Trent is dead and the baku still in you, I will call the Order myself.” IDs in hand, he paced closer, halting out of my easy reach when his security stiffened. “Your soul is ready to fall. You will be its prison,” he said. “Not me.”
Maybe, but I had firsthand knowledge that the baku would rather have Landon. Either way, Trent’s life was in the mix. Silent, I watched Landon give the IDs to his security team and tell them to find Dan and Wendy—and fire them.
“You’re making a mistake,” I said, and memory sparked of me telling Lee the same thing on a windswept ruin in the ever-after. Landon wasn’t going to listen, either. Come on, Jenks. Wake up!
“You think?” Landon sat against the glass table, ankles confidently crossed. “You’re a bigger danger to the Order than me. They want you in their cell. If you’re hosting the baku, even the FIB won’t lift a finger to protest. Demon assassin.”
And at that, uncertainty filled me. I looked at Trent, and Landon began to smirk.
“I’m curious,” Landon said. “Tell me, Trent. When the baku takes her, will you let her kill you because you love her? Or will you kill her to save your life? It might be kinder than letting her live out her existence as a zombie.”
My expression blanked.
“Put them somewhere quiet,” Landon directed. “They look tired. They need to rest.”
“Landon,” I tried one last time, but Trent was silent as they yanked him up and we were shoved to the door.
“The pixy, your grace?” one of them said, and fear pulled me to a stop.
Landon’s eyebrows rose as he saw me with my hands to my middle, frozen. “Put it in the garden, where it belongs,” he said flatly.
“What? No!” I backed up, jerking when two men descended upon me to pull my hands apart. “No!” I protested, starting to fight. “He’ll die. It’s too cold. It’s murder!”
But they held me still at a curt gesture so Landon could edge closer. “This is happening,” he said as he gripped my fingers, fighting to pull them apart. “It’s not against the law to kill a pixy.”
“You bastard,” I whispered, then gasped as he bent my fingers backward, almost breaking them. I fought to be free, kicking and thrashing until someone punched me in the gut and I bent double, gasping for air. Trent was watching, jaw tight and stiff in frustrated anger. “Landon,” I rasped, eyes watering as they pried at my hands. “If you kill him, there’s nothing on earth or the ever-after that will stop me from coming after you. Nothing!”
But it was their three to my one, and I screamed in frustration, thrashing wildly as they forced my hands apart. “Jenks!” I shouted in agony as he tumbled to the floor. But then he rose up, wings a harsh clatter as he darted erratically into the air to evade the reaching hands, slowly gaining height as they swung and jumped for him until he made it to the chandelier.
“Jenks, thank God,” I said in relief, and he gave me a shaky thumbs-up, safely out of their reach as he held his head and sifted a sickly green dust. He looked awful, but he was alive.
“Get them out of here. And someone get me a net!” Landon shouted.
And then I was pulled into the hall, fighting the guards every step of the way.
CHAPTER
32
The floor of the dewar’s wine cellar was cobbles. Cold cobbles. And they were hard, too, as I sat with my back to the thick oak walls and held my knees to my chest. The air smelled like the pasta and red sauce that they had given us to eat. That had been hours ago, and we only had the stubble on Trent’s face to guess at what time it was. After sundown, by the looks of it.
Worry for Jenks gnawed me like a cur chewing a marrowless bone. He was hurt and alone with an entire building of elves after him. And here I was, stuck in a hole with a band of charmed silver around my wrist. Al would have laughed his hat off, then smacked me with it for being uncommonly stupid. He’d be right.
But even Al wouldn’t have been concerned about Jenks, and I frowned as I stared up at the light bulb hanging over the freestanding racks of fermented bottled sunshine. I had nothing. They’d even taken Hodin’s ring in a second, more careful search before shoving us in