A low growl behind me breaks the silence.
I don’t turn back. I don’t need to.
I run.
29
I’M AT A full-on sprint in seconds. Sel’s hellhound is fast; I can hear its heavy breaths behind me, closer and louder with every step. Hear its claws scraping over stone markers. I reach the section with the headstones, and I zig and zag around them, hoping that I’m nimbler than it is.
I’ve never run this fast in my life, and it still doesn’t feel fast enough.
“Reveal yourself, Briana!” Sel’s voice, taunting and amused, calls down from somewhere above me. I leap over a wall and a gravestone, then another headstone, racing toward the mausoleum section.
I’m almost there. I can see the three low buildings facing inward and the courtyard in the middle. If I can get inside one of them… I push faster, will my legs to stretch farther. Sel’s voice keeps pace. He shouts down from a tree just over my shoulder. “Give up the ruse!”
Just after I leap over a low stone wall, just when the courtyard is within reach, the hound decides it’s time to act. I hear a grunt, as if it’s launched its whole body into the air. I change course, trip over a low marker, and fly forward, skidding across the courtyard bricks on stomach and hands. The hound lands headfirst against a mausoleum. Its skull cracks against the marble wall.
By the time I scramble breathlessly to my feet, the hound has recovered, so that when I turn, I see it for the first time.
Sel’s hound looks the same as the first hound I’d laid eyes on, but his is far, far bigger, and fully corporeal. It throws glowing silver aether off in waves. Details I’d missed before are clearer now, even in the dim light: its long snout with nostrils flared and tipped like a bat’s. Sel’s given it the Shadowborn’s heart-blood eyes, dark and impossibly red. I can’t look away; I can barely move for terror that when I do, it will strike.
I edge one foot back, and my heel hits something hard, vertical, smooth. Another mausoleum. I know without looking that the door is out of reach. The only escape routes are between the corners of the buildings and the fourth, open side I’ve just come through—the side that the hound is now closing off with its massive body.
It snarls and snaps its saliva-drenched jaws, in delight or fury, I don’t know. It lowers itself into a crouch, ears flicked forward. My heart accelerates into a full gallop, blood pounding in my ears. “Call it off, Sel!”
Sel drops down silently beside his construct, landing in a crouch and rising with a satisfied smile. “Just as I thought. A coward and a liar both.”
Sel’s hellhound pants at me, its mouth wide and open in a doglike grin. “Call it off!” I press my back into the wall.
Sel crosses his arms over his chest, pleasure painted all over his face. “Once a true hellhound has the scent, it never gives up its prey. The only way to stop it is to kill it. As much as I despise those Shadowborn beasts, I find I’m much the same way. So I decided to give you two final options: reveal your true form, or kill me.”
“You set me up!” Adrenaline and rage surge through my veins. “You planned to corner me here.”
He groans, as if correcting a dense student. “Of course. I must admit, I was inspired by what you said yesterday in William’s infirmary. You were right—all of this cat and mouse is getting old.”
I risk a step forward, but the hound snaps. I fall backward onto the bricks. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I’m tired, Briana, of your Shadowborn lies and the fun you must be having at our expense. Planting your brethren at our Oath, sending the serpent to take Nicholas under my nose, taking part in our trials.” With every slow step forward, his features turn more menacing and his eyes wilder until he looks more like his hellhound construct than himself. Looks more demon than human. “We both know you don’t care about our mission. I can see it in your face!”
“That’s not true!” I scream.
Sel’s expression is pained, annoyed. “More lies? Even now?” He kneels in front of me, his upper lip curling into a sneer. “I know you Saw the isel before taking the Oath. We both know the First Oath never took, that you sloughed off our sacred commitment like it was nothing. Like it was worthless to you, less valuable than dirt.”
I tremble. How did he know? Did he see—
He chuckles low at my confusion. “You think I don’t recognize my own casting or sense its absence?” He leans close to whisper in my ear. “I can feel them, Briana. The Oaths I’ve cast.” His eyes drift across my face and throat. “And I don’t feel any of me… on you.”
“Get away from me!” I shove him hard with shaking hands, and he laughs, rocking back on his heels. I scramble to my feet, but his hound is right there, its slobbering jaws at my shoulder.
Sel rises. “Nicholas needs to know who you are before he is called to the throne and you make a fool of him. William, Felicity, Russ, Sarah… They all seem to think you might actually belong with us, when we both know you don’t belong anywhere.”
I feel myself shaking. And not just because of what Sel says about Nick or the others, but because of his last words.
You don’t belong anywhere.
After everything that’s happened to me, everything I’ve done to make it this far, to get this close to the truth of my mother’s murder, those words snap something inside me.
My hands begin to flex at my sides, clenching and unclenching. The tips of my fingers feel like they could pop, like there’s a balloon beneath my skin that just wants to expand outward and explode. I look at Sel’s hound and think of breathing fire in the monster’s face and watching it burn, burn, burn. Laughing at its pain, because it’s so small next to mine. I see Sel. See his confidence in his ancient mission and his hunger to take me down.
I may not know my own ancestors, but after seeing Mary and Louisa and Cecilia, all I want is to show him that he’s not the only one with power in his veins.
“Nick was right,” I say in a low voice I barely recognize. “Merlins are monsters. You are a monster.”
His eyes widen, and his lips press into a thin, angry line—but I don’t find out what horrid thing he might spout next because he doesn’t get a chance to respond at all.
A crashing in the woods pulls our attention. A low howl. A high, piercing bark, then another that echoes against the closed-in courtyard.
Sel scowls. “What did you do? Call in reinforcements?”
I hiss, “I didn’t do anything, you asshole!” Like him, my eyes are glued to the graveyard.
We don’t have to wait long.
Three nightmares appear out of the woods and jump onto the stone wall. Three enormous foxes, green aether drifting up like steam off their scaly backs.
These are true Shadowborn. No construct. No illusion.
Sel’s hound dissolves until it’s nothing but silver dust.
“Cedny uffern!” Sel hisses. He slides backward into a fighting stance. “Call them off, uchel! If you kill me, you’ll never get close to Nicholas. All your efforts will be for naught.”
“They’re not mine!” I snap.
The partial-corp creatures leap down to the courtyard as one, covering the ten-foot distance easily. The foxes yip and snarl, chittering as they stalk toward us on long legs, their hairless, ratlike tails whipping behind them.