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A mbrose woke to a kiss.

He’d never been roused from sleep this way. Of the many new experiences this world had given him, he cherished this one in particular.

His eyes fluttered open. Emery hovered over him, tucking hair out of his face.

“Good morning,” Ambrose mumbled sleepily.

“You talk in your sleep, you know.”

Well, that was mortifying. “What did I say?”

“Oh, that I was the best lay of your life and you can’t wait to ravish me again, and also that I’m the sexiest weasel you ever laid eyes on.”

Ambrose covered his face with his arm and groaned, “True.”

“Wait,” Emery choked. “I was joking. Well, not about the sexy weasel part, you did mumble that.”

“But you’re not a weasel.”

“You said, Your sexy wiles weasel-y me . Which I think was sleep-talk for ‘You weaseled your way into my heart,’ but I can’t be sure.”

If that was true, Ambrose’s heart felt lighter with a weasel in it than without. Regretfully, he looked over the edge of the bed toward the stack of books where he’d idly tossed the spell jar last night. “We should deal with that.”

“Mm.” Emery leaned in, tracing a finger along the scar tissue knotted up Ambrose’s chest. “I was thinking. If that thing is linked to Morcant’s immortality, he’s probably put one in all of the initiates.”

Ambrose had considered that, too. Rolling over, he got out of bed to retrieve the foul thing.

It had fallen inside one of Emery’s shoes by the wardrobe. Given the chaos of Emery’s room, it should have taken hours to find it, but the spell jar had an aura to it, malignant and unsettling. The moment Ambrose got close, he sensed it as if he’d stepped in an icy puddle.

Holding it, he couldn’t imagine how Emery had felt with it inside of him for so long.

He sat on the edge of the bed, and Emery shifted closer to lean his chin on Ambrose’s shoulder to look at the spell jar in his palm.

“I think it’s safe to assume that, in order to kill Morcant permanently, we have to destroy all of them,” he said. “But will he … I don’t know, feel it?”

“It’s impossible to know until we do.”

Turning it over, Ambrose examined the quartz. Its coloration had the rust and crimson shades of blood both new and old, but he could tell nothing else about it.

Morcant’s aim was to make these as unobtrusive and difficult to retrieve as possible.

The more of them he had, the more secure he could feel in his immortality.

It had been placed with magic, and barring invasive and potentially dangerous surgery, only magic could retrieve it, but you had to know what you were searching for.

“He spoke of moving away from Bellgrave and taking up their business elsewhere.” Emery paled. “What if we weren’t the first guild he started? If we aren’t the only ones he’s implanted with these things, searching for the others—”

Ambrose put a calming hand over his. “No. In Hellebore’s memory, it was the first time she’d performed the ritual with him.

If there were others, I doubt he wouldn’t keep them close at hand.

You’re the source of his strength, but also his vulnerability.

” He thought about the power he wielded for the witch king, and how that could so easily have been turned against its creator if not for the collar.

“Most power is a kind of cage. We’ll trap Morcant in his. ”

Emery relaxed a fraction. “The most obvious place to start is with the other initiates, but getting them to hear me out might be a … unique challenge. They all avoid me, mistrust me, or believe I’m off the deep end, thanks to Morcant.”

“They must hate him, too.”

“They fear him more. They’ll expect retribution. I have to convince them to let some bloke they’ve never met go bobbing for apples in their chest cavity using arcane magic cast by a dead king. To do that, they have to believe I can beat him.”

“Or their fear of retribution will be stronger than their desire to be free of him,” Ambrose concluded.

A heart-aching look of fractured hope shone in Emery’s eyes. “In all my years at Bellgrave, they’ve only seen me lose.”

They required a show of force. A demonstration that Morcant was not as powerful as he seemed, to prove they could beat him.

“We have one spell jar. If we could keep Morcant restrained, we could destroy it for all the other initiates to see him weakened.”

“What about Hellebore?” Emery said.

True. Convincing the initiates would be challenging. Convincing Hellebore to help kill her own father seemed impossible.

“That’s if we can even find a way to destroy the spell jars,” Emery added.

Experimentally, Ambrose let a few grasping snakes of magic form a fist around the spell jar in his hand. The hunger took longer than usual to answer his call. That it was still there at all disconcerted him, but if it could be useful for not only retrieving the spell jars, but destroying them …

The spell jar shivered at the touch of destructive magic, but as Ambrose closed his fingers around it to test for any weakness, he found none.

“We need an enchantment strong enough to break its protections,” Emery said.

All their problems: how to convince the initiates to help, how to corner Morcant, and how to destroy the spell jars—felt monumental and impossible, but as Ambrose considered them all, solutions began to fit into each like missing segments of a puzzle.

“We should speak to Saoirse.”

She agreed to meet them within the safety of Emery’s wards. Wearing a coat the color of daffodils, she stuck out through the thick fog as she came to their door.

She said, “Bitch, you live here?”

“I happen to like it here,” Emery said.

“Whatever you say, swamp witch.”

“It’s a lot cozier inside than it seems,” Ambrose assured her.

She came inside, looking up at the hole in the ceiling, enchanted to keep out the rain but not the sight of a starry sky. After a pause, she looked at the disaster of the living room—tithes gathered, scribbled notes, and the grimoire open on the coffee table.

“What did you find?”

They told her about the contents of Hellebore’s memory—the spell jar filled with a scrap of Morcant’s soul, and where he’d placed them. They explained how it made him immortal, and they’d need to destroy all the spell jars in order to finish him.

She listened intently. “You’re not having me on, are you?”

In the end, it was simpler to show her.

Though touching it didn’t seem to hold any danger, they’d wrapped the quartz in a dish towel to dampen the stomach-turning aura it exuded. Ambrose peeled it open.

“They weren’t that color before.” Saoirse’s reaction, though less visceral than Emery’s, was no less repulsed. She sounded very far away and touched the spot on her chest where the rune mark would be. “How’d you get it out?”

“Ambrose has a unique talent for it,” Emery said.

Ambrose rolled up his sleeves to show her the spell stains of his magic. “It allows me to phase through objects. And people.”

Saoirse winced. “Sounds painful.”

Emery’s cheeks turned color. “No. Not really.”

He had asked jealously if Ambrose would have that particular effect on everyone while removing the spell jar. Ambrose had, in as kind a way as possible, informed Emery that he was possibly the only little freak who’d enjoy the process.

“And you want me to do the same thing,” she guessed.

“Do you want his dirty, scummy soul in there until the day you die?” Emery asked.

“Obviously not, but a fat lot of good mine will do you if he has five more in the other initiates. And Hellebore.” The name was said with a milieu of emotion. “She knew about all of this.”

“That’s why we came to you first.” Emery cleared his throat. “We hoped you might convince everyone else to help. Including Hellebore.”

“Help kill her own father.”

“You said yourself, she has more reason to hate him than any of us.”

“Of course, but hating him doesn’t negate, well, the whole load of everything else she feels.

He’s had his claws in her for years. She isn’t a bad person, but a bad person controls her every move.

How much she eats, where she went to school, who her friends are, who she dates.

How much of that do you suffer before he controls who you are? ”

Her words were an arrow through Ambrose’s heart. She said aloud all the things he’d thought himself.

He hoped he could convey as much conviction from the depths of his own experience in what he said. “Perhaps, if she could not choose any of those things, that means she will appreciate it all the more when you give her another option.”

Saoirse looked at him as if he’d said something very revealing, narrowing her eyes.

“Just to confirm, you two definitely aren’t cousins?”

“No!” Ambrose said.

“He was born several centuries ago ,” Emery added.

Which only meant they had to explain a step further who Ambrose was.

It led to describing the rest of their plan: how they might trap Morcant, convince the initiates, and destroy the spell jars in one fell swoop.

Saoirse absorbed it all gamely. After falling in with an immortal necromancer’s cult, perhaps not much surprised her.

They laid it all out. The rest of their plan had come together piece by piece, but it all hinged on Saoirse’s cooperation. They couldn’t do it without her.

“Will you help?” Emery asked.

Saoirse waited, clearly relishing the chance to badger him a little. It was a hint of the friendship they might have fostered under better circumstances, where Morcant’s poison didn’t turn good-natured banter into cutthroat repartee.

“Of course,” she said. “You can start with me.”