He’d barely continued reading when Ellery said, “I don’t understand why the Council didn’t want us to attend. It’s an important vigil—would it be that strange to reporters if we were there?”
Domenic grunted noncommittally.
“And all this work they have us doing. Do you really think”—she squinted at a line in her own register—“someone who wieldsFrithanis the traitor? I’ve never evenheardof Frithan.”
“It specializes in herb gardening, apparently.”
“Yes. That has high treason written all over it.”
Domenic didn’t glance up as he flipped a page. Not just because it ached to look at her. But because he feared one meeting of their eyes would give it all away. That the real reason they’d been omitted from the vigil’s attendees was because the Council no longer trusted her. That he was terrified she loathed him. That simply to glance at her mouth would be to experience the phantom taste of it.
“You’ve really thrown yourself into this,” Ellery said. “What are you even expecting to find at this point?”
“I don’t know. A sign or something.”
“A sign,” she repeated flatly.
“What do you want from me, El? I’m just trying to…”Exonerate you. “It’s going to take Hanna weeks to interrogate the whole Order. We can’t just kick up our feet and do nothing in the meantime.”
When she didn’t respond, finally, Domenic braved her gaze—it was wary.
“You’d tell me if there was something I was missing, right?” she asked.
He stabbed his nails into his knee. “Of course I would. You know that—What? What’s wrong?” Ellery’s face had shuddered into an expression of horror.
Then abruptly she stood, her chair screeching. “Cadaver is here, in the Citadel,” she gasped. “I feel its heartbeat.”
“What?”He rose and grasped the back of his chair to steady himself. “Where?”
“It’s…” She drew Iskarius to better concentrate, then she blanched. “Below.”
Ellery took off, and Domenic scrambled after her. His mind fuzzed like radio static. Below meant the subterranean levels, and the subterranean levels meant the Vault, the vigil, and Cadaver was the… was the…
Suddenly, the elevator was opening, and he was in the same stone corridor that he’d last visited in another life. Some thirty yards down, the grand door of the waiting room lay in a shredded heap, and Domenic had paced outside that door only weeks ago, had just watched as a colony of Order magicians carried away Julian Norwood’s charred, unconscious body. Now a throng of magicians bottlenecked that same entrance. Many had crumbled to the ground. They were gasping, moaning, and when Domenic looked down, he was shaking, shaking—
“Do you feel that?” Ellery hissed as they slowed to push past the fallen magicians.
“Yeah,” he heard himself answer. But he didn’t feel whatever she meant at all; not until they stood directly atop the threshold. A terrible pressure emanated from the room in a crush of gravity.
Hanna,a voice warned him, a voice he hated.
Yet as Domenic scanned the room, forcing himself to examine every unmoving body, every broken bone, every splotch of blood, he realized the students that lay around him weren’t dead, only unconscious—and grotesquely, almost exaggeratedly injured, like a scene staged. There was their hands: bruised and mangled to every last finger. The several limbs bent at revolting angles. The obligatory puddles of blood.
Only one still stood. Her eyes were rolled back into their whites. Her mouth hung crooked, and blue light leaked out from her throat, her ears, even her nostrils, glinting against the slick trail of her nosebleed.
“Demelza,” Ellery choked, lunging toward the girl. Dimly Domenic recognized her. That actress girl. Maybe a year or two below him.
He trained Valmordion on her.
“Don’t,”Domenic said, making Ellery halt midstep. His breath fogged in the frigid air.
“Wh-what are you doing? She’s—”
“The pressure in the room. It’s coming fromher.”
“Shit.Shit.” Ellery’s hand trembled as she raised Iskarius. “But if Cadaver’s possessing her, how do we get it out without hurting her?”
“C-can you expel it?” Domenic’s voice wavered even as he fought to keep it firm. He glanced at the second door, flung haphazardly open, and realized with a clench of his stomach that a similar scene likely waited in the vigil chamber, thatIseulwas in the vigil chamber.
