Page 47

M orcant’s expression changed, confusion replaced with—fear?

He hadn’t looked afraid when he’d been about to die the first time, but now, in this moment, whatever he saw as Ambrose’s fist sank through his chest a second time did scare him.

Ambrose himself was only distantly aware of the magic fizzling through his veins or Morcant’s hot blood in his hands.

His body slumped to the ground, lifeless, but not for long. Immortality would knit him back together in time.

Ambrose’s panicked thoughts raced to catch up. My body is not my own. He’s possessed me. He’s going to force me to—

With its caster gone, the enchanted noose vanished, and Valenti fell into the sarcophagus, holding his throat as he caught his breath. The spell holding Emery released him, too. He sank to his knees. They shook as he tried to regain his feet.

He tried to find a tithe to defend himself, but the brutality of Morcant’s spell left him weak. “Ambrose?” His voice was tinged with doubt.

“I am not Ambrose,” the witch king said.

Comprehension dawned in Emery’s eyes, and Ambrose hated it.

The witch king could not return without a body, a vessel.

Morcant’s hadn’t sufficed. His immortality prevented him from ever truly leaving his body empty for occupation.

In lieu of an empty vessel, Ambrose’s had been enchanted large enough to share, so the witch king’s soul had a place to bide its time until a vessel became available.

Or was emptied out for him.

The words from the grimoire, the bit of vertebrae retrieved from the witch king’s remains, neither had been a means to resurrect the witch king from the dead. They had been a safeguard. A contingency plan.

Since Ambrose hadn’t been willing to kill someone—to empty their body for the witch king—he had taken possession of Ambrose and would do it himself.

Morcant had taken the tether off Emery. It was on the floor next to his cooling corpse. There was nothing to prevent the witch king from killing him now.

Emery’s already wan face drained completely as the witch king, wielding Ambrose’s body as the weapon it was, advanced upon him.

Run , Ambrose tried to scream, but his voice had been stolen from him.

Emery scrambled back against the wall. His limbs were weak and uncoordinated from blood loss, but he grabbed a fistful of bone powder to cast a portal.

The witch king seized his wrist in a crushing grip, and the bone powder drifted like snow to the floor, what remained in his grip creating a portal too small to fit through.

No, not him , Ambrose pleaded. Take anyone but him.

“He is the only one who will do.”

Emery said, “Ambrose, please, if you’re in there—”

Get away from me , Ambrose wanted to shout. Cast a portal, escape, anything.

“—fight him!” Emery screamed.

Ambrose tried, but whatever control he’d had over himself had been forfeited along with the shrapnel of his spine he’d spat out on the floor.

The witch king drew back a fist. Magic coalesced in his fingers like the point of a dagger aimed at Emery’s heart.

This time, it was aimed not only to kill but to supplant one soul with another.

Emery’s for the witch king’s. Ambrose thought he could feel the witch king’s spirit gathering, turning his fingers icy numb.

Ambrose could hardly forgive himself all the sins he’d committed, but he’d never wash the stains of Emery’s blood from his hands.

Rail and fight and thrash as he did, he was as powerless as he’d been when the collar compelled him.

The witch king’s spirit gathered in his hand, turning his fingers icy and numb.

He struck out.

Valenti screamed, “Stop!”

Ambrose had been too transfixed by horror and hadn’t heard the professor move.

Nor had the witch king. Valenti threw himself in front of Emery, and the witch king’s fist dug out a different heart from the one he’d aimed for.

The hungry magic forged a path within Valenti, even as the witch king’s spirit railed against its new host, howling in Ambrose’s voice. Valenti’s strangled death mewl morphed into the snarl Ambrose had been making as the witch king was dragged from one vessel to another.

Ambrose regained control with a disorienting sense of vertigo. It felt like the moment Emery had dredged him out of the bog.

The witch king stumbled upright in Valenti’s body, power and magic enshrouding him in a cloak of mist and fog.

Emery took advantage of the momentary lapse in the witch king’s control. He seized Ambrose by the hand and scraped enough of the bone powder off the floor to widen the portal.

Shimmering on the other side were the shattered teeth of the ruin’s rose window, the evergreen hue of its freshly painted door.

Ambrose tripped as he lunged toward it—tripped over the grimoire. Instinctively, he picked it up before stumbling through after Emery.

The portal closed, but they didn’t stop moving until they were through the front door and inside. Ambrose’s breathing sounded wounded and loud as he went into the kitchen and seized a knife from the utensil drawer.

“What are you doing?” Emery wheezed. “Ambrose, stop!”

Ambrose had already drawn the knife across the back of his arm. “Renew the wards. Make them steadfast. Make sure he cannot follow us here.”

“They were just renewed the other day.”

“He’s been with us, been inside me this whole time. He’s been here. Make them stronger.”

He felt a surge of gratitude when Emery didn’t argue further.

He gathered tithes, the most powerful ones he’d stolen, from the wardrobe in his bedroom.

He daubed them in Ambrose’s blood, writing runes across the inside of the door, the lintels of the windows, even climbing the library ladder to the hole in the ruin’s ceiling to reinforce the protections of their only sanctuary against their enemies.

Enemies. Plural. They now had two.

Reality settled in.

Morcant had nearly ensnared Emery in an arcane collar just like Ambrose’s.

The only way to escape had been to follow the witch king’s lead.

The witch king had dispatched Morcant and then nearly done the same with Emery, intent on using him for a vessel.

Instead, he’d gotten Valenti.

Once the wards were secure, Ambrose stared at Emery, still drenched in a cape of his own blood, still with charcoal smears of runes on his neck. Ambrose wanted to wash them away. They were heinous. A possessing claim over Emery’s soul that he couldn’t abide.

But his own hands had nearly killed Emery tonight, and he didn’t feel they were clean enough to wash Emery of anything.

His voice came out a raw croak. “I’m sorry.”

Emery’s wide, dark eyes were guarded as a prey animal’s. “Did you know?”

Ambrose flinched. He hated seeing that look on Emery’s face, so similar to the way he’d looked when they first met.

He’s afraid of me, and he should be. I am wretched.

The witch king no longer inhabited his head, but those were his words. Would he ever be free of the witch king, or had spending so much time in sick company made him contagious?

“Did you know?” Emery repeated, insistent.

“Know what?”

“That the witch king could take control of you like that.”

Ambrose divulged everything the witch king had told him. He’d guarded the secrets for so long, made his loyalty to the witch king such a tenet of his personality, he thought the shame of telling all would crush him for all the ways it implicated Ambrose as much as his king.

Instead, it felt like a bloodletting. An unburdening.

He explained the quest for the witch king’s skeleton and his grimoire, how it was meant to bring him back without bloodshed.

He felt foolish for having believed it, but in the crypt, he’d only discovered the king was a liar moments before he’d been forced to make a choice in a moment of desperation.

The betrayal still felt as raw as an infected wound. A betrayal Emery must feel, too, learning what Ambrose had hidden from him.

“You wanted to bring him back.”

“Yes.”

“You did bring him back.”

“I—”

“You chose him.”

Why did hearing that make Ambrose’s heart break?

“I hear his voice,” Ambrose said. “ All the time. ”

Emery’s frosted expression melted just a little. “How do I know I can trust you? How do I know he’s not still there?”

Ambrose shook his head, helpless. “I don’t know. If you had the tether—”

“This tether?” Emery opened his hand, two bones rattling together in his palm.

The finger bone and the vertebra.

“I grabbed them on my way through the portal. I figured they were better in our hands than theirs. I know you can’t harm me while I hold this, but … Ambrose, we have to break this pact you’re under.”

Once, Ambrose would have felt a mountain of guilt for wanting to sever ties with the witch king, but the day had been filled with revelations.

It felt less like his resurrection had spat him out into a different era, and more like the events in that tomb had.

Before he’d known the witch king had killed him, and after.

“Whatever it takes to be free of him. I’ll do it.”

Emery still looked guarded, but he also looked hopeful. “We’ll find a way, but first … I think now the adrenaline’s worn off, I might …”

His face paled. Ambrose narrowly caught him before he sank to the floor in a dead faint. Given how much blood he’d lost, it was a wonder he’d stayed conscious as long as he had.

He came to quickly, eyelashes fluttering. “Knew that would happen.”

“We need to get you washed and into some clean clothes,” Ambrose said.

Emery tried to stand on his own.

“Let me help you,” Ambrose said.

Emery avoided his eyes. “I’m fine.”

Ambrose’s heart sank. What must Emery see, when he looked at Ambrose now? The witch king, armed with Ambrose’s body, stealing into it like a burglar.

He didn’t want to push. “I’ll boil some water.”

“Bring the grimoire, too.”

Emery sat gingerly on the edge of the sofa, taking the grimoire and wearily opening it to the first page.