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“No,” a familiar voice says. “I was hoping to speak with Ivy of Nikodi. Is she here?”
Stavros hesitates, but I step forward.
The guard who’s seemed to haunt me around campus stands in the hallway, his face as beautiful as ever but his jaw tight and his eyes wider than I’ve ever seen them.
He looks almost… scared.
My heart lurches with the sudden certainty that something is wrong, even if I have no idea what.
I hurry the rest of the way to the door. “I’m here. What’s the matter?”
The guard glances at me, and a faint glow of hope comes over him. “You’re the only one I could think of to come to. I need your help.”
Stavros shoots me a puzzled look, but I’m equally bewildered. “Help? With what?”
The guard nudges past Stavros, who lets him enter but looms over him with a defensive air. The other man doesn’t appear to notice, let alone mind.
His attention is fixed completely on me.
“I’ve broken some of their hold on me,” he says. “I’ve been asking questions, challenging orders… and they’ve decided I’m no good to them anymore.”
I stare at him. “Who are you talking about? Who’s had a hold on you?”
“The ones who made this body.” He taps his chest. “They built the form out of clay and put me in it, and now they want to shatter me and send me back to the state I was in before. But I don’t want to go. I like this kind of living.”
Behind me, Alek lets out a strained sound. “They made you… out of clay?”
I’m outright gaping now, but I don’t know how to reel in my shock or slow the thumping of my pulse. “The scourge sorcerers made you. But who—whatwere you before?”
The guard who isn’t really a guard shifts his weight on his feet. “I have been saying I’m ‘Rheave.’ It’s the closest thing to a name I have. Humans call all of us ‘daimon.’”
Understanding snaps into place in my head alongside my memories of my appeal to the spirit-creatures in the All-Giver’s tower. The images they sent of flames and constricting darkness.
It could have been fired clay, closing in around them.
The conspirators switched from controlling the daimon in their ephemeral form to stuffing them into physical bodies.
“That’s how they created life,” Alek mutters as the pieces click together for him too. “They didn’t actually create it. They stole what was already there.”
“Can I stay with you?” Rheave asks, his gaze darting across my men and back to me. “If they find me, they’ll kill this body.”
Casimir eases forward, speaking in a soothing tone. “You should be safe now. The leader of the scourge sorcerers is dead. The army is rounding up his—”
“What?” The daimon in human form looks at the courtesan as if he’s grown a second head. “No, he’s not.”
I manage to stop gaping long enough to ask, “How do you know?”
Rheave’s gaze swings back to me. His lips purse as if he doesn’t like what he’s about to say.
“He’s just called on all of us nearby. We’re to go to the palace and murder every inhabitant who has Melchiorek blood.”
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