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“Come back, Nell!” The boy pleaded, his voice shrill with panic. “Lunaya, call her back. She’s going to hurt her.”

“No.” The Orphos girl’s voice was fierce despite how weak she looked. “Leave her, Persis. Nell must stay there.”

“She’ll die!”

Nell. That was her name. The little fluffin was ignoring them both. She stood just a few feet from me, her tiny body braced, huge ears pricked forward. She looked at me in that way Neville always had—with impossible stubbornness, as if she had already come to a decision and there was no point arguing.

Around us, the manor house shook. Dust drifted down from the ceiling as somewhere up above something huge hit the house. In the distance, I could hear the children crying and calling out again.

I was useless. My whole body trembled with pain. But at least I hadn’t hurt the fluffin.

Nell came closer. She raised her front legs and planted two tiny paws on my knees gently, looking up with huge, glowing eyes. She opened her mouth, and I saw a little pink tongue. For a moment, I expected her to lick me.

A sound ripped through the hallway. Nyxaris cried out. My head jerked.

Another figure had appeared out of the dark behind him. A half-born woman, her pale hair pinned up in a high bun. Elowyn Wisp-wood’s face was driven as she buried the hilt of a knife in Nyxaris’s back. Nyxaris’s grip on Viktor broke. Viktor slid to the ground, one hand to his throat. My former professor of magic pulled her knife free and took a step back, clearly waiting for Nyxaris to fall.

Everything happened at once.

Nyxaris staggered, then spun. He moved with incredible speed, even though wounded. Elowyn’s hand was rising again. She drove the knife down toward Nyxaris’s face.

Nell’s mouth was still open. She began to sing. It was a faint sound, and yet it somehow filled the whole cell. A pure, high note, impossibly sweet and clear.

Viktor’s head snapped toward me. “No,” he cried, horror spreading across his face. He began to crawl toward my cell.

But it was too late. The fluffin’s paws were light on my knees, barely a whisper of weight. The small creature’s fur brushed my skin. She was singing, her voice high and shrill and sweet—otherworldly and full of magic. The sound went straight through me. My breath hitched. There, inside my chest. The wrongness which was not me began to buckle and crumble like rotting wood. Viktor. His presence. His thoughts, his cruelty.

The fluffin nudged my hand with her wet nose. Something tore. Like a stitch being yanked free from flesh. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t scream. It was pain and not-pain; it was relief.

I sensed Viktor recoiling from the purity of the fluffin’s power. She was everything good. Everything he could never be. Her mysterious magic was a power he could never hope to compete with. For the first time I understood the power these small creatures truly possessed and the threat they had always posed to highbloods.

Viktor’s rage tried to rise, to seize me with pain like he’d always been able to do before.

He couldn’t.

The collar had cracked; Nell was doing that. I felt the last of Viktor’s grip slide off me. Joy filled me, pure and overwhelming.

On the floor nearby us, Viktor lay writhing in pain. The pain I’d felt being bound to that monster was now being paid back to him tenfold.

Nell’s song swelled one last time, then stopped. I leaned down and wrapped my hands gently around the fluffin, lifting her up very carefully. She was warm and wriggling beneath my palms, just a pup after all. I stroked her head, and she purred. I felt myself smiling.

Lunaya and Persis looked at me hopefully. Viktor had come to, and Elowyn still wasn’t letting up on Nyxaris. So many more people needed saving, but as I looked into the fluffin’s owlish eyes, I was sure of one thing: Viktor no longer had control over me.

The fluffin looked up at me, her eyes wide and curious. Did she understand the depths of the evil from which she had just saved me?

It didn’t matter, really. Because in my mind, Viktor’s presence was gone. For the first time since I’d been bound, I spoke without his permission.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

Chapter 59

REGAN

The darkness had taken us whole. One moment, I was standing in the storage room with my hand pressed to the cold stone. The next I’d approached the shimmer that had suddenly bloomed within the arch. I’d walked up to it and fallen through, like someone vanishing between cracks of ice on a frozen lake. It felt like falling, like being pulled through cold water. A roaring filled my head, too wrong to be the wind. I stumbled, gasping, letting go of Kage’s hand and sinking down on my knees as we came through the other side. My vision swam, and for a few horrible seconds I wasn’t sure if I was up or down. I blinked, fighting back waves of nausea, and slowly the world began to take shape.

We were in a stone-walled room. The air was damp and tasted of earth and mildew—underground, then. The room reminded me of a cellar. We weren’t alone. Two figures stood on the far side of the room, a man and a woman, shock written all over their faces.

I blinked, dizzy and disoriented, trying to hold back my bile. Behind me, I could hear Kage making retching noises.