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I push the front door open. It’s not latched, never mind locked. I enter and look into the house. It’s dark, and it looks to be empty. I hurry to the stairs but there, before I take the first one, I see Willow’s phone where she must have dropped it.
“Willow!” I cry out, unable not to. Benedict’s barks are frenzied. He’s not inside. He should be inside.
Rather than going upstairs, I rush down the hall, and when I see the library door is open, I shift direction. Is Willow hiding in the dark wing? Did she make it there?
“Willow?” I ask, entering the library and rushing to the hidden door that will lead to the dark wing. In the darkness, I almost fall over a man on the ground. It’s a Society guard.
My heart pounding, I rush down the corridor, the draft stronger than usual meaning the exit door is open.
“Willow!” I call out, but hear nothing. When I get to the exit, I find it open as expected and I can see the shadow of another man down. I expect to see a Society guard but am stunned to find Alfred Noyes there on the ground instead with a pool of blood around him and a large, ancient looking dagger on the floor beside him.
I leap over his body and rush outside, where I hear Benedict’s frantic barking. From here, I can see him leaping against his chain but before I get to him, lightning flashes, illuminating the bodies of two more men. A Society guard and James, one of my drivers and the man who normally handles Benedict. I drop to my knees to check for a pulse, but it’s too late for him. If I don’t hurry, it’s going to be too late for Willow, too.
If it isn’t already.
No. I can’t think that. I can’t.
Benedict turns toward me, growling fiercely until he sees it’s me. He barks his warning, and when I release him, he takes off at breakneck speed with me at his heels. He leaps down the stairs that lead into the garden, and the lights of the house blink momentarily on then off again three times in quick succession. In that light, my gaze catches on something. Something that shouldn’t be there.
I stop running, shocked when I turn fully to see Salomé there. But she’s all wrong. I find my feet moving, carrying me toward her prone, unmoving body. Her feet are at the top of the stairs with her head on the bottom stair. The skirt of her dress is up over her thighs, leaving her exposed. Her neck is bent at an unnatural angle, her head cracked open. In her hand she’s still holding a pistol, and in death, her eyes are open, red from where blood vessels burst when I nearly strangled her. And as wicked as ever.
I kneel beside her and touch her cold neck, unsure why I’m feeling for a pulse. She’s dead. It’s obvious. Her skin is cool to the touch, her hair soaked with blood and rain. Without looking away from her face, I tug the skirt of her dress over her legs to cover her and lay my hand over her eyes to close the lids. I stand just as I hear a scream.
Willow’s scream.
Willow’s piercing scream followed by a gunshot.
27
AZRAEL
I run so hard my muscles burn by the time I arrive at the scene—and what a scene it is. It’s surreal, like something out of a fucking nightmare. My worst fucking nightmare.
Benedict is on the ground whimpering a few feet from Shemhazai’s broken altar. Blood colors the fur of his hind leg a dark red.
Seven brothers in cassocks and rosaries stand in a semi-circle chanting what sounds like some demonic prayer.
Willow is stripped naked, her torn nightie in a heap of soft pink in the dirt. It doesn’t belong here, that color. That pretty, vibrant shade.
She doesn’t belong here.
And what I see, how she’s positioned, fuck, it takes me to that morning on Proctor’s Ledge. It’s the nightmare, but this is no dream because she’s bound with a thick rope around her neck, strung up around Shemhazai’s own neck. Her hands aren’t tied at least, and she has them wrapped around the noose, but she won’t be able to hold on too long, not once the rubble beneath the tips of her toes, which barely make purchase as it is, slips away.
Thunder roars and lightning strikes almost in unison to Caleb, not yet seeing me, drapes a rosary over her head and stands back.
Willow’s eyes are wide on him.
“Caleb,” she chokes out, as he brandishes a dagger that looks a hell of a lot like the one Abacus used to cut out the birthmarks on his shoulder blades. But that’s not possible. That’s at the bottom of the lake.
