Diamond in the Rough - Vivienne Savage Page 0,45

losing my mind, but when I gave the gemstones to Lacherra, something told me to do it. One of the gems spoke to me, and it felt as if the words had come from Moritan himself.”

“Perhaps he did speak with you again,” Xavier mused, rubbing his chin. “The Legacies are each a small portion of divine essence, and they’re connected to their hosts. It could be that this was ultimately the plan all along—for the enemy to regain them.”

“Yes!” Her excitement quickly fizzled away, slumping her shoulders once again. “They’ve had them for hours now. It might be too late already.”

“It is not,” Xavier assured her. “If they’d brought demons through to our world, we’d know it. But it will be soon, during the blue moon I’d wager. They’ll want to perform the ceremony at twilight when both sun and moon illuminate the sky. That is the best time to pierce the veil between planes.”

“That’s tomorrow night. We’ll never be able to steal them back in time.”

“Then we have to disrupt the ritual. It’s the only way. And for that, we need a plan.”

16

The Plan

With the bulk of the army still attacking the wizards, only the royal contingent stood guard around the old ruins. Xavier’s hunch had proven correct, not that Rosalia had ever doubted him. She crept among the shadows, flitting from one crumbling building to the next. The cold night breeze carried the scent of the wild blossoms that carpeted the surrounding desert like a blanket. They had bloomed that morning, thousands of pink and violet flowers, as if the world itself were trying to fight the coming darkness with beauty.

The deeper into the ruins they went, the further her heart fell. Too many guards roamed the area for them to remain undetected for long, and even with a dragon, they were vastly outnumbered.

Stick with the plan, Rosalia told herself. She had to have faith if the plan was to succeed.

“There,” Xavier whispered, his lips close to her ear. With a careful gesture of his hand, he directed her attention between a crack in the wall to the courtyard beyond.

Someone had set the hand mirror atop the crumbling structure of an old marble pillar beside a fountain. The Legacies sparkled in the frame and gave the metallic setting an eerie sheen. Their replacement into the once-empty sockets gave the mirror an entirely different look than what Rosalia remembered. Fat candles dripping wax burned on the lower tiers while a dozen torches had been spaced out in a perfect circle.

“Could you knock the mirror over?” she asked, equally as quiet. “Shatter the mirror and they can’t open the gate.”

He shook his head. “Merely shattering the mirror isn’t enough to disable it. It mends itself. Besides, we’d be fools to believe it isn’t protected somehow.”

“Fools indeed,” an oily voice whispered from the darkness.

Cold steel touched Rosalia’s throat a split-second after the man spoke. Beside her, Xavier stiffened, only to rise and face several swords pointing at his chest as guards appeared from a blanket of obfuscating magic. The layers of the spell fell from them like shed water. At the forefront stood Lacherra and the wicked spymaster.

“Don’t move,” Lacherra hissed sharply to Xavier the moment his eyes gleamed green. “Don’t even consider transforming. Twitch a single finger, show one claw, and I’ll remove her head in front of you. Test me if you wish.”

Rosalia had never known she could feel so much loathing as she did for them.

“Well done. It would seem you were correct about the weredragon as well. When you suggested it was Bane, I thought surely you were joking…but then my pets returned and verified your claims. What a delight to at last have him in my possession,” Caius purred.

“Told you they’d show,” Lacherra replied, grinning.

“So you did. They’ll make the perfect offering to our new friends.” The spymaster turned and started toward the courtyard, calling back, “Bring them.”

As the guards pushed her and Xavier forward, Lacherra fell back a step and leaned in slightly, her voice low. “You should have stayed away, girl.”

They brought them as far as the torches before stopping, two guards for each of them with a third holding a sword at their backs. It was over. They’d been caught before they could do anything.

And it was perfect. The guards had brought them precisely to where they had needed to be. Something told her they didn’t realize that Xavier’s blood could not only seal but also destroy the mirror and unravel its dark