there echoed her own. It brought her no comfort. After a long moment, Knatt shook his head and set his shoulders with new determination.
“We shouldn’t stay here any longer,” he announced. “If Atherton is in this much trouble, then no one is safe. Miss Blake, if we help you, do you think you could move?”
Eliana closed her eyes in a hard grimace and nodded.
“Good. Miss Li, help her up. I’ll get you two out safely, and then I’ll come back to evacuate the students’ quarters.”
At first, Jude nodded and started to help Eliana up, grateful to be leaving and grateful that Knatt would be by their side, keeping them safe. Then she stopped.
Am I really such a coward that I can’t even evacuate on my own?
“No,” she said aloud, standing up to face him. “You should go help the students now. I can get Eliana out on my own.” She glanced back at Eliana with a weak smile. “Besides, if Atherton does—well—then she’ll be back to normal, right? Between the two of us, we can protect ourselves.”
She pushed her smile wider, trying to imbue it with more confidence than she felt. It must have worked, because Knatt gave her a nod.
“Very well. That would be more efficient.” He stepped closer to her. Placing an encouraging hand on her shoulder, he smiled fondly. “You are braver than you know, Miss Li.”
“I hope that’s true.”
He nodded again. Then he dropped his hand and turned away, and within a moment, he was gone.
Jude felt her panic rising, but she reminded herself that Eliana needed her to keep it together. So she swallowed hard, and pushed it back down.
Logan tightened her grip on the knife. Her right hand pinned his behind his back, and she could feel the damp edge of his robe sleeve. She didn’t want to risk checking to be sure, but she suspected it was damp with his own blood.
“I knew you’d be the first to figure it out,” he whispered, sounding delighted. His voice sounded different now than it had before. “While everyone around her remains blinded by belief and prejudice, the shadow summoner soldiers on.”
Atherton still stood within her sight, face contorted with an unknown pain. She gave Volkov’s arm an extra twist as she leaned into his ear.
“Let him go.”
Volkov chuckled. She could feel it reverberating through his body.
“Come now, Henrietta,” he murmured, so quiet she doubted anyone else could hear. Why did his voice sound different? “We’re friends now, aren’t we? Would you really risk our special connection for the sake of that old windbag?”
It’s the accent, she realized. He didn’t sound Russian anymore. British, maybe?
His tone was playful, wanting. Appeasable, perhaps.
Time to play ball.
“Of course we’re friends,” she answered easily, her voice as breezy as if she weren’t holding a knife to someone’s throat. “And I’ll give you the same deal I’d give to any of my friends: you let him go, I’ll let you go.”
“You really do want to help him, don’t you? See, that’s what I admire about you, Henrietta. You never give up. Even when the odds are against you.”
“Do you really think the odds are against me, Volkov?” She gave his arm a tug,
reminding him of his own precarious situation.
“Perhaps not,” he conceded, sounding strained. “But tell me, if I let the Prophet go, how do I know you’d keep your end of the bargain? After all, you seem to have allied yourself with a group of liars and murderers.”
She didn’t mean to do it, but her gaze shifted back to Atherton. Volkov wasn’t wrong: the High Prophet was a liar and a killer.
He picked up on her hesitation immediately.
“Yes. You know, don’t you? You know what he did.” She could practically feel Volkov smiling as he watched her ambivalence play out on her face. “Do you want to know the names of the Adepts he sacrificed? It should only have taken him one, you see, but Atherton isn’t as studied a man as he likes to put on. He fucked it up the first time. So another one had to die.”
As much as she wanted to ignore what he was saying, a part of her knew he was telling the truth.
“They were young, too,” he whispered. His tone was dangerous. “Do you want to know their ages?”
Ahead of them, Atherton began to sink down, quickly disappearing behind the bodies in the crowd that stood between them.
“Nobody else has to die tonight,” said Volkov. “I only wanted him.”
Logan didn’t believe that, but an ever-increasing part of her wanted to. For a moment, she hesitated. I could walk away right now.
A moment was all it took. Right at that moment, an unearthly howl erupted from the center of the room, not far from where Atherton’s body had fallen. Several people screamed, and the crowd around her began to work itself into a frenzy again. She felt her grip on Volkov slip for a moment, and then slip even further as someone barreled right into her.
The Bound are waking up. And what had they become, now that Volkov had distorted the ritual?
Several feet ahead, she saw the Bound rising to their feet, their new massive forms coming head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. Another body slammed hard into her, and Volkov seized his chance.
Just like that, he was out of her grasp, dancing just beyond her reach. Before she had a chance to react, he grabbed the nearest Order Adept and positioned his own blade over their heart.