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“Bella.” I approached her cell slowly.

She kept pounding her fists against the glass wall. Her platinum-blonde hair was stained with blood. Her savage eyes burned with madness.

I tried speaking to her again, but she didn’t show any sign that she’d heard me. She just kept pounding and pounding and pounding. I was tempted to go in there with her, to hold her, to keep her from hurting herself, but that’s probably exactly what Ava wanted. She wanted me to give Bella the chance to get free.

Eventually, the sun went down, and Bella was herself again. Before my eyes, her hair darkened to its usual strawberry-blonde. She stopped pounding. Looked down at her bloody, battered hands. Then began to weep.

“I am a monster!” she cried, kicking the wall.

“You’re not.” I pressed my palm against the glass. “You’re my sister. My Bella.”

She pressed her own palm to the glass, right where mine was. Only a wall of unbreakable glass separated us—that and an unbreakable curse.

No, I wouldn’t think like that. I wouldn’t lose hope. Every curse could be broken.

“Leda, I…” Bella stopped. Her eyes snapped to me. “This was Ava. She made me do this. She made me create a distraction.”

“Why?”

Bella shook her head. “I can’t remember.” She tapped her head. “Wait, there’s something…she made me lure you down here, so she could…so she could…”

“Take your time,” I said, even though I was jumping in my pants to know what she was going to say.

“So the attack could happen,” Bella decided. “Yes.” She nodded. “An attack. That’s right.” Her eyes bulged. “The attack. It’s happening now.”

I sped out of there as fast as my legs could carry me. I would have flown if I’d thought it would get me there any faster, but I knew it wouldn’t.

I squeezed through the crack in the dungeon door. Now the lack of guards made more sense. Ava must have found a way to lure them away too.

Wait, if Bella was still trapped in a cell, that meant Ava had more than one weapon to do her bidding. I raced up to Faris’s library, sure he was the target.

But he wasn’t.

“Attack in the guest suite!” a soldier shouted out in the hall.

I rushed out of the library, following the soldiers to the guest suite. There, we found Grace, dressed in nothing but a flimsy nightgown, clutching a fire poker in both hands, swinging it at her attacker.

Grace was the target.

22

THE WEAPON

Grace’s attacker was wearing a massive suit of armor that covered him from head to toe. It looked just like Bella’s armor—except it was white. And the assailant looked even larger than Bella had in her armor.

There was a pulse of energy, and then Nero and his parents were standing beside me. They’d teleported in.

“That is Zarion’s weapon.” Damiel pointed at the armored assailant in white.

“We tracked his magic here,” Cadence added.

A pulse of bright white light shot out of the assailant’s sword. I tackled Grace to the ground, shielding her from it. I had a feeling that light was like Nectar, deadly to demons.

“Thank you, Leda,” Grace said, her voice uneven. “That thing already killed my guards. Its magic tore right through them.”

“This way,” I told her. We took cover behind the toppled bed.

The enemy was sandwiched between Faris and his soldiers on one side, Nero and his parents on the other. They were all unloading everything they had on him. The assailant hardly seemed to notice. He was slowly but surely making his way toward us, one heavy, thumping step at a time.