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Unless…

“You – you –”

Anne’s voice was a harsh rasp. It was clear she was trying to shift, but nothing was happening – she simply writhed, her eyes blazing with fury, her hand still clawed around her throat.

“Powdered unicorn horn,” James said, with a wide, terrifying smile. “Extremely hard to source, but Hargreaves has its own store.”

Robb’s mouth dropped open.

Unicorn horn.

One of the few things that were deadly to wyverns.

To every other living creature, a unicorn’s horn had healing properties – it could help heal serious wounds and even cure diseases. But to wyverns, it was pure poison. Since no one here was – Robb assumed – seriously ill, they’d probably just thought the tea tasted a little chalky and didn’t think much more about it.

But to Anne, a wyvern, what James had just fed her was deadly poison.

“I’ve been waiting for this chance for a while,” James said, his voice filled with malevolence. “But I knew you’d be too busy thinking about your new toy to notice me slipping the powder into your tea, and too enchanted by the sound of your own voice to notice the taste until it was too late.”

As he spoke, Anne flopped back on the red velvet couch, spittle frothing at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes flashed yellow as her wyvern fought to come to the surface, but it was clear the poison was working on her, and quickly. She was already too incapacitated to do anything more than wriggle on the couch while her eyes conveyed nothing but pure hatred.

But is it enough to kill her?

Robb didn’t know a huge amount about unicorn horns – they were even rarer than wyverns, after all – but he knew that powdered unicorn horn wasn’t quite as effective as when it was intact. Grinding it into powder was the only way it could be ingested, however, so it was a trade-off that anyone who wanted to use it had to make.

But apparently, James had prepared for that too.

Robb watched in amazement as James moved across the room at the kind of speed only a shifter could manage, getting behind Anne and grabbing her shoulder – and before Robb could even open his mouth, he saw a blade emerging from her chest.

Not a blade, he realized. A unicorn horn. Complete and intact. And currently run straight through the head of Hargreaves’s heart.

“Sorry, ma’am,” James said as an inhuman scream tore itself from Anne’s throat, her whole body twitching and jerking. “But you were in the way. And honestly, your plan to wake the dragon? Absolutely crazy.”

With a moan of exhaled air, Anne collapsed to the ground, very obviously dead. Her body twitched, and then lay still.

“Actually,” said James, wiping blood off his hands with a handkerchief – and where he’d gotten that Robb had no idea – “I’m not really all that sorry.”

Robb exchanged an astonished look with Tahnee, whose mouth was gaping wide open. Robb wasn’t sure that he himself looked much better.

Of all the things he’d expected to happen, it had not been that.

“… The fuck,” Tahnee whispered as she stared at Anne’s body, lying in the spreading pool of blood soaking into the thick, off-white carpet.

Did James just save us? Robb thought dazedly. Did he realize just how insane Anne’s plan actually was and realize he couldn’t go through with it?

The Hargreaves guards looked at each other uncertainly, clearly not sure whether they should attack James – the person they were protecting was already dead, and Robb wasn’t certain how things worked in Hargreaves. Did this mean they now had to bow the knee to him? Robb assumed James wouldn’t have casually murdered their ostensible boss in front of them if he’d thought it meant they’d kill him immediately in retaliation – say what he wanted about James, but he wasn’t stupid.

Without even looking at them, James said lazily, “There’s an amnesty for anyone here who was working with Anne, but it only lasts for the next ten seconds. Let me know what you decide. And let’s be honest – you all knew as well as I did that this fixation she had on waking that dragon was ridiculous. She had no idea if she could control it or not – and I for one had no intention of being barbecued in order to find that out. You know we were all thinking it – we just knew that saying anything out loud would get us melted by wyvern venom.”

The guards looked at each other again, exchanging mildly alarmed glances, before one of them hastily said, “I’m loyal to Hargreaves,” the other one nodding vehemently in agreement. “But the dragon plan…”

He trailed off, but it was clear that he’d also thought Anne’s idea had been the work of a power-crazed mind, too blinded by the conviction of her own superiority and ability to control the dragon through sheer force of will to see any kind of sense.

Robb supposed that in that sense, it was probably a relief to them that James had taken matters into his own hands and stabbed Anne with a unicorn horn. He couldn’t see any of the other people in this room having the gumption to stand up to Anne and risk what she might do to them in retaliation. And even if they’d had some kind of loyalty to her at first, it was clear that neither of them was willing to die for Anne personally. Especially since she was now a rapidly cooling corpse.

James nodded. “Good to hear.”

He turned to the lyrebird, which was still sitting placidly on one of the chairs.