Jacobs’ shirt was open to the waist, the fabric torn in places.Blood soaked his back and shoulder.A bruise darkened his jaw, his hair wet and disheveled.
Ellie, Adam, Constance, and Neil froze in a tableau where they were gathered around the altar.
She made a rapid, desperate calculation.Adam’s machete was still missing.Constance was out of daggers.The only weapon they had was Neil’s flaming sword—which he had no idea how to use.
“That’s my gun, isn’t it?”Adam nodded to the rifle.
Jacobs answered him with an unapologetic smile.
“How are you even here?”Ellie demanded.
“I followed you lot.You always seem to find your way to what I’m looking for.”Jacobs swung the rifle to point at Constance.“Hand me those items from the altar, Miss Mallory, and I’ll refrain from putting a hole in your friend.”
Constance’s expression blazed with fury.“If you were three steps closer, I promise I could make that much harder for you to do.”
“I don’t need to be any closer to shoot you, Miss Tyrrell,” Jacobs reasonably replied.“Now hurry along, Miss Mallory.Or I can kill your friend right now to show you just how serious I am and still have your brother to threaten.”
Ellie looked to Adam.His expression was grim.“I don’t think this is a bluff we want to call, Princess.”
Carefully, she picked up the arrow.It flared with ghostly, dancing light.A hot wind rose once more, the scent of ozone burning in her nose.
She felt something where her fingers met the shaft—not the uncomfortable sting of the Staff of Moses but an electric, humming sense of unimaginable potential.
The feeling was not comfortable.Ellie quickly dropped the arcanum into the quiver.
The bow seemed warm to the touch as she lifted it, as though someone else had only just let it go.
Jacobs balanced the rifle against his hip from the strap over his uninjured shoulder, his finger still on the trigger.He extended his left hand to Ellie, his jaw twitching with pain as the movement tugged on his wound.“Quiver first.”
She handed it to him.He slowly lifted the strap over his head.The muscles of his cheek tightened with a wince as the quiver fell into place on his back, just below the vicious wound from Borthwick’s whip.
Ellie felt a queasy, involuntary tug of sympathy.
Adam nodded at Jacobs’ shoulder.“That must hurt like hell.”
“Gloating, Mr.Bates?”
Adam’s expression was level.“Might surprise you, but I happen to think it’s wrong to whip a man.No matter how much of a bastard he is.”
A rich, tense complexity swirled between the two men as Jacobs held out his hand again.“Bow.”
Ellie obeyed, and a shudder of pain racked through him as he slid the weapon onto his wounded shoulder.
The movement pulled aside his ripped, bloody shirt, revealing the dark lines of a ruined tower and its twin swords slashed across the pale skin of his chest.Words blazed in black over his heart.
PER ARDUA.
Constance lifted her chin with an air of contempt.“I knew you were a stooge for the Order of Albion, but I didn’t think you’d stoop so low as to tattoo Lord Aldbury’s sigil on your chest.”
Jacobs went deeply, entirely still.
The room froze around him, the air itself holding taut.Even Ellie’s blood seemed to slow, pulsing strangely through her veins as her mind scrambled to make sense of what she had just heard.
Jacobs spoke, each word burning like hot iron.“What did you say?”
Constance frowned, bewildered by his tone.“That symbol on your chest.It’s from Lord Aldbury’s ring.He wears it constantly.Surely you’ve seen it?”
“I have never met Lord Aldbury,” Jacobs replied with exaggerated care.
