Of Wicked Blood (The Quatrefoil Chronicles #1) - Olivia Wildenstein Page 0,152

to hug it.

In the end, I just hold it with both hands.

A thunderous crack sounds next to me. The column breaks in half along with every other column balancing the vaulted ceiling. And the ceiling . . . the beautiful ceiling painted with cherubs and clouds collapses over me.

I waged a battle against a monster and won.

I will not lose to plaster.

I run toward the window just as it explodes, thankfully, outward.

Before I can reach my escape hatch, something glances against the back of my skull.

I stumble. My ears ring, and my tongue tastes leaden.

I press my palms into the shuddering ground.

My leaf?

Where’s my leaf?

I crawl, my palms scraping through the debris. Before I can spot my prize, something heavy slams into the base of my spine, flattens me. I try to get up, but the world spins, and spins.

Quiet and dark.

Flecked by pinpricks of light.

Stars.

I see stars.

And then I see nothing.

57

Slate

I turn off my phone. All is in order.

Bastian will receive everything I own when I die at moonset, which according to him, is at 4:43 p.m.

Thing is, I don’t even give a fuck about dying. Because it’s been almost four days, and Cadence is still in a coma. Her face is covered in cuts and scratches. She’s got a black eye and a gash through her right eyebrow.

Miraculously, no broken bones. But hell, I’d beg for broken bones over this unconscious shit. A clear bag of IV fluid hangs above her, and countless machines beep, their pattern never changing. She’s breathing, yet she barely seems alive.

There might not be a hospital in Brume, but the fancy university clinic more than makes up for its absence. The rooms are so new they sparkle, and the bathrooms . . . they rival mine back in Marseille. If the University’s short on funds, this place is why. If only they’d allocated ten euros of the cash spent on decorating this joint to replace the hairy soap-on-a-stick in my dorm’s toilettes hommes with liquid soap dispensers.

Two hours and thirty-six minutes.

You deserve to die, Rainier told me when Cadence was transported in here.

I didn’t disagree. No matter what kind of weird shit he did with my money, no matter how easily he left me to the sharks in the system, no matter how often he’s lied, it doesn’t matter.

I put on the ring. I started this whole mess.

And then the one time I needed to be by Cadence’s side, I forced her to go off on her own. And she ended up here.

When the fire brigade broke down the temple door, I set out like a doped-up racehorse leaping out of a starting gate. On the temple steps, a paramedic was shining a pen light into Bastian’s eyes and asking him questions. He was conscious and answering accurately.

Still, I asked him to list the foster parents we’d had. Once he’d spoken all their hateful names, I’d raced across the quad toward a site of such destruction that my heart didn’t beat once on the way there.

The Beaux-Arts veranda was gone, thousands of shards of glass glinting like diamonds on the snow as the firefighters swept over the area with their flashlights. The building itself had caved in, now resembling a Roman ruin with its smashed pillars, uneven sections of gray limestone walls, and arches of tenacious ceiling.

Two men grunted as they lifted a slab of slate roofing.

“We have something!” one of them yelled.

I ran toward where they stood. When I reached them, reached her, my breaths stopped short in my lungs. For an eternity, I stared down at her unmoving body. And then something in me snapped, and I lunged. Before my fingers could brush over her bloodied cheek, seek out her pulse, Adrien and one of the firemen cuffed my arms and hauled me back to let the paramedic do his job. I spit obscenities at them, roared to be released.

“Slate, calm down. Cadence would want you to calm down.”

“Calm down? Are you fucking kidding me? How am I supposed to fucking calm down, Prof?”

“I have a pulse,” the man kneeling beside her exclaimed.

I stopped fighting and gulped back the jagged lump stuck in my throat.

“Should he be touching her?” Adrien asked.

I was about to go off on him when I understood what he meant. If she was clutching her piece, he’d be cursed.

“Too late now,” I murmured.

They dug out her legs, then brought over a stretcher and laid her unresponsive body out. Her red coat was white with powdered plaster, her