“I’m just wondering what the plans are for my return to Boston,” he stammered.
The Theurgeon grinned. His cheeks were flushed from the wine. “You didn’t really think we were going to let you go, did you? You assaulted one of the King’s advisors. And you consort with a Ragman.”
Thomas shot a glance at the King, who was ogling Fortuna’s cleavage over his goblet.
“So you mean to keep me here?” Thomas bellowed. The dinner guests went quiet, glaring at him. He was ruining their evening now, but the wine and rage simmered away his fear. “And you didn’t send Oswald home.”
A glimmer of amusement flickered across Queen Bathsheba’s face.
The King thinned his lips into something between a smile and a sneer. “How could I send you home? You’ll make such a charming ornament on Fishgate.” He threw back his head with laughter, and the others joined in. “In any case, an execution could liven up the Mayflower celebrations.”
“I will wave at you when I pass by,” Fortuna chirped.
Asmodeus guffawed before turning to Thomas. “Of course Oswald remains in the Iron Tower. You should have heard him whimper when I crushed his little familiar.”
Thomas’s thoughts raced. They were torturing Oswald somewhere nearby, and he’d been sitting here among them, gorging himself and watching dancers.
Anger gripped him. He had nothing to lose. He glared at the King. “You’re a plague on this city,” he spat. Adrenaline coursed through him. “And do you know what rids cities of plagues? Fire. When the Tatters rise up to burn the fortress—”
Strong hands grabbed him from behind, yanking him toward the exit. “—they will cleanse the pestilence—”
A hand clamped over his mouth, and an arm tightened around his throat. Someone was choking him, and as his lungs burned, a small part of him felt relief. In this world, a quick death is a mercy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Fiona
If she screamed louder, would it attract unwanted attention from the guards? As she contemplated this, the creature’s howls stopped. Fiona could hear only her own breathing, fast and rasping. The crickets, so loud before, no longer chirped. In the silence of the night air, her breath was deafening.
She looked up to the sky. “Byron?”
There was no reply, no winged form fluttered in front of the moon. She had a sudden urge to look behind her to see if the snake-haired wight had followed her out of the cemetery. She stumbled around another hedge corner into a dead end, pain searing her ankle. Something told her that if she glanced over her shoulder, those haunted black eyes and the bone-pale face would drag her under the earth, into Hell itself.
She limped faster, gasping in her panic. There was a crunching noise in the distance. Footsteps? Hair rose on the back of her neck. She glanced around. There were just stupid hedges everywhere she looked. Who builds a hedge labyrinth? She hobbled in the other direction.
Crunch. The footsteps were closing in. She tried to run again, but pain shot up her leg. Crunch. Her heart beat fast as a hummingbird’s wings, and with a trembling hand, she covered her own mouth to stifle the sound of her heavy breathing. Crunch. She was being hunted by her own monstrous doppelg?nger.
I can handle this. I helped defeat the bone wardens. She tried to make herself as still as one of the cemetery’s marble angels. If the crypt-demon couldn’t see or hear her, it couldn’t hunt her.
Crunch. Except that it had seen her.
The footsteps drew closer over the gravel, and she could hear its breathing as well as her own. Maybe she could call up a small flame, just long enough to distract it while she slammed a fist into its face. She’d taken a self-defense class at Mather, though most of the moves assumed she’d be fighting a man and not a crypt-demon. Still, a well-placed elbow could do a lot of damage.
Crunch.
She held her breath.
But the hand that touched her shoulder was gentle. “Fiona?”
She squinted in the darkness. She could just make out a pair of broad shoulders. “Tobias?”
“There you are. What the hell are you doing out here?”
Despite her doubts about his honesty, she was relieved to see him, and some of the tension in her shoulders relaxed. Whatever he was up to, he wasn’t trying to murder her. “There’s something after me. A demon thing. With snake hair.”
“There’s nothing there. Where are the others?”
“I think they’re back at the house already. I landed funny on my ankle.” She leaned into him as they began walking.
With Tobias’s arm around her, her racing heart began to slow, and she caught her breath. “How did you find me? Those stupid hedges are a safety hazard.”
His body was warm in the chilly night air. “I could hear your panicked breathing. You sounded like an ox tilling a field.”
“An ox? Wait—what do you mean you could hear my breathing?”