EIGHTEEN

The Lord Master’s gaze flicked away from me, passed with cursory interest over Mallucé. “I’d come to finish him myself,” he said. “He’d become a liability. You saved me the trouble. How did you do it?” He studied me, the blood splattered on my face, clothing, and hands, the glaring lack of injuries. A slow smile spread over his exotic, beautiful face. “You ate Unseelie, didn’t you?”

I said nothing. I guess something in my eyes did, though. Framed behind him in the doorway were a dozen or so Unseelie of a caste I’d not seen before, wearing black uniforms with red insignia, clearly his personal guard.

He laughed. “What a surprise you are. Lovely like your sister, but Alina would never have done it.”

My sister’s name on her murderer’s lips incensed me. “Don’t even say her name. Nothing about her is yours. Nothing about her ever was.” If Barrons took this fight from me, I’d kill him.

But I wasn’t going to get this fight. Not here. Not tonight.

The Lord Master’s voice deepened, hardened, rolled with the thunder of a legion of voices. It did something inside my head; echoed, whispered, rearranged things. “Hand me the amulet. Now.”

I picked it up and handed it to him, wondering even as I did it what I was doing, why I was obeying. It glowed a faint blue-black invitation the moment I touched it. His eyes widened fractionally. He took it from me swiftly.

“Another surprise,” he murmured.

That’s right, you bastard, I am epic, so watch out, I wanted to say, but my vocal cords weren’t under my control any more than anything else was at the moment.

“Stand,” he commanded. The amulet blazed in his hand, eclipsing the feeble light I’d managed to make and been so proud of.

I stood as jerkily as a puppet on strings, mind resisting, flesh obeying. I swayed before the red-robed Lord Master, stared into his too-beautiful-to-be-human face, and waited for him to rule me. Had he done this to my sister? Had she been not duped by him, but stripped of choice like I was now?

“Come.” He turned and, automaton-like, I began to follow.

Barrons exploded from the shadows and hit me like a missile, taking me to the ground beneath him.

The Lord Master turned in a whirl of robes.

“She stays with me,” said Barrons. His voice, too, rolled with the thunder of a multitude, reverberating inside my skull. Of course I was staying with him. What had I been thinking?

What the Lord Master did next was so incomprehensible to me that I was still blinking blankly at the opening, several minutes after he was gone.

He took a long look at my enigmatic mentor, jerked his head at his guard—and left.