Capture the Crown (Gargoyle Queen #1) -Jennifer Estep Page 0,94

Milo doesn’t.”

Anger flared in his eyes. “I am fucking sick and tired of people slaughtering strixes. They’re magnificent creatures and the bloody symbol of Morta, of the Morricones. We should be protecting strixes, nurturing them. Not burning them up like candles and then tossing them aside when their blood and magic are gone and they’re of no further use.” He spat out the words as though they left a bad taste in his mouth.

More disgust crinkled Leonidas’s face, and he spun back around to the table, angrily sorting through the tools there, his fingers curling around the pliers, saws, and more as though he longed to use the tools on his brother the same way Milo had used them on the strixes.

I moved on to another table covered with books, papers, and maps. I eyed the books, which all had to do with various creatures. Strixes mostly, although several volumes focused on gargoyles and caladriuses. Leonidas was right. Milo wanted to experiment on other creatures, not just the strixes he had easy access to.

“Can Milo absorb magic from strix blood?” I asked. “Like King Maximus could?”

Leonidas jerked upright as though I had just shoved a sword into his back. An answering heat exploded in my gargoyle pendant, making it burn against my chest, but it couldn’t hold back all of his emotion, and his rage slammed into my heart like a red-hot hammer, leaving me breathless.

“No,” he growled. “Milo can’t absorb power from strix or any other kind of blood. He didn’t inherit that bit of Morricone mutt magic, thank the gods.”

He paused, as if struggling to find the right words. More of his rage slammed into my heart, although waves of cold bitterness and roiling anguish quickly washed it away. “Milo is always searching for more magic and better, easier, quicker ways to kill his enemies. But he mostly experiments on the strixes because he knows how much it hurts me. My brother might kill the creatures, but they die because of me.”

Leonidas dropped his head, and his fingers clenched the edge of the table as though he wanted to rip it apart with his bare hands.

Sympathy filled me, and I had the strangest desire to walk over, wrap my arms around his waist, lay my head on his back, and tell him that it wasn’t his fault. That nothing in this sick, twisted workshop was his fault.

The urge to comfort him was so strong that I actually took a step in his direction, before I thought better of it and stopped.

Leonidas raised his head, released the table, and returned to his search. He didn’t speak, but his rage, bitterness, and anguish kept cascading over me, making me sway from side to side as I turned back to my own table. He had knocked my internal ship off course, in more ways than one.

His confession also made me even more puzzled. If Milo couldn’t absorb magic, then why was he so eager to experiment on creatures? He might be cruel, but the piles of books and pages of notes indicated that he had some goal in mind, something more important and sinister than simply torturing his younger brother.

I sorted through the books again, glancing at the titles, and scanning the sections Milo had marked. Most of the passages were dry, technical treatises speculating how strix, gargoyle, and caladrius magic was different than the power that human magiers, morphs, masters, and mutts wielded. Milo had also marked several sections theorizing about how magic could be used, absorbed, created, transmitted, and destroyed. Strange, and a bit frightening, but the books and notes still didn’t tell me what he was plotting.

I picked up another book, and a bright gray gleam caught my eye. Curious, I set the book down, snagged the item with my fingertips, and pulled it out from underneath a stack of papers to reveal . . .

An arrow.

Disappointment surged through me, along with relief that it wasn’t a dead coral viper, or something else equally disturbing. I started to shove the arrow back underneath the papers, but its bright gray gleam caught my eye again, and I held it up to the light for a better look.

The arrow was quite a bit shorter than normal, only stretching from my wrist up to my fingertips. The pointed tip was razor-sharp, but the arrowhead itself was unusually large and lined with hooked barbs that reminded me of fishing lures. I wasn’t a weapons expert like my stepmother, Captain Rhea, but this