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With another shrill hoot, the bird rustled its feathers and took flight. At the same moment, something nipped at the back of my neck.
“Ouch!” I swatted on instinct, whirled—then stopped dead.
Filaments of milky mist twirled toward me, their strands leading back to a singular figure framed by the moonlight basking her from above.
No. It couldn’t be. I tried to blink the image away, but she didn’t dissipate.
She was here. At the Institute. In the Element Wielder sector. Watching me with her head tilted to one side, midnight hair falling over her shoulder.
Dyonisia Reeve.
Every part of my body locked up, on edge. I hadn’t seen her since the night she’d flown me back from Hallow’s Perch in that carriage, but her own antipower still shrouded her entire body, a magical armor that shimmered with her every movement.
“Rayna,” was all she said.
As always, her voice cracked like chips of ice, coldness seeping from every syllable. My heart hammered. I glanced back at Mr. Gleekle’s bungalow, as if the president might step out any moment to save me from… whatever this was.
Whenever it came to Dyonisia, it wasn’t good.
“Can I help you?” I forced my shoulders to relax, my hands to unclench, knowing I had to tread carefully.
“No,” Dyonisia said simply, “not yet. I came here to help you. Come.” When I glanced back at Mr. Gleekle’s house again, she snapped, “That fool can’t help you, Rayna. He’s just a human, and the number one thing you must learn about this world is that humans are born weak. That is why we must forge them into something greater, something that can grow teeth and claws and fight alongside us.”
This time, she didn’t tell me to follow her as she spun around.
I stared after her, my heart beating fists against my ribcage. I hadn’t missed the way she said ‘we must forge them into something greater,’ as if she thought of me as equal. Someone who would help her turn more innocents into monsters.
Well, I could pretend to help. Pretend to bow and obey and comply.
Steadying my breath, I followed her.
Dyonisia cut through campus like a phantom of fallen moon. Wherever she moved, nocturnal birds took flight and monkeys swung out of the way. Even the trees seemed to lean away from her as she passed, cringing from that glowing antipower.
When she passed straight through the Wild Whisperer sector, toward a familiar abandoned classroom with a broken door and moss-cloaked windowpanes, goosebumps cascaded down my spine.
My venom has a soothing property that works so quickly, it’ll be like floating among the clouds and stars within seconds. One year ago, a black mamba had hissed those words out to me on the chipped wooden porch we now faced. And the year before that? You have woken us from a very, very long sleep with your tedious questions, and we are rather hungry when we wake.
Those words had come from the vampire bats that Jagaros had demolished with Coen’s help. The vampire bats who had first told me about my mother—right inside these walls beneath the caved-in roof with missing shingles.
What was Dyonisia playing at? Did she know that this is where the lost princess Chrysanthia, her own sister, had given birth to me in secret? I opened my mouth, but she merely beckoned me with a brisk finger and clicked her way up the wooden steps to the door.
Inside, two singular lanterns cast a faint glow over heaps of objects that certainly hadn’t been there the last time I’d stepped foot in here. In a way, it was a lot like Jagaros’s treehouse, filled with heaps of coins, keys, instruments, jewelry, and other golden objects that made my third magic buck within my veins, all of them covering the bloodstains I knew scarred these floors.
But it wasn’t the objects my eyes seized onto.
In the back of the room, beneath the spot where Lord Arad had once hung upside-down, a middle-aged man looked up at us from where he’d slumped to his knees. Chains snaked from his wrists and ankles to new clevises in the wall. Bruises speckled his face. A fresh gash ran from his left eyebrow to lower chin.
“I would say meet your new Object Summoning mentor,” Dyonisia announced rather triumphantly, “but I believe you already know each other well.”
Yes. Yes, I knew this man well, had missed him with every fiber of my being over the last two years. But horror twisted in my gut at the sight of him now, bloodied and bruised and chained up like an exiled one. The room tilted.
My new Object Summoning mentor was…
“Fabian,” I whispered.
CHAPTER
28
