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I had been in this form, after all, when Dyonisia Reeve had forced me to take an oath or watch the last of my people die. I couldn’t even remember what I was supposed to look like. Ever since I had first burst with my innate power six hundred years ago, my original form had been shed like a snake’s skin, long lost to the wind.

The face of my brother was the closest I could get.

“Kanuk,” I said when the snarls of the tiger had melted away into my new lungs and my faerie voice had reemerged.

“Jagaros.” He nodded. “I was beginning to think you wouldn’t return this time.”

“And miss an opportunity to boss you around? Never.” I jerked my head over my shoulder. “They seek sanctuary. Find a place to put them.” Then I bent swiftly to grab hold of the satchel again, its contents weighed heavily by one very important item. “And fetch Yenatin. I’m in need of his magic.”

“Again?” Kanuk’s hiss followed me up the sweep of stairs. “You cannot keep doing this, Jagaros. It’s time to let go.”

I ignored him, flexing my jaw as if part of the tiger remained after all. At the top of the steps, I turned to look down at my brother and the eleven refugees still huddled together at the bottom.

Now that they didn’t look so much like tasty snacks as they did in my tiger form, I could see them for what they really were: lost, hopeless, terrified human beings with sickly pallors. Ten of them still had ghastly scabs and scars over every part of their body that Dyonisia Reeve had forcibly branded, and they all stood with their arms crossed and legs shaking.

Only the eleventh, the older sister of one of the exiled ones who had abandoned the Good Council in Hallow’s Perch, locked eyes with me as I stared down at them. Her hard expression bled into pleading that didn’t touch what was left of my heart.

She’d hurt Rayna Drey, and for that, I would never forgive her. But if Rayna didn’t want me to bite her head off her shoulders…

…then the Leake girl could at least get out of my fucking sight.

“They seek sanctuary,” I told Kanuk again, a growl lacing my tone. “Once they have all been given a place of refuge, come join me in the sunroom. Then you can admonish me all you want.” And I can tell you to fuck off all I want, I didn’t add.

Nothing—not my brother’s lectures or anything else in this world—would stop me from pursuing the mission that had haunted me for two decades now.

Find her.

I turned and swept into the entrance of our home, an atrium bathed in gilded sunlight that streamed through the glass-paneled ceiling overhead. Here, devil’s ivy drooped from the balconies above, and palm trees grew from perfectly circular holes in the polished limestone floor, their fanned-out leaves creating feathery shadows where elegant sofas sat in wait.

Tempting, but I didn’t stop to lounge even though I hadn’t slept in days. I simply followed the twisting and twining of hallways, hating how loudly my footsteps clacked in this form—and hating how empty the palace still felt after all these centuries.

I’d never quite gotten used to the massacre of my people.

Finally, the tinkling of water ahead made me quicken my footsteps until I came to the sunroom, an open plaza surrounded by the rounded edge of a cliff where little waterfalls snaked down the stone and splashed into the pond at the edge.

This was where I’d always felt the most clear-headed, and thankfully, Kanuk hadn’t moved anything in my absence. There was still the stone table and chair set up by the pond, close enough that I could see the slow movement of turtles in the water.

And of course, there was still the giant white tiger lazing by the water’s edge, watching those turtles with hungry pupils.

“Don’t even think about it, you brute,” I said, even though I couldn’t help but lick my own lips after nothing but a few unassuming birds during my journey here.

The tiger twisted its neck to zero in on me haughtily. My brother’s innate power gave him a soul connection to felines, and this was one of his favorite friends—as well as the one whose form I mimicked in order to leave the Uninhabitable Zone. As a true clone of my brother now, I could feel his soul magic tethering me to the tiger before me, connecting us through a bond more potent than what the Wild Whisperers at the Institute could feel.

“Those turtles are older than you,” I pressed on. “You don’t eat your elders.”

The tiger cocked its head and gave a low grumble in its chest.

“Yes, including me.” The damn cat was going to make my hair turn whiter than it already was. If it wasn’t my favorite form to copy, I would have wrung its neck long ago.

“My king.”

A new, wavering voice emerged from behind me, but I didn’t even have to turn to see who it was. I’d asked Yenatin to use his magic for me so many times by now that his spectacles, saggy jowls, and sallow skin were engrained in my sense of desperation and hope. At more than a thousand years old, the elderly faerie was finally nearing the end of his lifetime and wasn’t afraid to hide the signs.

Nor was he afraid to put me in my place, it seemed.

“Aren’t you tired of attempting the same thing over and over and expecting different results, my king?”

He and his cane thumped into place beside me as I turned to empty the contents of the satchel onto the table, my brother stomping up after him.