fields, farmhouses to the woods. Purple land, purple sky. I was a hazy streak sandwiched between them, more than halfway there before a new, heavy sensation settled over me, dragging me down to a crawl.
Armand wasn’t inside Tranquility any longer.
I wasn’t certain how I knew that, but it was so. None of his energy—his trail? his scent?—waited ahead of me. I felt the pull of him behind me. Back toward the coast.
Damn it.
I drew myself up into the stillness, condensing into a sphere above a rye field. A cloud of magpies exploded into flight from a thicket nearby, rushing frenzied wings carrying them away from me, inland.
The beast in me registered that. Hungered for pursuit. I quelled it.
Armand. Armand. The only other living being in the world with blood linked to mine.
I floated in place and tried to let my senses drift free, feeling for him, reaching. It would have been helpful to have Jesse sing me the way, but Jesse was silent.
The castle. Armand had gone there. He was in trouble and he had gone there, maybe even to find me.
I curled about, briefly assuming the shape of a fishhook—don’t think about the shark!—and tore back the way I had come.
Iverson beckoned me home. Tiers of stone, arches and windows and towers and a hundred radiant eyes, all of them lit windows. Burning gold against amethyst, a target of such easy and immense proportions that it probably cast its glow all the way to France.
An automobile had been parked askew beneath a beech just past the island bridge, the grass behind it torn to shreds by the tyres. He must have driven here in a hurry but slammed to a stop there, far enough away that the engine wouldn’t wake anyone. If that had worked, he’d have been able to creep inside the castle unnoticed. After all, Lord Armand knew his way around his former home, and the doors were never locked.
My mind put the pieces together. He didn’t want to be seen or heard. He didn’t want anyone else to know where he was. Was he hurt? Bleeding? Had the duke’s sanity completely deserted him? Had he done something dire to his son?
Was he in pursuit?
Armand would expect to find me in my room. It would be the first place he’d look. I funneled back up to my window and poured inside, but the room was empty. No echoes of him. Nothing.
Jesse, I thought, slightly panicked. Jesse, where is he?
But, of course, Jesse couldn’t hear me. I could only hear him.
I Turned, scrambled back into my nightgown, opened my door and paused, listening with dragon ears, tasting the air with a dragon tongue—or as close as I could get to either in my human shape. I detected limestone and cologne and furniture polish. The usual nighttime noises of a mass of sleeping girls; shifts and sighs, some snoring. The same from even farther away, perhaps the teachers’ floors. The servants in their dungeon cells.
Then, from the far end of the castle, something very different: panting. A heartbeat so fast it sounded like nothing but an unbroken convulsion of muscle and blood, pumping louder and louder.
A teeny tiny metallic series of clinks echoed above that, but so dim compared to that heartbeat that I wasn’t sure what it was or where it had come from.
Armand was in the eastern portion. I was in the west.
And Jesse, I realized, as his music lifted back to me in a full, imperative refrain. He was near Armand, as well.
There was no time to agonize over going to smoke or staying in this shape. If I met up with any firmly sealed windows or doors, I’d waste time Turning to open them. My feet flew down the stairs, the gown a white whip behind me. I might have made noise. Possibly not. I don’t know that the soles of my feet had much contact with the floor.
In any case, I was in too much of a hurry to worry about it. If anyone did wake up, all they’d discover was an empty hallway.
Impressions flitted by me, the long corridors, sharp turns, unlit corners. I didn’t recognize most of where I ran; I was just going. Going and going until suddenly I was in familiar surroundings again. I was at the base of the corkscrew stairwell that led to the roof of the castle.
Jesse and Armand were beyond them.
I grabbed the folds of the nightgown and sprinted up the stairs. The door at the