The hag gave her a prunish look. Tap, tap, tap into her desk . . .
She went still.
Goosha smiled up at Sophie. Fake and tight. The kind Sophie gave to everyone in the world except Agatha. “Thank you for banking with us. I’ll fetch Albemarle. Wait right here.”
She tapped a few more things, shot Sophie another cramped smile, and headed into a back office.
Sophie immediately leaned over the desk. Red words screamed against a black background—
IMPOSTOR ALERT
KILL ON SIGHT
In the desk’s reflection, Sophie glimpsed armed guards coming from the left. She turned and saw more from the right.
Alarms pealed through the bank: wild and deafening, like a heartbeat out of control. The tinted glass around Diamond Level morphed to iron, locking the floor in.
“THERE!” a cloying voice cried.
Sophie’s eyes flew to the Empress in the lobby, pointing up at her, the Empress’s goose captain and guards spearing towards Sophie’s head, beaks sharp as daggers.
Left, right, down . . . she was cornered from all sides—
Except one.
Sophie was already charging for the glass, kicking up into a flying leap and smashing through the pane, a glitter-rain of shards cascading over her as she fell past storming geese and plummeted through the atrium . . .
. . . straight onto the back of a phoenix.
The metal phoenix screeched and thrashed to life, trying to throw Sophie off its spine. Overhead, the Empress’s geese swerved, dive-bombing Sophie and stabbing her with their beaks, drawing blood from her arms and thighs. More and more geese came, Sophie too besieged to light her finger, the birds slashing her head and neck, their hellish squawks melding with the alarms. Panicked crowds scattered from the Bronze and Silver Levels as Sophie’s bucking phoenix accidentally batted geese through windows. Sophie couldn’t see anymore, her field of view nothing but feathers and blood and falling glass, her breaths shallowing with pain—
Then it stopped.
Geese went limp and dropped out of the air, impaled by small red spikes.
Red spikes from Sophie’s dress.
One by one they fell dead at the Empress’s feet, splattering her with blood.
Empress Vaisilla let out a howl of anguish, patrons fleeing around her.
Gobsmacked, Sophie looked down at her dress, pure white now, all the red spikes gone.
For the second time, the dress had come to her rescue.
Evelyn Sader’s dress.
Why?
No time to think about it.
A statue was still trying to kill her.
Make that three statues.
As her phoenix tried to fling her off, its two sisters were upon her, bludgeoning Sophie with iron wings. Together, the three statues grappled her in a headlock, wresting her higher, yet somehow Sophie still clung tight. But now she realized the birds’ plans, the three hemming her close and surging towards the ceiling, faster, faster, about to crush her against the stone. Sophie tried to defend herself, but they had a steel hold. Fight fair, she seethed. No one fights fair. Fear and rage ripped through her blood, lighting up her fingertip—
The statues bashed her into the ceiling at full speed, wings crumpling to shrapnel, before the wreckage plunged, cratering into the lobby and imploding the floor.
The alarms softened . . . then stopped.
A dull silence faded over the bank, as guards and patrons peeked out at the carnage of glass, metal, and dust.
Slowly, the misshapen phoenixes grunted to life, staggering out of the crater, their smooth gold bodies steeling back to form. They smiled at the Empress, expecting to be rewarded for their cleverness, for obliterating the intruder . . .
But the Empress wasn’t looking at them.
She was staring at the ceiling, where statues and prisoner had dashed against stone.
Four bodies went up.
Vaisilla had seen it herself.
But only three had come down.
MOGRIFYING OUT OF danger was a cheater’s game.
But as Sophie fluttered beneath the doorway of the Diamond Level and down serene hallways sealed from the chaos outside, she didn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt. In her years at school, Good and Evil played by the rules.
But in the Camelot years?
Play by the rules and you die.
Choosing a blue butterfly had been cheeky, but even in the worst danger, Sophie had to find a way to have a little fun. It was Evelyn Sader who’d started all this: the twins’ wicked mother, who’d duped King Arthur and borne his heirs.
At least that’s what she’d seen in Rhian’s blood crystal.
Except Japeth had denied it to Tedros at the wedding. She’d heard his voice inside that bubble, the scim tuned to the ones inside her head. Japeth had told the prince that he wasn’t Tedros’ brother . . . that he wasn’t Arthur’s son at all . . .
Truth, Lies, Present, Past . . . It was all mixed up now.
But sorting it out took short shrift to Sophie’s mission.
Finding the Snake.
The Diamond Level was a luxurious fantasy, even by Sophie’s standards. As her butterfly wove through, she spotted patrons getting manicures and massages, others partaking in caviar and champagne, even one doing yoga while a bank teller recited the status of their accounts. Unnaturally perfect plants spritzed rosy fragrance into the air, while a choir of green geckos floated in a soap bubble singing dulcet tones. Aside from the guards lining the iron-sealed glass, whispering into Lion badges on their armor, in touch with their colleagues outside, there were no signs that anything in the bank was amiss. Sophie drifted closer to the guards to listen.
“No sign of Sophie up here, Empress,” a guard murmured into his badge. “Yes, Empress. As you wish.”
He whispered to his fellow guard. “Empty the floor. King Rhian just arrived. He’s been briefed on the intruder situation. Wants privacy with the Bank Manager.”
Guards began rounding up tellers and patrons—a security situation, they insisted; the floor had to be cleared.
Sophie’s wings beat faster. Japeth would be here any minute. She needed to find Albemarle’s office and take the Snake by surprise.
Her butterfly zipped through halls, scanning workers’ name tags: Rajeev, Vice President . . . Francesca, Vice President . . . Clio, Vice President . . . everyone a Vice President . . . but now Sophie spotted a room set off from everything else, its door heavy and onyx-black.
BANK MANAGER, the plaque read.
Sophie squeezed beneath the door, the space so tight it trapped her. She’d thought she’d finally shed Evelyn’s dress when she mogrified, but now she could feel it burning against her thorax as if it was still on, the dress sure to reappear the second she reverted. She jammed harder under the door, about to rip her wings—oooof—
And she was through.
Albemarle, the Bank Manager, was in the heat of conversation with a customer—
Sophie’s butterfly leapt in shock.
Albemarle! The woodpecker!
The one from the School for Good and Evil, responsible for tallying ranks!
Sophie had known his name, of course, but she’d never entertained that a middleman at school might be moonlighting at the Woods’ most prestigious bank. And yet, here he was, with his white spectacles and red-topped head, perched on a desk, with a massive steel vault looming behind him, as he argued heatedly with a patron.
That was the other surprise.
Seated opposite Albemarle was a skeletal woman with stringy gray hair, a high forehead, and thin, cutting eyes.