I glanced at my brother.
He was alive. We hadn’t been too late.I should’ve felt relief.
Instead, I felt something colder.
Rage at what Giovanni had done. Rage at what had almost become of us in that place. Rage that Emberline had been in danger, that I’d nearly been outmaneuvered, when I’d been so sure of myself yesterday.
And beneath my anger, the quiet clarity of what came next.
The helicopter dropped, and Dante’s arms tightened around his wife, holding her steady. Nico’s hand pressed tight to the ceiling as we dropped lower, the bright desert turning rockier.
Nothing out here looked familiar, because everything was exactly the same. I pulled out the cipher from a small pocket sewn into the hem of my pants, hidden where the guards never thought to search.
The metal was warm and getting hotter.
The skids hit rock, not soft sand, the cabin shaking. Emberline’s eyes popped open. The door slid open again, and a sweep of hot air rushed in, grit filling my lungs and abrading my face.
Nico leapt down with catlike precision, then turned, reaching up for Emberline as she climbed out. Dante followed—with agonizing slowness—and I was right beside him, shoulder under his arm before his knees could give way.
The mortals stayed inside.
Their job was to deliver us to our required destination. Nothing more.
The arms dealer leaned out, pointing a finger like he still needed the illusion of authority. “Don’t forget,” he called. “You owe me.”
I stared up at him, dust swirling around the rotors, my hair whipping around my face, his eyes squinting against the wind.
“And I told you,”—my voice carried over the beat of the rotors—“I never forget.”
His finger lowered. The door slammed shut, and the helicopter lifted off, rising into the bright blue sky and vanishing over the ridge, leaving us with silence and the thinnest outline of a door, glowing in the air in front of us.
I stepped forward, sand crunching under my boots, the cipher in my hand.
The silver cipher was etched with symbols and some old runes, a language from centuries ago that was no longer spoken. It had been passed down through our family’s hands for generations. A key disguised as a relic. My father’s talisman, until I’d stolen it to bring down his kingdom.
I tightened my grip on it and murmured an unlocking spell I’d learned as a child.
Light flared—muted, silver-blue—and the portal opened, widening into a rippling oval, and beyond that, cobblestones and houses stretched, the blue of the Grand Canal, sparkling in the midday sun.
“We have to move fast,” I braced myself. “Ready?”
We stepped through, and for an instant, the world vanished.
There was no up. No down. No sound but the thrum of magic, the taste of iron on my tongue, the sensation of being drawn through a needle’s eye.
Then… the smell of saltwater and ancient stone flooded my senses. Noise and voices and the steady tread of a million feet filtered in, the soft slap of water against ancient stone.
We reappeared on the Riva dei Sette Martiri—open air, open sky, middle of the day—the air impossibly thick and humid after the arid desert, the city of Venice boisterous after the darkness and grit of the Fossa. Two humans walked past, taking pictures with their phones. They stopped.
Saw four figures appear out of thin air like ghosts—dust-coated, blood-streaked, one of us barely upright, Emberline’s upper body smeared in red, Nico’s deathly expression carved from stone.
They froze in place, phones still raised.
For half a second, I could see their thoughts.
That’s not possible. Where did they come from? Did you get that on film?
Nico’s mouth twitched. “I’ll handle this,” he murmured, then he was beside them, casually deleting pictures off their phones, pointing them back toward the city, their expressionspleasantly dazed.
