“Take him alive if you can,” I yelled after them, but they gave no sign they’d heard.
Blocking out Amelie’s frantic screams and the watchmen’s joyous baying, I yanked open the van’s door and did a quick examination of Linus. As a necromancer, I knew zip about healing from a medical standpoint. We were taught the signs of death so that we could encourage them in our clients to hasten their resuscitation, but not how to counteract them, and Linus was ticking off all the boxes.
Sluggish pulse. Poor color. Faint breaths.
“You’re going to have to trust me.” I gripped the front of his shirt and ripped it straight down the middle, sending buttons pinging off the dash. “I have an idea that I think might work.” With the fabric untucked from his pants, I parted the halves of his shirt to expose the planes of his inked chest and the smooth rounds of his shoulders. For this to work, I wanted the largest canvas possible. “Okay, here we go.”
Strange magic licked over my skin, and the ward surrounding me burst like a balloon punctured with a needle. A sharp point wedged between the knobs of my vertebrae, stunning me into stillness, and I sucked in a shocked breath that hissed through my teeth as that power burrowed into my blood.
“Hello, Grier.”
Careful to keep the movement slow, I dared a glance over my shoulder. “Eloise?”
“Not quite.” Her eyes were sharper, her face harder, and she mocked me from a greater height. “I’m Heloise Marchand. Her twin. And don’t get me started on the rhyming names. Our mother did it to bind us tighter than she was to her sister.” A mocking smile curved her lips. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, cousin.”
Twins?
Sloppy of me not to have dug into Eloise’s past after she appeared on my doorstep, but I had turned her on her heel and sent her packing. The skeletons in her closet were her problem. Not mine.
Well, until now.
Learning Mom had a twin should have jogged my memory that fraternal twins run in families.
Heloise’s smugness forced out one burning question. “How did she beat the wards?”
Woolly would have never allowed Eloise in if she had treacherous thoughts in her head.
“Vain, aren’t you?” She clicked her tongue. “With Maud as a mother figure, I expected as much.”
Maud’s blood, and my sweat and tears, had seeded the foundation for those wards, so yes, I was proud of them. I had constructed them to protect me, to keep Woolly safe, and it was a blow to my ego to learn I had failed us both. Again.
“Ellie has no idea I’m here,” she said when I didn’t rise to her bait. “That’s how she beat your wards. Ignorance. Or innocence. Depending on how charitable you’re feeling. That house read no ill intent from her, so it allowed her entrance.”
“She left that first night, didn’t she?” I thought back on it. “You were the one waiting for me at Mallow. You had done your research and knew where to find me.” I hissed out a curse. “The grape. Eloise is the one who’s engaged. That’s why you weren’t wearing the ring.”
Heels or flats could have explained away the difference in their heights, but the rest was all on me.
“An oversight, I admit.” Her lips flattened. “I had to gamble you wouldn’t notice. Or, if you did, that you wouldn’t feel it was your place to ask.”
Society training did have that effect on people. Polite to a fault up until the moment they buried a hatchet in your back. “What’s your angle?”
“I was Eloise’s first stop after she overheard the conversation between Grandmother and Madame Lecomte. I encouraged her to track you down, to make contact. An infamous relative fostered by one of the most famous necromancers of all time. How could she resist?” Her smile was wrong on Eloise’s gentler face. “I wanted an in with you, a reason why you might accept an invitation if I asked you out for coffee. I could have cold-called you, but you struck me as a cautious person, and I was proven right by the wards on your home. That’s why separating you from Woolworth House was paramount.”
“You’re the one who attacked the wards?”
A shrug rolled through her shoulders. “I jabbed them a little to see what makes them tick.”
All of a sudden, the random images Woolly had shown me made more sense. A fallen branch, from my family tree. A starburst, like the giant ring on Eloise’s finger. Two peas, these had shared the same pod.
“You followed us to Atlanta.” That explained why the issues stopped after we left.
“I thought your disappearance might be more open to interpretation if you got lost in the city,” she admitted, “but I underestimated how badly your grandfather wants you returned to the fold.”
The Master was…my grandfather?
A scream of denial welled in my throat, but I swallowed it down.
No time to dwell on what this meant. I could melt down in the safety of my bedroom later.
Replaying how everything that could go wrong on the trip had, I gritted my teeth, fury igniting in my blood. “The accident?”
Cruz had been adamant about a woman being responsible, but Ernestine had been the instigator between the two vampires, and I assumed that meant she had been the driver. I assumed wrong.
“I admit, it was rather impulsive of me, but the vampires were too close for comfort.” A growl entered her voice. “They still beat me to you. Though I can hardly complain given the outcome. The potentate of Atlanta was prepared to raze his own city to protect you. I find that quite interesting.”
The mention of Linus had me tasting bile. I had to buy us more time, but his was running out, and the odds of a rescue were looking slimmer by the minute. “You orchestrated the infiltration at the Faraday.”
Finally, the escalation in violence made sense. Even impatient, the Master wanted me unharmed. Clearly, the Marchands weren’t as particular about the shape I arrived in.
“It was easy with inside help.” Her smile was pure delight. “Meiko sends her regards, by the way.”
That backstabbing little beast. “He will never forgive her for this.”
“I know that, and you know that, but…” Heloise twitched her shoulders. “Meiko thinks in straight lines. Cat logic, if you will. Linus is her person, and she refuses to share him. Much like a cat knocking a glass off the counter because it can, she determined you were an obstacle to her happiness and removed you.”
Cat logic had failed her. The Faraday operated by its own rules, and she had broken the golden one.
“You executed your trap well,” I admitted. Isolating the weakest link, she used Meiko’s petty jealousy and vanity to achieve her own ends. “I can admire that, but you hurt one of my friends in the process. That I won’t forgive.”
“I don’t need your forgiveness,” she scoffed. “You will return home with me and take your place among the Marchands. Your mother was disowned. You are simply a recording error in need of correction.”
The scope of Dame Marchand’s foresight in forming this loophole made me warier than ever of that side of my family. Before they had been a nebulous nonentity. Now… They had declared themselves my enemies.
“Grandmother is strict,” she said, digging the metal into my spine, “but she won’t punish you as long as you cooperate.”
A shiver coasted down my arms as a new possibility surfaced, one that filled in a few of the cracks spiderwebbing over my heart.
Neck aching from cranking my head around, I looked to Linus for a heartbeat, let myself watch the rise and fall of his chest. “How did you nullify my wards?”
“An artifact from the family vault made by the last goddess-touched necromancer from our bloodline, more than seven hundred years ago.”