“He won’t be expecting us, but I’ll explain.” Bastian flicked his hand in obvious dismissal, and the guard stepped aside.
The three of them walked silently down the hallway beyond, still dark—no one had relit the candles after Bastian pinched them out. It made him a vague shape in the shadows, all dark hair and bare skin and bloody knuckles. He pushed open the door to the tunnel and waved Lore through with a bow.
Behind her, Gabriel snorted.
The Sacred Guard stationed at the end of the short tunnel said nothing as he watched them approach, but his grip on his bayonet eased when he saw the Sun Prince. Bastian didn’t wait for him to speak. “We have business here,” he said shortly.
The Sacred Guard nodded, though his eyes lingered curiously on Lore. He undoubtedly recognized her from earlier.
Fantastic.
But her mind didn’t have much room for worrying over the Arceneaux brothers and what they’d think about her going to the vaults with Bastian, or what they’d think about Horse’s reanimation when they inevitably heard. Lore could come up with something, lie enough to explain it away in a manner that would satisfy. Right now, she was too busy fighting down nausea at the prospect of seeing the child’s body again. At the possibility that he’d come back to some awful semblance of half-life, too.
“Lore?” Gabriel, soft and worried.
She shook her head, straightened. “I’m fine.” She set off toward the vault August had taken her to, trying her best to keep the tremble from her fingers. Above them, stars wheeled through the glass dome of the ceiling, the indigo sky streaked with fingers of lavender.
The opening in the side of the stone tower yawned like a toothless mouth. Bastian crossed his arms, cocked his head. “This the one?”
Lore nodded. She was pathetically thankful when Bastian entered first, ducking into the circular opening and disappearing into the dark beyond.
With one more look at her and a heavy sigh, Gabe ducked into the vault. Lore tipped up her head to the night sky through the glass, took a deep breath. Then she followed.
Her eyes adjusted slowly. Bastian stood between the stone Apollius’s outstretched hands, the cavity of the god’s chest positioned right behind him, like he was its missing heart. Gabe stood across from him, pressed into the opposite corner.
The child’s body on the slab was still. Relief made Lore weak-kneed. What happened with Horse must have been a mistake, maybe she hadn’t severed their connection fully—
But then, as if scenting her on the air, the body sat up.
The movement was unnatural. The corpse’s arms swung loosely as it bent at the waist, as if a string were attached to the head, pulling him up. The eyes opened slowly, black pits in the pale face, as the corpse slowly turned toward Lore. Like he’d been waiting for her to arrive, to give orders.
The weakness in her knees wasn’t relief anymore.
“Shit,” Bastian breathed. “Shit on the Citadel Wall.”
Gabe said nothing, but the very air behind her felt tense and cold, as if shock seeped out of him to infect the atmosphere.
It took her a moment to remember what she was here to do when faced with those black eyes. She needed to ask the corpse what had happened. She needed to ask it to tell the truth.
“What killed you?” she breathed.
The small mouth unhinged, a circle of black. It spoke without moving. “The night,” the child said, in a voice like a rockslide. “The night killed me.”
The four of them—Lore, Gabe, Bastian, the corpse—stayed still and silent. Then Bastian gestured to the slab. “See, Gabe? Told you it wasn’t me.”
Gabe shifted on his feet and ignored him entirely. “The night doesn’t help us much.”
Lore’s brows drew together, her concentration completely focused on the child in front of her. The mouth opened again, wider this time.
She expected an echo of the same message. But this felt different. The lips still didn’t move, the dead vocal cords still didn’t work. But there was a sense of effort this time. The corpse’s words before had seemed rote, a trained bird repeating what it’d been taught to say. This was… intelligent. Purposeful.
Like something else was using its mouth.
“Find the others,” the corpse said, the words rough and crawling from that dead throat, that dead and unmoving tongue. “They are not destroyed.”
She half expected the body to fall backward after the message was delivered, the purpose served. Instead, those black eyes still stared at her, mouth still opened, and Lore remembered why she was really here.
Whatever she’d done to reanimate this corpse, she had to undo it.
Half a heartbeat, then she reached out her hands, closed her eyes. All she could think to do was walk back through the steps she’d taken before, see if maybe she could reverse the flow of death. Send it in, rather than pull it out.
Around the slab, Gabe and Bastian didn’t move.
Instinct was all she had to follow here. Lore thinned that forest in her mind, loosening its protection. She took a breath, then held it until her vision began to white out, until everything faded to the muted gray of dead matter or the blazing white of something living. Gabe and Bastian were smudges of light, the body on the slab the color of charcoal—something between, something that should be dead, but with the death spooled out of it.
Mortem was easy to find—it lived in the rock, in the glass solarium above, slowly turning pink with incoming dawn. But it was hard for her to grasp, hard to get a handle on.
Bastian. Bastian was here.
Lore opened her eyes, fixed them on him. “Bastian. You have to go.”
Incredulity crossed his face first, then a blaze of rage. “Absolutely not. I thought we established that—”
“I can’t get a grip on Mortem while you’re here.” She was too tired to argue. Gods, how long had it been since she’d slept? “I don’t know why, but if I’m going to do this, I need you to leave the vault.”
To his credit, Gabe didn’t look smug. He didn’t look at Bastian at all, only at Lore, his brow furrowed. Channelers could see Mortem, but non-channelers couldn’t—they could only see the effects it left on a person. Gabe had seen her reach for Mortem, seen her fail to grasp it.
She watched him a moment, saw him hold his breath, his fingers go white and cold. Testing to see if he could grab hold of Mortem when she couldn’t. No dark threads attached to his fingers—he couldn’t grasp the magic of death when Bastian was around, either.
Lore couldn’t decide if that was comforting or alarming.
Bastian stared at her, not quite a glare, his arms crossed over his still-bare chest, his full mouth pressed into a white line. He nodded, just once, and stalked from the vault.
Gabe didn’t ask questions. Didn’t do anything but wait.