“I am sure my honored wife was sad to miss it. I trust you said very thoughtful things in her absence.”
The way he could so easily mock Julie after he had manipulated her, tortured her,murderedher made Mallory want to draw her knife and impale his heart on the blade, but she resisted—tightening her hands into fists. “Julie is still here?” Even as she asked it, she realized—of course Julie was still there. Tethered to her ring like the others.
But she hadn’t seen any sign of the wives since her return, not even Triphine, who was usually impossible to be rid of.
Where were they?
“Is that why you came back? For her? I am sure she would be most flattered.” Bastien slinked closer to Mallory, almost close enough to touch her, and she tried to tell herself that he could not harm her, not in this form. He needed the strength of a mortal human to do anything more than brush a cold finger on her skin. He needed Armand.
He was just a spirit. Just a ghost. Smoke and nothingness. Even if he made himself corporeal for a moment or two, no doubt she could overpower him.
But when he took another step closer and the overwhelming aroma of oranges accosted her, she could not keep herself from shrinking away.
“Did you seek to give rest to my beloveds?” he said, half jokingly. “To help them find eternal peace? I did not take you to be so chivalrous.” He reached forward, his fingers teasing the buttons at Mallory’s throat.
She recoiled from the touch.
The bow snapped.
Bastien dissolved, like a cloud of squid ink in water. The arrow thunked into the wall.
Even unable to see the ghost, Constantino had sent the arrow straight through the side of his head.
Constantino snatched another arrow from his quiver and nocked it on the string. “Did I get him?”
“You got him,” Mallory breathed, watching the slimy black tendrils vanish into the air.
Then a laugh, coming from everywhere, all at once. Fitcher and Constantino both ducked from the noise.
“You should not have done that,” Bastien sang.
In the next moment, the house—so still, so serene—was thrown into chaos. The windows shattered. A fire flared to life in the hearth, burning an unnatural blue. And the wooden floorboards opened up beneath their feet and swallowed them whole.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Mallory screamed as she fell.
But it was barely a blink, not even enough time to know what was happening, before fabric wrapped around her wrist and yanked her to a stop with such force she thought her shoulder might have dislocated.
She, Fitcher, and Constantino had fallen straight through the floor of Armand’s bedroom suite, and then through the floor of the game room directly beneath it, and now they were dangling like fish on a line over the kitchen on the ground floor.
The curtains of Armand’s four-poster bed had stopped their fall, whipping out faster than the tentacles of the lou carcolh to grab each of them in midair.
Mallory’s thoughts were still spinning when the fabric released them and they crashed to the stone below. Pain reverberated up Mallory’s leg and she dropped to one knee. Every bone felt like it had been pounded on with a hammer.
A cacophony of groans and snapping wood roared through the walls as the curtains snaked back up to the bedroom and the floorboards over their heads pieced themselves back together, though wood remained splintered and iron nails jutted through the beams.
It felt as though the house was about to collapse on top of them.
“Everyone all right?” asked Fitcher, voice strained as he checked himself for injuries.
“No!” Constantino bellowed. “I most certainly am not.” He rolled off the table he’d landed on with a grunt. His whole body was trembling. “What in the name of Velos just happened?” He spun on Mallory. “You could have told us that he can controlthe house.”
“I did!” she shouted. But then hesitated. “Didn’t I? Look—I didn’t know he could dothat.”
The bolts holding a hanging rack of copper pots to the ceiling gave way, sending lids and pans crashing to the floor. More blue fire erupted from the bread oven, spewing out of its cavernous mouth.
She kicked at the door that led to the servants’ halls, surprised when it swung easily open, crashing into the wall. “Come on!”
