“It’ll be okay, Drake,” I whispered so my voice wouldn’t betray me; so he wouldn’t hear the potential truth belying my words. “I just need to get you down.” I grabbed the blade, and a jolt of fire shot through my body, knocking me into Jagger. “What the fuck…”
The raven who held the soul of my dead uncle inside him looked at Grizz. The man-bear stepped forward a second later, sadness in his warm brown eyes, and stroked his bald head.
Then, in a single movement, he ripped it from his body.
“No!” I screamed, launching at my guardian who’d just killed my father’s. “How could you?”
“It was a mercy kill,” Jagger said, sadness rimming his voice.
“But we didn’t even try to save him!”
Grizz, still holding the bird’s head, looked at me, silently begging me to understand what he could not say, as I had so many times before in our bizarre relationship.
My anger slowly washed away to pity, realizing that he’d done something he hadn’t wanted to in the service of a friend—a comrade of sorts. Someone who understood what it was like to be him.
“He asked you to do it,” I said, the hollow words escaping in a whisper. The man-bear nodded. “He knew there was no saving him…”
He nodded once more.
“We need to get inside,” Knox growled as he punched in the code to the door. Without hesitation, we all crammed into the foyer and waited for the next code to unlock the entrance.
“Why did she pluck him?” I asked, the morbid question too pertinent to withhold. “Just to torture him? To be the soulless bitch she is?”
“It was a message,” Kat replied. I turned to find her blue eyes filled with burning rage.
“But what?”
“To tell us she’s going to pick us off one by one,” Brunton said, “until only one is left.”
I felt all their eyes land on me.
When the door beeped, I ripped it open and stormed through the foyer—right into my father. His wide eyes were full of panic, and for a second, I wondered what had gone wrong while we were outside.
“It’s Drake,” he said, his tone edged with fear. “Something’s wrong—” His words cut short when his gaze fell to Grizz’s bloody hands.
“He’s gone. We found him outside.”
While my father stood there silently, doing what he could to process his loss, I shouted for Merc as loudly as I could, but he didn’t come. And as ice surged through my body, I heard my mother’s cackling laugh bubble up from the back of my mind.
It has begun…
Then screams rent the air.
Chapter Twenty-Five
We bolted down the hall toward the kitchen, where the alarm had sounded. Along the way, others funneled out of other rooms, drawn by the sound. By the time we reached the chaos, we’d amassed a small army.
Knox and I shoved our way through the mob until we reached the bloodstained marble island in the center of the room, upon which lay a disemboweled witch whose name I didn’t know but whose face I recognized. She was one of the golem victims; a freed prisoner of the Ether. She’d survived all that, only to be gutted in a place that should have offered some measure of safety. But like most things that involved my mother, the illusion had been a lie.
It really had begun.
“I found Sasha like this when I came to see what was taking so long,” Bea said, tears streaming down her face.
Merc, surrounded by Jase and Dean, pulled Knox to his side and spoke low in his ear. “She has breached the mansion—we are out of time.”
Before Knox could reply, shouting from above made its way down the butler’s stairs, and the mob was in motion. I slipped on the bloody floor, but we were all packed in so tightly that I didn’t fall. Bottlenecked as we ascended the stairs, I could barely see what awaited us in the hall above. By the time I reached it, my mind had run amok with macabre scenes—but none as dark as the reality that awaited.
Lining the long corridor like bloody paper dolls was a string of witches and warlocks and werewolves, impaled with blades like Drake had been, each one’s hands pinned to another’s with daggers to complete the effect.
It was then that I realized just how right Brunton had been in his assessment of the fey queen’s warning. She was going to pick us off one by one.
And in our own fucking house.
“Sherry!” I yelled, winded from the run up the stairs. “Time to do your thing.”
“But we’re not ready—”
“I think the luxury of time for getting ready has long passed, don’t you?”
She cursed under her breath as she forced her way to the coven queen.
“Larken!” Knox shouted over the din in the hall. “You fucking cunt—I know you’re here. Why don’t you come out and try to take what you want?”
Her laughter filtered around us, as though she was everywhere, but she was nowhere to be seen. Then her guard sprang out of the bedrooms into the hall, ambushing us.
Chaos erupted, magic and weapons and blood flying wildly around the tight space; so tight that there was barely even space to move, which was by design, no doubt. My energy waned, still weakened from the bloodletting, and I struggled to do anything to help thwart the fey attack.
“We cannot stay here,” Merc growled. “Follow me.” He grabbed my hand and ghosted us down to the foyer, which appeared empty. But the second our feet hit the floor, more fey soldiers flew down the hall at us, armed to the teeth with swords and magic. I shoved Merc away from me and threw my arms in the air. Just as they had in Faerie, the fey were yanked into the air and dangled there. Sweat beaded on my brow and my knees buckled as I held them with what little power I had left.
Then I clenched my fist and flicked my wrist, and their necks all snapped to the side. They fell in a heap on the floor, and I wasn’t far behind them.
“I have to get outside,” I said as Merc scooped me off the floor. Some of our allies fled down the grand staircase toward us, covered in blood, while Jase and Dean ghosted a random assortment of supernaturals to the foyer.
“That is exactly what Larken wants you to do,” Merc rumbled in my ear.
“And if I don’t get closer to nature and heal soon, she’ll get what she wants regardless.”
His dark eyes flared with anger, and he placed me on my feet just as Knox, my father, Kingston, and Grizz appeared with Jase. The man-bear ripped me away from Merc and shot him a look as he started hitting the numbers of the security code.
And all the while, the battle upstairs continued.
“Where’s Kat?” I shouted as Grizz ripped the door open.
“I’ve got her,” Dean answered, emerging from the hall of dead fey with Kat and Brunton at his sides.
“They are using portals to maneuver,” Reinhardt explained with disgust. “We cannot fight them in here. It’s too tight, and they have too many places to hide and escape. They’ll take us out one by one—”
“—just like she planned,” I finished for him. “Get the witches! We need that cloak of invisibility or whatever the hell it is. I didn’t fucking bleed for nothing, and we’re going to need it long enough to let me heal.”