Page 44 of Bloodgrove

Elodie spoke before he could. “Keep your forgiveness if you only mean to offer it because you are frightened. I want nothing I have not earned.”

Will paused and released her arm.

“Besides, you look sweet when you sulk.” With that, she hurried away, her thin nightdress fluttering behind her.

The journey through the silent house to the corridor she had mentioned seemed endless. They avoided broad spaces, empty rooms, and the stairwell, always keeping close to a wall and within reach of one another. The moonlight hovered above them, casting a silver dome around them that made Elodie’s hair shimmer.

At last, they reached the short corridor that now led into nothingness. In a few weeks, the door would open onto a small balcony, but for now there was only a five-meter drop onto the heap of rubble that remained of the ballroom.

Will was about to close the double doors and seal off another chamber filled with shadows when he noticed the moonlight falling in long bands across the dusty subfloor. A small smile touched the corner of his mouth, and he turned away, leaving the empty room and its silver treasure at his back. Instead, he took his place beside Elodie at the far end of the corridor and stared at the only door leading into the stairwell beyond.

The minutes stretched on, filled with tense silence.

The shadow came first. It stood motionless in the doorway, snakes lapping around its feet and filling every dark corner and hollow until the entire corridor seemed alive. But the shadow merely stared at them, and Will felt as though he were looking into death itself.

Then footsteps sounded on the stairs. Slow and confident.

Chapter 25

“Elodie,” Will whispered.

“I hear it.”

She raised an arm to her mouth and bit into her wrist—first one, then the other. Blood streamed out, smearing her lips, and when she lowered her arms, it pooled in her palms. Will stared at her in shocked disbelief.

Suddenly, the blood in her hands swelled and hardened into crystal. Elodie closed her fingers around the daggers forming within it. Her wounds continued to bleed as she raised the two blades.

A man stepped into the shadow’s shape, and the two became one. When he moved toward them, the darkness followed a fraction too late, so that nothing about him ever looked entirely natural. But now the featureless silhouette conformed to the bony, slightly stooped frame of a man.

“It did not have to come to this, Elodie,” the mage said, his voice unpleasantly shrill. He stood slightly crooked, one shoulder raised. In the moonlight, his hair was nearly white, his skin so translucent that veins branched around his throat like twigs.

“Robert Lake.” Elodie sighed. “You do not truly believe you will become the next Red Hand.”

Her first blow struck home. The man took an angry step toward her, his shadows hissing and pressing closer. Will’s light hardly seemed strong enough to hold them back.

Mr. Lake spread his arms. “Look at me. Look at the power I command. And you believe a few tricks will earn you enough recognition in society to secure a nomination? That the Red Hand would choose you for what—your beauty? Because the wives like you?” He laughed maliciously.

“My father nominated me when I was barely a year old. Does our King even remember you exist when you never leave your observatory? The people of this city have forgotten you.”

Mr. Lake’s right eye twitched. Then the entire right side of his body followed. “That is all your father’s fault! He was obsessed. He thought you had been born for the office. ‘Born from your mother’s dead body,’ ‘baptized in blood,’ ‘fed with blood.’ Blood, blood, blood. He never understood that blood is what holds you back. There are far greater powers out there!” The shadows reared. Will’s moonlight flickered and shrank.

“All that power, and you are still trapped here like the rest of us.” Elodie stepped to the edge of the circle of light and lowered her daggers. “Without me and the sacrifice my father forced upon me, no one would care about you. Even your wife knew you would never become the Red Hand. Is that not why she left you?” Elodie shifted her weight, almost as though she were relaxing.

Meanwhile, Will fought against the pressure of the shadows. Sweat gathered along his back. The light was no longer strong enough to enclose them completely, and his own shadow had grown dark and long enough to merge with the room beyond.

Suddenly, he cried out. Something had bitten deep into his thigh, then vanished the instant he moved the light. He immediately stepped closer to Elodie and drew her fully into the shrinking circle again.

If he meant to be of any use here, if he meant to survive the night, he had to be prepared to abandon the last remnants of the Capitol’s decency. His father’s contempt, his neighbors’ mockery, his lover’s betrayal, and the scandal before the queen’s family rose into a panicked chorus as he dipped his fingers into the fresh wound in his thigh. With great effort, as though all their hands clung to him and tried to hold him back, he raised them to his mouth and touched his tongue to the blood.

But his body knew what to do. His tongue licked up every last drop with greedy eagerness, and the moonlight swelled. He repeated it, reaching into the wound again, flinching at the pain, and drinking his own blood. The light grew, and Mr. Lake cursed.

“Your mage will not save you!” he screamed, raising his arms. The shadow stepped beside him. Tentacles and snakes rose, growing down from the ceiling and pressing their black bodies against the light.

“He will save us all,” Elodie hissed, too quietly for Robert Lake to hear. But he no longer waited for her reply. Together with his shadow, he lunged at Elodie, and now that he stood within the light, nothing restrained his monsters.

They shot forward and attacked Will, driving him farther and farther back. Elodie dodged Lake and struck at him with her blood daggers. But he was quick despite his frail body. Every movement was jerking and abrupt, bursts of violent force flinging him forward and wrenching him back as though strings controlled his limbs. Ether gathered around his hands, and he tried to catch the young woman with lashes of black, thickly dripping whips.

Will limped several steps backward, but there was nowhere to go. The shadows were everywhere, crawling toward them from all sides. They formed around his light, trying to smother it inside a cocoon. In desperation, he reached for the sphere of moonlight and, to his surprise, caught hold of something—hard as steel, cool as water. It lay in his hand, which now shone like the moon itself.