“Butwhat?” Verrick asks, his voice as smooth as silk.
“But I… I defer to his highness in this and all matters, of course.”
“Good choice. Now, luckily for my daughter, I’m not as merciless as you,witch.” Verrick’s eyes glitter with anythingbutmercy as he turns to look at me once more. Then, through a grin as sharp and cold as his voice, “I think it’s only fair we give them an opportunity to say goodbye.”
Say goodbye?
Fear squeezes the last of the breath from my lungs.Oh, goddess. No…
It’s not dark yet—the guys are still in their stone forms. There’s no way Verrick would waste precious time and energy dragging them all the way here from upstate. Besides, he can’t get to them—not physically. He can’t cross Rook’s protective wards. He indicated as much when he was taunting me earlier.
You walked out into the darkness beyond the wards, straight into my waiting arms…
It’s a small comfort, but I can’t imagine who else they could’ve captured.
“Who… who is the… other?” I finally manage, fighting against the pull of oblivion as Verrick’s drug works its way through my system. I can’t pass out now. Not when I have no idea if I’ll even be allowed to wake up again.
I focus on Verrick’s cold, calculating gaze. On the mage’s grip around my arm as he jerks me up out of the chair. At the faint smell of candle wax from the chandeliers overhead. But all of it is blurring together, my thoughts slowing, my tongue fat and useless in my mouth.
“I will see you in a few hours, my moon.” Verrick touches my cheek, his tone suddenly kind. “Worry not. After tonight, everything will be different. You’ll see.” He leans in to kiss my cheek with ice-cold lips, and then he’s gone, heading out through a plain wooden door behind the altar, waving for Eloise to follow.
She rushes to obey.
The mage drags me across the altar and into the sacristy, where he dumps me on my ass in front of the vestment cabinet and heads out without a second glance, locking the door behind him. I’m slumped against the hard wood of the cabinet, my legs stretched out before me, but I can’t move them. Can’t feel my arms. Can’t even scream.
My head pounds against my skull, and all I want to do is fall into a dreamless sleep. But just before my eyelids flutter closed and the darkness sweeps me under, I catch sight of the man watching me from across the room, blood staining his shirt, tears staining his face.
“I’m… sorry,” he chokes out. “I’m so, so sorry.”
My mind has slowed to a crawl, my vision dark and blurry, and I’m not even sure my heart is still beating. But through the fog, one thing is painfully clear.
The other prisoner isn’t a gargoyle. Not even a glamoured one.
He’s…
“Dad?” I whisper, because it’s the only name I’ve ever called him.
And then the world goes black.
Chapter Three
DRAEGAN
The gargoyles and I feel it before we see it—the kind of deep, dark dread that pools hot in the gut, nameless, yet nevertheless horrifying.
Still, when the sun finally sets over the grounds of Blackmoor and releases us from our stone prisons for the night, none of us is prepared for the brutal confirmation that we were not, in fact, trapped in a nightmare.
This terror is absolutely real.
Our senses awaken to a sky choked with thick, roiling smoke, ash floating in the air like the gentlest snow, Lucinda and Huxley circling us with frantic caws. The scent of burning wood is overpowering, and before my men and I so much as glance at one another, we leap from the manor rooftop and soar toward the glow of the strange fire.
Flames stretch into the sky, hungry and devastating. We land on the ground in front of the inferno, unbearable heat radiating from the strange fire—a fire that rages high, but hasn’t moved beyond the structure it consumed.
It’s so unexpected, so disconcerting, it takes me a full minute to realize what I’m actually looking at.
A pile of flaming ash where just last night the library stood in stately, quiet pride.
It’s… gone. Just gone. All of it. The barn. The books. Rook’s computer equipment and the loft and the damn Cerridwen Codex and—
