Page 49 of A Beastly Court

At its mention, I became aware of a persistent throb and clutched my head. “Uh, I think I’m dehydrated. And exhausted,” I said, suddenly realizing the truth of it. “And my wrists feel like they’ve been crushed. My hand—”

From the ache, or the memory of the ache, I expected to find the knuckles of my right hand black and blue and pulpy, but visually, it was fine. Maybe a little tender to the touch and the skin a little redder than normal, but that was it.

“You had a tiring day, I’m told,” Ame continued, interrupting my thoughts. “A little trip to the farmhouse, was it?”

I glared at her. “Now I remember why I was mad at him. I lost my ember because of you.”

She seemed smugly satisfied and not at all chastised like she should be. “I told Sawyer you could recharge the ember at the farmhouse. I didn’t say you were recharging it for you.”

“Then who exactly? My family’s back at the manor!”

The cat didn’t bother with a reply, instead hopping off the bed and padding off to the bathroom, presumably to truly wash herself.

Well, I wasn’t going to be ignored so easily. I needed that ember; I wasn’t sure I could finish uncursing myself without it. Sawyer wisely sprang off my lap before I was forced to toss him aside, and I scrambled off the bed. Ame was on the sink counter, helping herself to a drink from the faucet, and just when I thought about snatching her up and thrusting her under the water—she needed cleaned anyway, and it served her right for using me for her own purposes—I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror.

I was my customary post-sleep hideousness—disheveled hair, chapped lips from drooling, the imprint of the duvet’s pattern marring one side of my face like a rash, that veritable desert of crust the Sandman had poured into my eyes—but it was the plethora of red twinkling at my throat that had me stopping in my tracks.

Rubies, each the size of the marbles I’d seen in the farmhouse, were embedded in lacework silver around my entire neck. Their color and sparkle matched the rubies in my ears, all of them twinkling madly, and I quickly swept up my hair to get a good look of them together.

“Another gift from Ossian?” Ame quipped, her tone carefully neutral.

Tears sprang to my eyes as delight swelled in my heart. “I don’t even remember him giving this to me. It had to be sometime last night—curse that fairy wine.” I touched the rubies, feeling the warmth radiating from them, almost as if they were spelled. But it was just my body heat. “It’s so beautiful. This must have taken him days to—”

“Looks more like a collar than a necklace to me,” Sawyer said from where he sat in the doorway.

“I believe the term is ‘choker,’” Ame corrected, hopping down and stalking towards him. There was a pregnant pause where they just stared at each other, their tails flicking, and I knew they were having some kind of silent exchange. Ame won, Sawyer averting his gaze and hunching into a loaf.

“Wait just a minute,” I said, forgetting the rubies and charging after her. Sawyer chased after my heels. “The Hawthorne ember—”

“Is back where it belongs,” Ame said, hoping up onto a windowsill and batting the drapes aside for a brief glance outside. The gray light beyond that tiny sliver of window heralded a dawn that was still a quarter hour away.

“But I need it!”

“And it was needed more elsewhere.” She hopped down and went to another windowsill.

I stalked after her. “Who are you to decide that?”

Apparently she didn’t like what she saw in her brief glance out that window either and moved on to another, ignoring me.

“I’m talking to you, cat!” I snapped.

“Yes, and wasting perfectly good time on that fruitless endeavor when you should be unlocking more of your magic. You had your helping hand, and now it’s time for you to finish the job,” she said, abandoning that window too.

“What are you looking for?” I demanded, throwing the drapes aside. I’d never get a straight answer out of her if she was constantly distracted anyway. And why were my drapes closed? I always had them open to let in the moonlight.

On the opposite side of the diamond-paned glass, a blue-eyed barn owl screeched. Memory flared—I did not like that owl. Catching sight of the two cats, its white chest feathers puffed out in alarm. With another screech, its talons clawed at the sky as its tawny wings beat a hasty tempo. Not in attack, but in escape.

“It’s getting away!” Sawyer cried.

“Aperio!” Ame shouted, the window unlatching and bursting open. She launched through it a second later, paws flung wide.

The barn owl screamed as the cat’s paws caught its wings and her teeth sank into the back of its neck.

“Ame!” Sawyer lunged for the windowsill, but I snatched him out of the air, hugging him tightly to my chest. It was a fifty-foot drop to the alleyway below.

Ame’s momentum had combined with the owl’s, the two of them rocketing across the alleyway and onto the roof to the adjacent building. Shingles broke loose from the impact, and while Ame scrambled with her back paws, she couldn’t find purchase. They slid off the roof amongst a shower of shingles, a last-minute shove of her rear legs altering their trajectory.

The cat landed on the ground with the owl pinned beneath her, neither seeming the worse for wear. Except the owl wasn’t moving. It was—