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Georgie clutched at my arm. My heart knocked against my ribs as I put my hand over hers. I didn’t have to ask the man’s identity. I knew.

I’d know one of my kind anywhere.

But this was all wrong. Georgie had said it herself. Ghosts were a thing of the mortal world.

“Hamish,” Graeme croaked, falling to his knees.

Georgie tightened her grip on my arm.

Graeme’s dead mate stepped from the doorway and onto the snow. He advanced toward us, his steps as soundless as ours had been. The helplessness I’d felt during the flight returned. My instincts screamed at me to take my mates and go. My gut told me something was wrong. But I didn’t know anything about the Oracle. Was this part of its plan?

Hamish stopped a dozen feet away. He looked down at Graeme and spoke in a deep voice colored with the Highlands. “You stopped searching, my love.”

Graeme paled. His mouth worked, but no sound emerged. Finally, he rasped, “You told me to.”

The blue light around us swelled, and for a second I could have sworn Hamish’s expression flickered between sorrow and rage. But then his mouth trembled, and his eyes filled with tears.

“A test of your vows,” he rasped. “And you failed it.”

Graeme swayed on his knees like he’d been struck.

Hamish reached both hands up and unlaced the front of his coat. He pulled the two halves apart, and my stomach dropped to my knees.

In the center of his chest where his heart should have been, there was only a hole. It went all the way through his body, showing the wall of wind behind him.

“You betrayed our vows, Graeme,” Hamish said. Blood began to trickle from the corners of his mouth. “You ripped my heart out the same as that icicle.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

GEORGIE

My heart pounded painfully as I watched more blood pour from Hamish’s mouth. Behind him, the North Wind boiled and seethed—a tumult holding itself in check.

“I’m sorry!” Graeme cried out, rocking forward on his knees. He braced his hands on the snow like he was prepared to crawl to Hamish. “Forgive me.”

Callum’s bicep was tight under my hand. His face was a mask of pain as he stared at Graeme kneeling in the snow.

Hamish stood silently, blood flowing down his chin in a gruesome mimicry of the waterfall of wind behind him. The hole in his chest was large and disturbingly smooth.

Graeme’s voice flowed through my memory.

“I found Hamish at the base of the tower with an icicle through his heart. He was already dead.”

The tower.

The battlements.

“The battlements were broken, like he’d slipped or maybe fought with someone.”

My heart pumped faster as I let my gaze wander down Hamish’s body to the snow at his feet. He’d left no footprints when he stepped from the Oracle.

“There was only a single trail of footprints.”

When I’d rushed to the top of the North Tower after I heard a man’s cry on the wind, the line of prints had run all the way to the battlements before plunging over the side.

Air was so much more powerful than people knew. Emotions traveled on it. Passion turned it electric.

Strong memories could linger in it.