Page 19

M orcant’s dropped torch rolled, extinguishing in a puddle with a hiss.

Ambrose yanked his hands free of the statue, too stunned to make sense of it. He hadn’t managed to topple the whole statue, but had the plan really gone wrong if it still worked?

You must make certain. Reach into his heart and ensure it’s not beating.

The collar squeezed so tight, Ambrose nearly let out a gasping cry that could give him away. That was not part of the plan. Murdering Morcant that way would not look like an accident. The hunger within still railed against its bonds, slavering to be used exactly as the witch king asked.

But Emery had compelled him to follow the plan, so the collar held him steadfast in place. He couldn’t check Morcant for a pulse if he tried.

There’d been cries of alarm, a high shriek. People from the front of the crowd surged forward to check Morcant’s body, sprawled like an ink spatter on the steps. Someone knelt next to him and put their fingers to his neck.

Impossibly, he stirred.

How? Ambrose had watched the stone come down on Morcant’s head. He’d heard the crunch. Or had it been the sound of the statue coming apart?

No, the sound of bone cracking left an impression.

Yet, Morcant sat up, rubbing his skull. His unbroken skull. Someone helped him to his feet, asking if he was all right.

“Fine, fine. A narrow miss,” he said.

“I thought for sure it hit you,” someone said.

“A glancing blow.” Morcant touched his head again. His fingers came back a little bloody. “Nothing serious.”

“Thank heavens.”

“I’m parked nearby. I can take you to hospital.”

In the commotion, Ambrose searched the crowd for Emery.

He stood back from the crowd, eyes wide. After a searching, horror-stricken moment, he seemed to confirm for himself that, yes, Morcant was indeed still breathing. Then he broke away from the crowd, heading for the park gates.

Ambrose followed. He had to, or the collar would start exacting punishment with a vengeance. Navigating the crowds of people took him on a circuitous route to catch up, and as Emery got farther from him, the distance tore at him like a man on the rack.

He caught up a ways outside the park, far from the fundraiser’s attendees. He grasped Emery’s wrist and dropped invisibility.

Emery jumped, ripping his hand free. “Stop doing that!”

“Doing what?”

“Sneaking up on me!” Emery shook his hands, as if Ambrose’s touch were something disgusting stuck to his skin. “What happened?”

“It hit him. Well—” Ambrose reconsidered his wording. “ They hit him.”

“That wasn’t the plan,” Emery said. “The plan was the whole statue.”

“It didn’t work. My abilities have never been put to such use before. But he was struck.”

“Not hard enough.”

“I heard it,” Ambrose insisted. “Fifteen, perhaps twenty pounds of pure marble impacted his skull. It cracked.”

“You must have imagined it. He’s barely bleeding.”

“Something more is at work,” Ambrose said. “Some magic.”

He could see Emery resist believing it. He didn’t want to, but before Ambrose could press the subject, Emery shoved him into a bush.

Normally, he’d have been able to avoid losing his balance, but it shocked him so badly he went top over tail into the shrub, landing on the other side of it. He recovered just in time to hear Hellebore’s voice.

“Running away from the scene of the crime?”

“What are you talking about?” Emery said.

“You don’t expect us to believe you weren’t involved in that charade.”

From Ambrose’s place in the shrubs, he caught glimpses of Hellebore. He’d never seen someone saunter with purpose before. He slipped into invisibility, avoiding any movement that could disturb the hedges and give his hiding place away.

“That,” Emery said, “was karma. I’m only sorry it has such poor aim.”

“You’ll have to convince my father. He’s ordered you to come with me.”

“Like hell—” Emery’s voice cut off as Hellebore grabbed his wrist. He wrenched free, but the burnt-hair smell of a spell lingered on the air. Ambrose couldn’t tell what kind, but there was a rune mark on Emery’s wrist.

“What’s this?” Emery demanded.

“Follow me and you won’t have to find out.”

She marched in the other direction. Emery hesitated a moment too long and cried out in pain, grasping his chest. Hellebore kept moving, and he jerked along after her.

Ambrose knew that spell. He’d lived most of his life under it, albeit his own leash was a whole lot longer.

His heart hammered. If Hellebore used a portal to drag Emery somewhere Ambrose couldn’t follow, his own tether would choke the life out of him.

He rushed to pursue them. Sure enough, Hellebore dragged Emery through a gate into a secluded garden where no one would see her open a portal to the necropolis.

Emery dragged his heels, grunting in pain, aware this would spell disaster for them.

The moment he stepped through, the tether would register Ambrose as miles away from him and exact its punishment.

Ambrose had the hair of a second. He broke into a run.

Hellebore stepped through the portal. Emery let out a yell, nearly doubling over from the tearing pain of that temporary separation, and Ambrose, knowing he would feel the same in but a second, crowded against Emery’s back, wrapped an arm around his waist, and carried them both over the threshold.

During a fraction of a moment, Emery was on one side of the portal, and Ambrose the other. The way the tether tore at him—he imagined many of his victims had felt the same as he rent them apart. A wave of nausea hit him, sickly hot and shivering with cold at the same time.

Then they were through, and the feeling evaporated. The portal shut behind them. Ambrose released Emery. Too soon, apparently, because he collapsed to his knees in the grass.

They’d emerged next to the tomb leading into the guild’s headquarters. Ambrose had never seen it in daylight hours. With the sun in golden descent, it looked too peaceful for what haunted the earth’s bowels.

Gasping for air and heaving himself up by a tombstone, Emery said, “Are you being paid? Because you’re a professional bitch, Hellebore.”

“Oh, buck up. I’ve had period cramps more painful than what you just went through.”

Ambrose would rate the pain on a similar level, personally, but watching the interaction from the safety of invisibility, he couldn’t comment. He found it strange that Hellebore knew how to use magic so similar to the charm placed on himself. It wasn’t commonplace magic, or hadn’t been in his time.

Emery said, “I thought Morcant would be on his way to hospital.”

“He is. But he thinks you’re a flight risk, so he wants you locked up until he’s cleared to leave.”

“He wasn’t even knocked unconscious. Why bother with hospitals? Why bother with me? He’s fine.”

“Miracles aside, he knows you’re behind that little accident.”

“He’s paranoid.”

Emery sounded flippant, but Ambrose sensed his unease. Neither of their murder attempts had gone well. The first hadn’t even looked like a murder attempt, while the second hadn’t looked enough like an accident to dissuade Morcant from suspecting Emery.

Hellebore opened the mausoleum door and headed down the steps into the crypt. The wards must have prevented her from opening a portal directly inside.

Emery kept to her heels with a glance over his shoulder to check Ambrose still followed. The tiny glimmer of fear in his dark eyes triggered an instinctive response. Ambrose reached out and touched Emery’s elbow to reassure him he was still there.

Remember. He is still your enemy, not your charge.

Ambrose retracted his hand, feeling foolish. It was true. Emery had stolen him from the witch king, did not care for him, was only using him, and hadn’t even trusted him to carry out their plan without a compulsion order. He’d killed his familiar and now wished to kill his mentor.

How had this foolish impulse to protect him arisen in the first place? It had to be nothing but deeply ingrained habit or the by-product of Emery holding his leash—

His leash.

If Hellebore searched Emery before locking him up, she would find it.

The thought of her holding it was intolerable. The thought of her or—worse—Morcant seizing the power to command him …

Dread chilled him more than the cool air of the crypt.

Hellebore led them through labyrinthine catacombs the guild meetings never ventured into, stopping in a dank chamber where several metal cells waited, unoccupied.

“Here we are,” Hellebore said, bored. “Want me to bring you water? A snack? A smutty novel? You’ll be here a while.”

“I’ll entertain myself with the magic of my imagination, something you’d benefit from rather than mindlessly following Morcant’s orders.”

“Have it your way. Give me your tithe belt and turn out your pockets.”

Emery stiffened.

“Don’t dawdle,” Hellebore said.

As Emery removed the tithe belt beneath his cloak and handed it over, Ambrose racked his brain for some way he could intervene without revealing his presence—a risk they couldn’t take.

It would ruin their plot if Morcant knew Emery had found a way to secret an accomplice into the depths of their guild.

The only solution he scrounged up could go wrong a thousand different ways, but he had little alternative. Heart in his throat, he moved silently behind Emery and, at the same time that Emery put his hands in his pockets, Ambrose shoved his own in alongside.

There was an awkward moment’s pause, the second in which something about the brush of skin and Emery’s caught breath turned the anxiety in Ambrose’s stomach into a nervous flutter.

He couldn’t seize the leash from Emery—it went against the pact he was sworn to—but Emery could give it to him.

Too late, he recognized the futility. Emery hadn’t trusted him to kill Morcant uncompelled. He wouldn’t trust Ambrose to hold the leash on the good faith he’d return it.

But he had to trust Ambrose more than he trusted Hellebore.

Ambrose waited, so close a wave of Emery’s hair fluttered with his breath. So close he could smell the woodsy spice of a scented oil Emery used on his skin.

He thought, Please, trust me.

At the same time, he didn’t know if Emery should . The hunger—that insatiable appetite Ambrose could never quite slake—purred at the thought of taking the leash and holding it in confidence. Not for Emery, but for the witch king.

Emery’s fingers closed around the bone, palming it in his fist. He slowly withdrew his hands, the pockets pinched to turn inside out. Ambrose withdrew his hands, too, his thumb against the sprinting pulse in Emery’s wrist, but Emery didn’t relinquish the leash, and Ambrose’s hands left empty.