Page 62

We stand on the rose mosaic. Overhead, massive trees spread their branches across a glass ceiling. The torrential storm still rains down, creating a cacophony inside the library.

“Your turn,” I tell Orla, elbowing her in the side.

She huffs. “Fine. Dearest library, we are looking for information on siphons . . . and bloodbonds . . . pretty please?”

I nearly snort. I’ve never heard Orla say “please” in her life. We wait, and the quiet makes my skin prickle. Finally, I can hear the crackle and slither of moving branches, and then a book appears before us, held tight by sturdy vines.

The sight of the book turns my stomach. Its cover is constructed from discolored tan stretches of some sort of leather that I don’t trust, stitched together with thick bands. Its pages are pitch black and roughly cut. I don’t want to touch it. Orla grabs it and brushes aside the vines, which seem to take offense and snap her on the wrists. She hisses and hands the book to me to open.

The first page has a small title in hasty, splotched calligraphy in the language of Imaelhain.

“The Book of the Undead,” Orla reads.

The book opens on a graphic depiction in white ink of a dead body, its parts labeled with instructions for a sort of magic not taught at Gossemort. This is not even Dark magic—something deeper and older. I flip through the pages, Orla looking silently over my shoulder. I stop on a page with a depiction of a jawbone. Elongated teeth meet sharp points.

I scan the pages that follow. A picture of a siphon biting its victim, the path of its poison through the bloodstream, the change to the heart that grants it immortality.

But then I turn the page.

Two hearts. Bound together by iron chains. A lock in the middle. Orla traces a finger along the paragraph that follows.

“The life cycle of a siphon,” she says. “They’re most vulnerable in their infancy, as soon as they’re converted.”

“He’s been a siphon for a fortnight. Is that considered recently converted?”

“Hold on,” she says impatiently.

We both read on. “It says a new siphon has to find its bloodmate. That once the bloodmate is converted and the two are bound, the bloodbond is unbreakable. After that, it becomes much harder to kill either of them. They become stronger, faster, and stealthier. And they can go longer without feeding.”

The spot on my neck where Galvin bit me aches, an echo, a reminder. I want to curse. I want to scream. Denials flood my mind—that I’m still in control, that I can still fight it. I can resist Galvin. I can stave off my appetite.

But I remember Poppy and how she loved Hugo, how in the end, it did not matter.

The scent of Lonan is overwhelmingly tempting. But even now, with Orla standing next to me, I can hear the beat of her heart in my ears, the rush of her blood through her veins. It smells different, but not unpleasant—like roses and sugared lemons and . . .

“Vesper?” Orla says, her eyes narrowed like knives. Saints, I’d been staring, hadn’t I?

I nearly contemplate it then—asking her to do what is necessary. Of all the members of our cohort, Orla might.

The sensible thing.

The right thing.

“Is it reversible?” I ask thickly. “After you’ve been . . . ”

Orla clicks her tongue as she flips the page. An illustration of arteries branching like tree roots spans the page. Numbered skulls are scattered throughout the arteries. It almost looks like a family tree. “You have to kill the sire,” Orla says. “Kill the siphon at the top and it will revert all the others in its line so long as the siphon nature hasn’t taken root.”

“Taken root? And how do we know if it has?”

She shakes her head and turns the page again. The next illustration depicts a siphon’s bare chest, marking the location of its heart, and beside it is a sketch of a silver blade with an emblem of a dragon carved onto the hilt.

“This must be that stake the prince was so reluctant to tell us about,” Orla says. “But it says nothing of where to find one, possibly assuming the reader will be able to make one themselves. That’s no help.”

I reach over her and flip back to the page about the bond. “It says that once we’re bound, the bond becomes unbreakable. What does that mean?”

Are Galvin and I already bound or not? He implied that it was already done, that fate had made the choice for me. Orla shakes her head, at a loss.

A disturbance in the shadows of the bookshelves grabs my attention. We both freeze as the branches and vines shift and rearrange. A moment later, a branch curls up toward us, holding a new book. For a moment, the vain hope catches me that maybe this will tell us where to find the silver dagger. But then I recognize the cover.