He opens his palm, the veins in his right forearm flexing, black against his pale skin. At his command, sharp, bony fingers emerge from the floor, chipping through the wooden floorboard. The bones press on the ground, and a dark skull pushes through, stretching its neck, and screeches like a newborn babe. As the undead rises, the unmistakable sharp scent of death assaults me.
I recoil.
Right when I think the undead is about to come for me, Grimm turns and walks over to the stairs in the right corner of the room, the skeletal figure following closely behind him.
The moment he’s gone, I lurch out of the chair toward the door, but Delaney stops me with one arm and throws me back.
“Did you think we’d never find you?” she scoffs. “After your little trick with the fake cuff, I can’t wait for him to kill you.”
She whistles, and Mara emerges from the darkness below the stairs Lorne just took. Her face is a memory of what it once was; her skin is ashen gray, her eyes now bright blue, and her teeth serrated. She moves like a rabid animal, salivating at the sight of me.
“Take her to the greenhouse,” she snaps at Mara. Then she turns on her heels.
If she’s giving Mara verbal instructions, it means there’s another puppeteer controlling her. Gods, it has to be, because this is the first time Mara’s had blue eyes. Now that I think about it, the previous times her eyes were the green of Delaney’s or the moss shade of Lorne’s.
Mara—the other puppeteer—hesitates. My foolish heart thinks the puppeteer will have mercy on me, that they will save me. I don’t break Mara’s stare as she bends toward me, clinging to this futile hope that maybe she’ll reconsider.
For a moment, I think she does. Her features relax, her head tilts, but the next second, a wicked grin stretches along her lips and her claws come out.
Sylas, I dream of your mother often these days, as if she’s trying to tell me something. Some might say I simply miss her, but I know our world far too well: my end is near.
You are enough, son. You’ve always been enough.
LETTER FROM HANSEL ARCHYR TO SYLAS ARCHYR, JUNE 1939
forty-eight | sylas
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1939
Mara’s claws wrap around Viola’s arms, and I move.
Ysenia pleads with me to wait for reinforcements. I consider it. Even with the Imortalis, two killer aspiers, and a healing as-pier, I am no match for the sheer number of undead Delaney and Lorne can summon and the poachers they must have inside the cottage. But as I watch Mara drag Viola through a small door into the greenhouse, I know time is our enemy.
Damn waiting for help. If I wait, I lose her.
Delaney is upstairs, Ysenia says.
I hug the walls of the cottage, and Raiku and Scar join me, slithering ahead and making sure there are no poachers around—it is odd how few of them I’ve encountered. Are Delaney and Lorne so arrogant to think they don’t need reinforcements?
My only solace is that Railesza is with Viola.
Lit by a string of lights running down the center, the white greenhouse is full of plants, dead and alive, crawling on the glass. I fiddle with the white metal hook, and it comes apart easily. I pause. All this feels… almost too easy.
Still upstairs. They are arguing. The poacher controlling Mara is threatening Delaney. Get Viola and get out.
Where is Lorne? I want to ask, but Ysenia is right. I need to get to Viola.
The overgrown bushes make it hard for me to move forward, but my dagger cuts some of the vines, creating a path. In front of me, Viola sits on the first steps of a white metal staircase, her hands bound to the rails.
My heart leaps at the sight of her.
Sometime in third year, I read a fable about the God of Death kneeling before the other Gods, begging for mortality in exchange for the love of his life. I thought it to be foolish then, but now I understand it.
“How long do I have?”
Ysenia doesn’t reply.
It doesn’t matter anyway; I’m too far in now. And if anything happens, Raiku sits at the door between the cottage and the greenhouse, and Scar is perched on a branch above him. They will slow anyone down.