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Basilia screams and slashes at our throat again. Another blow rings like a bell against the golden collar.
“Why won’t you fucking die like your mother?”
The gryphon carries a Blood in his front talons. Wings beat frantically as they fly down the spiraled path.
Lew releases Thierry and shoves him toward us.
Another scarab pops up out of the floor.
We smile.
The second blood circle explodes in a wave of heat that rattles the table beneath our palms. Nuri’s blood circle is gone. Cracks spider web across the clear surface of the walls but they hold. Barely.
Come in like a lamb. Say it.
“Come in like a lamb,” the Speaker said.
Only Basilia’s blood circle remains.
She runs around the table toward Undina. No cursed jewelry will protect us all. The Speaker can’t be silenced or?—
Basilia raises the knife and plunges it into our throat. “Kill one, and they all die.”
None of us can speak.
Basilia’s words echo in our consciousness. “I’m not Skolos.”
Leviathan’s words echo. “She doesn’t smell like a Gorgon.”
Thierry falls across the blood circle. It’s still there. Sekh hasn’t torn it apart yet. Stumbling. Crawling. To our side. His broken body oozing black taint.
The Dauphine’s taint.
Her blood.
He crossed the third blood circle.
We know.
We know who Basilia really is.
Names flicker through our consciousness.
Leonie Delafosse.
Jeanne Viennois.
Dauphiné of Viennois.
The Speaker gurgled, trying to say the name.
Only the Speaker can speak. We are silenced.
Blood pours out of the table like a tidal wave flooding the coral floor. So much blood.
An ocean of blood.
Thierry’s fingers close over our wrist. On the bracelet. So careful despite the urgency.
