back. Jessamyn had trained him well in their short time together, and the four adatrox hovering listlessly at the doors were useless fighters. Angels no longer guided their movements. They moaned wordless cries of agony, swung their blunt fists, tried to ram Remy against the wall.
He darted between them, slashed their throats, then hurried inside the room.
There was Jessamyn, gritting her teeth as she pulled on her boots and jacket over her bandages. Ludivine felt them lay eyes on each other. Jessamyn: surprised relief. Remy: weary gladness. He hadn’t thought he would be lucky enough to find her.
The cruciata have invaded the city, he told Jessamyn.
I can see that. Her wry reply.
He approached her carefully. Ludivine sensed how prepared he was to kill her if she tried to stop him. She was wounded; he might manage it.
I need your help, he said. I don’t know the palace. You do. And you’re a better fighter than I am. We need to get Eliana out of here.
Jessamyn nodded. I’d thought of that. Who else can stop the beasts? The Emperor certainly can’t. She eyed his belt. I need a knife.
He tossed her one, and they ran. Ludivine watched them weave through the palace toward Corien’s favorite theater. Music began to play, accompanying their quick, light footsteps. Brass horns set high in the rafters crackled with sound. Lights flashed at each juncture of wire that connected them—galvanized power, sparking as it worked. Lamps flickered in their casings.
The music was choral, sweeping, triumphant. Ludivine recognized it as the symphony Corien had commissioned from a recent acquisition—a young composer from Mazabat, prodigiously talented, who had surrendered to save her wife.
Ludivine dared to brush her mind across the theater, the barest sweep of a touch. She saw Corien lounging in his favored curtained box, flush with wine. He had locked the doors; he was brooding. The city was falling down around him, and he was ignoring it. He had nearly killed Eliana, and realizing that had frightened him. So there he sat, furious and terrified, unwilling to face the reality of his failure.
Or so Ludivine supposed; she would not dare touch his mind. But after thousands of years, she knew him well enough to guess.
Below, the audience—bloodstained and wild-eyed, plucked from the city by Corien’s generals to enhance the evening’s entertainment—applauded frantically for the orchestra. Ludivine felt the frenzied buzz of their thoughts: maybe, if they cheered loudly enough, the Emperor would let them stay inside, locked away and safe.
And sitting in a chair near Corien was Eliana, unconscious and horribly pale, sweating out nightmares Corien had left wedged in the brittle glass of her mind.
Only when she looked at Eliana did Ludivine feel pain. Her face was the perfect combination of Rielle’s and Audric’s. His full mouth, her arched brows. Her sharp jaw, his lovely brown eyes.
If Ludivine allowed herself, she would be able to remember their warmth, their arms wrapped around her, the soft fragility of their skin. Her rage, his grief. Her passion, his strength. Soothing Rielle to sleep after yet another night of dream-horrors. Audric howling in Ludivine’s arms on the floor of his rooms in Mazabat.
How desperately and fatally she had loved them.
But Ludivine did not allow any of this. Her mind was silver and clean, sharp as death.
Stay with us, little one. She didn’t dare touch Eliana. Corien would feel it. Instead, she said it to herself. Just a little longer.
She began her slow retreat from the palace. No movement too swift, no movement unplanned. Everyone was running where they should. There were Remy and Jessamyn, sneaking through the palace toward the theater. There were Navi, Ysabet, Zahra. Patrik and Hob, their soldiers. All of them fighting their way through the city.
There was another person Ludivine needed to find, perhaps the most essential piece of all. As always, when reaching for him, she sent her instructions with a silent apology—for everything she had done to him and everything he had lost.
But she would do it again if she had to, and he knew it. She would destroy his mind and remake it a thousand times if she had to.
It’s time, she told him.
Understood, he replied with a tiny shiver of joy, for even all the abuse she had dealt him had not destroyed his love for what his blood could do, for all the fearsome secrets it held.
She felt him draw his gun, heard him stalk through the corridors of the palace. Wailing adatrox intercepted him, bewildered and terrified. A