Page 56 of Turncloak

The boy’s chest lurched. Surely it could not be this easy.

He entered the vault behind her, sliding nimbly through the crack of the closing door. The rich courtier’s vault was like a dragon’s lair. A plain enough room, with dark stone on the floor and walls and goldencandle lamps bolted to the walls, but its contents…

Diadems and broadswords, ancient scrolls and enchanted portraits and treasure chests stuffed with Irisian gemstones, bolts of goldspider silk and an elmwood staff and a vial rack labeled Worst Nightmares, more ascens than he’d ever seen in his young life, more ascens than he knew existed, great pillars of them towering higher than most grown men.

The wild riches shifted and vanished as Lorissa Rezaran rifled through them. Over the clatter of objects and the faint sound of the fallowwolf’s sniffing, the boy strained his ears. The door separating the vault from the rest of the bank was thick, reinforced, but through it he was almost certain he could hear footsteps, shouts, that Saints-damned wailing.

Backup was arriving.

The wardholders must have been alerted of the breach.

Lorissa gave a muffled yes as she finally stumbled upon the weaverwick wand. One moment there was a slender gold wand case perched atop a stack of rare tomes, the next it was invisible, tucked into Lorissa’s pocket or waistband.

The vault door opened, and the boy slipped out behind his mother and the fallowwolf.

Every banker’s lamp burned bright gold. A dozen mages in all manner of robes—blood-orange Wielders, violet Healers, navy Enchanters, a handful of black Practers, and even a bronze Foreseer—sprinted across the atrium floor, over stone bridges, and between fountains, toward the sweeping staircase.

“Asoine,” one of them called to the others, a brash male voice, stippled with fear.

The boy’s heart faltered. They were vastly outnumbered, but they did have the advantage of invisibility—albeit the lurching, fragmentary kind.

Amidst all the chaos, he lost track of his mother’s footsteps.

And there was no sign of her, no swish of red, no slice of pale cheekbone.

He inwardly muttered a cuss he was not supposed to know.

The front doors were the only way out of the bank. He’d just have to make his way there alone.

Unless…

No. With the deminite bracelet around his wrist, there was no way he’d be able to compel so many people at once.

So he ran. Toward the staircase, toward the flurry of bodies, terror ripping through him like a fever.

On the stairs, the wardholders passed him in a gust of scent—myrrh perfume and lavender soap and Bellandrian bitterale—and a cloak hem fanned over his invisible face. A hand brushed his small shoulder. Clutching the banister, he bit down hard on his tongue to keep the yelp from escaping.

Four mages stood stationed by the front doors, wands outstretched to block any exit attempt. An emerald Brewer’s cloak, two black Mage Practers, and a navy Enchanter. The latter yelled, “Sel—”

Before the mage could finish the curse, his heart was torn from his chest by an invisible beast. A blur of white fur flashed and then vanished. The guard next to the Enchanter, open-mouthed with uncomprehension, fell next, their chest cavities gaping holes, their hearts disappearing into thin air as the wolf swallowed them whole.

“Rasso, no!” Lorissa hissed. “No!”

Horror rooted the boy to the spot, unable to stop staring at the fallen, their eyes wide, the life gone from them so suddenly that he couldn’t make sense of it.

“Tempavicissan,” he heard his mother murmur, plead, but the very fact of his hearing it meant she had not been able to wind back time, to undo the wolf’s brutality and find another way out. She was too depleted.

The dark chasm behind the boy’s ribs ruptured into a canyon. He was at once absolutely certain they would both die here.

Where was she?

There.

Just beyond the giant wyrmwood, slumped by an arched stone bridge. The flash of red, the dark braid, here one second and gone the next.

This time, the boy did not run for her, only stayed frozen at the foot of the sweeping staircase.

“Sel effigier,” one of the sentinels bellowed, casting a statue curse straight at her. It missed.