She threw open her closet doors and started flinging clothes out. Four shoe boxes followed, then an armload of old stuffed animals.
“What are you doing?” Lyre asked. The irritation in his whisper made her look up right as he pulled a pink bra off his shoulder and tossed it onto her bed. Ash edged behind Lyre to get out of the path of flying clothes, his attention on the door.
Piper threw another handful of laundry out of her way and found the tiny panel where the floor joined the wall at the back of the closet. She pressed it. A loud click echoed through the closet and a section of wall popped inward. She shoved it open to reveal a narrow, dark tunnel.
“Flashlight,” she muttered, backing out of the closet. “Need a flashlight and then—”
Wood groaned as weight pressed against the bedroom door.
Ash backed into Lyre to get away. He scooped his dragonet off his shoulder and tossed her toward the closet. “Lead the way, Zwi. Piper, follow her.”
The dragonet landed lightly and its scales turned white. The long line of its mane stayed black but its body was now bright as snow. It darted into the closet. Piper slid in after the creature. The passageway was so narrow she had to turn sideways to fit. Zwi almost glowed in the dark. Piper followed, shuffling as fast as possible. Lyre swore when his clothes caught on something and tore. The soft click of the panel closing again told her Ash had made it in.
Wood splintered loudly, muffled through the walls. The choronzon was in her room.
She followed the beacon of Zwi’s scales until the dragonet vanished. Piper stopped dead, her foot finding the edge of a drop-off in the dark. Lyre was right behind her, his breathing quick.
She reached out, feeling blindly for the first rung. “Damn it,” she whispered. “The ladder is gone.” She hadn’t been in the passage in a few years because her father had taken out the ladder to keep her from sneaking around the Consulate at night. She wished she’d remembered that five minutes ago.
A huge bang made Lyre jump into her, almost knocking her in headfirst. The hideous sound of tearing wood echoed down the tunnel and a dim light filled the cramped space.
“It’s in the passageway,” Ash growled. “Just jump!”
She hesitated on the edge. Wood shrieked as it was torn from its nails, gunshot snaps as the studs broke. The choronzon was bulldozing its way into the narrow passage.
“Go!” Lyre didn’t wait for her response. He shoved her.
She plummeted, knees bent for the impact. Pain shot up her legs when she landed. She tried to roll to absorb the impact but slammed into a wall. A whoosh of air was her only warning and she pressed into the side of the chute as Lyre landed beside her. There was no room for a third person.
“Go!” Lyre yelled.
She squeezed into the last stretch of the passageway. A flash of dim white ahead—Zwi, waiting for them at the exit. The crashing and snapping from above was as deafening as a landslide.
Piper reached the panel. Panic gripped her as she felt around wildly for the release latch. Lyre crowded in behind her. Ash joined them, breathing heavily. Piper thought she smelled blood. Where was the latch? Her hands slid all around the edges, picking up slivers from the rough wood. Where was it?
The floor shook as something impossibly heavy hit it. The choronzon was on their level. Bile jumped into Piper’s throat as the horrible stench of carrion filled her head and her nose.
A rough hand grabbed her shoulder and flattened her into the wall. Ash slapped his other hand to the panel and all the hair on Piper’s body stood on end as electricity filled the air. With a flash and a boom, the door was blasted right out of the wall. Lyre somehow squeezed out ahead of her and into the front foyer. He spun and snatched Piper’s arm, hauling her out. They both turned back as Ash appeared in the opening. Half out of the opening, his eyes went wide.
His feet went out from under him as something grabbed him from behind. A blood-red tentacle as thick as an arm spun around his neck and he was yanked back into the dark passageway with a strangled shout.
“Ash!” Lyre roared. He lunged to his feet, then spun to shove Piper toward the hallway. “Get help,” he yelled. “Get your dad. Quick!” Without a backward glance, he dove in after Ash. There was a soundless concussion from inside that made dust sift from the ceiling. A low, bestial howl tore through the air.
Piper spun and charged down the hall. Ash might freak her out but she wouldn’t stand there while a choronzon tore him apart. She reached the meeting room and flung the door open. It was empty. She’d known it would be. The meeting had ended half an hour ago when the ambassadors left. That meant they’d gone to get the secret object. Throwing herself back out of the room, she ran down the hall, through the kitchen, and plowed into the back door. With shaking hands, she undid the bolt and burst out into the cool night air.
Across the dark yard, before trees swallowed the grass and the forest took over, a small tool shed stood alone beside a huge oak tree. Piper sprinted to the shed. The entrance to the Consulate’s top security vault was outside because the spells protecting it were too dangerous to be in the house. Only the Head Consul could open it and he visited it only once or twice a year. She threw the flimsy doors open and stopped dead.
The six-inch-thick metal door of the vault set into the concrete floor of the shed hung wide open, but that wasn’t why she stopped. If there were people inside, of course the door would be open.
What she hadn’t expected was the dead man sprawled across the floor, his slit throat gaping like a bloody, toothless grin.
After one terrified heartbeat, she noticed his black eyes. The man was a daemon—one of the ambassadors? Breathing too fast, she stepped over him and started down the stairs. Her hands trembled and she wished she’d grabbed a weapon. Barehanded, she wasn’t much use.
The stairs went far deeper than a single story and at the bottom was another steel door. It too was wide open and there was another bloody body beside it; the daemon slumped against the wall, staring blindly. Skirting around his legs, she walked into the main vault. Steel shelves lined the walls on both sides to create one wide corridor down the center. Metal boxes, each neatly labeled, sat in rows on the shelves. Close to the entrance, the shelves were untouched. At the opposite end of the vault, boxes were tumbled across the floor and the shelves were bent and twisted like a massive force had blasted them backward.
Dead ahead the last door waited, open and beckoning.
Piper darted through the obstacle course of deformed metal and scattered debris. She reached the threshold and grabbed the frame to stop. Her gaze flashed across the cement cube and what she saw didn’t immediately register.
Bodies. Blood. Dead people.
This was where the explosion had detonated. The walls were stained black. Burnt blood made fantastic patterns over every surface. She couldn’t tell how many people were in the room, only that all of them had been thrown with killing force into the unyielding cement walls, their bodies burned and broken.
Her father was one of them.
A choking sound scraped her throat as she fell to her knees beside the nearest body and turned it over. Blackened skin flaked at her touch. The face was burned away but the clothes were wrong. She staggered to the next. These mangled corpses were all that was left of the ambassadors. But where was her father?
She stumbled to the other side of the room. Heedlessly grabbing the legs of the top body on a pile of four, she dragged it out of the way. She couldn’t see properly. Tears flooded her eyes and she couldn’t breathe right.
“Father?” she choked. “Where are you?” She kicked an arm out of her way and shoved another burnt corpse into the wall. Under the last body in the pile, the edge of a familiar white shirt peeked out, splattered with blood.
“No,” Piper gasped. Grabbing the burnt thing on top—not even recognizable as a body—she heaved it away to reveal the last one. Her knees hit the floor. Shielded behind the other three, this one hadn’t been burned as badly. Ghostly whit
e, slack and lifeless, the face was turned away but she recognized the clothes, the build, and the shape of that so-familiar person.
“Uncle Calder?” she whispered. Of course her uncle had accompanied the Head Consul. Of course.
Hands unexpectedly gripped her upper arms, pulling her away. She couldn’t stop staring, couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Arms crushed her against a chest that smelled like spices and cherries.
“Shh,” Lyre crooned to her, his voice trembling. He rocked her, his arms too tight. “Don’t cry, Piper. Shh.”
She was barely aware of the sobs tearing out of her chest. She clung to him, eyes squeezed shut against the sight of her uncle’s burned face.
“Damn,” another voice whispered. Ash’s dark presence slid past her left side. “Is this . . . ? Damn, it’s Quinn.”
“N-no,” Piper gasped. “It’s Uncle C-Calder.” Lyre squeezed her even tighter. Her father and uncle were identical twins but Quinn had been wearing a suit with a dark shirt. Calder had been wearing a white dress shirt.
“It is?” Ash repeated, startled. “But he—wait. He’s alive.”
Piper jerked back so hard Lyre staggered. “What?” she shrieked. She tore away and spun to find Ash kneeling beside her uncle, his hands flashing over Calder’s bloody chest. She dropped down beside him and grabbed Calder’s limp hand. “Will he make it?”
Ash didn’t immediately answer, his mouth tense with concentration. “He’s right on the edge. Curse the Moirai. I’m not a healer.”
“You have to try!”
“I am. We need—”
Boots clomped in the doorway. She and Ash looked up at the same time.
“You need to step away from the man and cross your arms on your chests in an X,” ordered the uniformed man in the door. A large black rifle rested in his hands, identical to the guns held by the three men behind him. “Slowly now,” he added.
Lyre, his face white, crossed his arms as instructed, pressing his palms against his opposite shoulders in a position that made it impossible to quickly cast magic without hitting himself. Piper rose carefully to her feet and followed suit, her hands shaking. Ash copied her, his eyes glittering like obsidian.
“Help him, please,” she whispered to the man, jerking her chin at Calder. “He’s going to die.”
The man, his black uniform marked with the symbols of a prefect—the police force of the daemon community—gave Calder a brief glance. Without changing expression, he gestured to the men behind him.
“Arrest them.”
CHAPTER 3
PIPER slumped on the bottom stair in the front foyer and tried to pretend she was calm. She stared at the silver bands of metal around her wrists.
Lyre fidgeted beside her, standing with his back against the wall and his cuffed hands trapped behind him. Apparently, he was more dangerous than her, so his wrists were behind his back. His eyes darted around the empty space, returning every few seconds to Ash.
The draconian was leaning against the same wall as Lyre but was slouched in semi-consciousness. If the prefects thought Lyre was dangerous, then they thought Ash was a walking atomic bomb. Not only was he cuffed, but he’d also been collared with a magic-depressor and gagged. It was the former making him so drowsy he couldn’t focus. Shimmers kept rippling over him in random patterns as his dampened magic weakened the glamour that made him look human.
All daemons were a little—or a lot—paranormal in appearance, but most of them could use magic to disguise themselves. Completely changing their appearance took a huge amount of magic, but they could fool the eyes and the senses with touches of power. The more human-looking they were to start with, the less magic they needed in order to walk around in public. Lyre, for example, didn’t bother changing the color of his unnatural looking hair and eyes because it wasn’t worth the effort.
Ash, on the other hand, probably needed quite a bit of glamour to pass as human. It must take a lot of magic to keep his appearance as semi-human as it currently was, since he didn’t change his hair even though dark wine-red would be almost impossible to replicate with dye. He probably relied more on a don’t-see projection when he was around humans—a mental aura that made him blend into the background. Humans would simply fail to notice him as long as he didn’t do anything to draw their attention.
At the moment, Ash was barely managing to keep up his glamour. Piper squinted, trying to make out his real face through the sporadic shimmers. He was human-enough in shape that his face was about the same without glamour but she kind of thought he might have a tail. Daemons were aggressively secretive about their real appearances so she only had a general idea what he might look like underneath the magic. Volunteers to model for textbook illustrations were a little hard to find.
She couldn’t blame the prefects for taking precautions with Ash—he wasn’t the kind of daemon you wanted ticked off at you—but the prefects were treating all of them like criminals.
The front door swung open and the sergeant in charge of the prefect team walked in. He was a big man with bigger muscles and an expressionless face that was the result of a missing sense of humor. His flat stare slid over Piper and Lyre to stop on Ash.
“How’s my uncle?” she demanded, her voice too shrill. “Is he alive?”
The sergeant shot her an impatient look. “Yes, he’s alive. He was moved to a medical center.”
“Will he be okay?”
The man shrugged uncaringly, his gaze moving back to Ash. The door opened again and another prefect came in. He stopped beside the sergeant, looking scrawny and weak-chinned in comparison.
“Sir, the magic signature is definitely haemon, not daemon.” He jerked a thumb at Ash. “The explosion wasn’t him.”
Piper’s eyes narrowed to furious slits. “Excuse me, but we already told you the explosion went off while me, Ash, and Lyre were upstairs. Ash wasn’t anywhere near the vault.”
The sergeant ignored her, but the other one looked over with what might have been pity. “He could have set it up in advance,” he told her, “but we know for sure now he didn’t.”
“I’ve barely been five feet from him for two days,” Lyre said angrily. “None of us did a damn thing wrong. Why are you arresting us?”
“I’ve heard your version of events,” the sergeant said dismissively. “Until we have some cold hard facts, none of you are going anywhere.” He looked at the prefect. “Anything else?”
“The expert is sure the magic signature belongs to—” the man glanced at Piper. “To the one you suspected.”
The sergeant nodded slowly. Piper ground her teeth. “What are you arresting us for, then?” she snapped. “What are the charges?”
Taking a clipboard from the prefect and flipping idly through it, the sergeant didn’t bother to look at Piper. “We can’t charge you with the deaths of nine daemons or the attempted murder of a Consul since the magic isn’t yours, but I imagine ‘accessory to murder’ and ‘grand larceny’ will stick just fine. Maybe even ‘conspiracy to commit crimes against the peace,’” he added thoughtfully.
The blood drained from her face and she was glad she was already sitting. “What?”
“Piperel Griffiths,” the sergeant said, his voice going hard and flat as he finally looked at her, “would you like to tell me where the Sahar is?”
She froze in place, unable to breathe. How did he know about the secret object from the vault that her father was supposed to have given to the ambassadors?
“It would be in your best interests to come clean now,” he continued, stepping closer to loom over her. “I’m sure we could bring the charges down to something less . . . treasonous.” His expression softened slightly. “Did Quinn force you, Piperel?”
She stared, not understanding.
“Or was it these two?” the man asked, jerking his chin at Lyre and Ash. Lyre’s mouth hung open, his face a mask of horror. “You don’t have to protect them, Piperel. They can’t hurt you now.”
“What . . . what ar
e you talking about?” she whispered.
The sergeant’s expression hardened again in a flash. “One of two things happened here tonight, girl. One: Quinn betrayed his position and stole the Sahar with your help. Or two: You betrayed your father and stole the Sahar with the help of these two animals.”
“It’s stolen?” she repeated blankly. The special artifact was gone? The man’s words slowly sank in and Piper felt hot blood surge through her.
“My father did not steal it!” she yelled, leaping to her feet. “Why would he? Even if he wanted to, it’s been here for months. Why would he steal it in front of a bunch of people?”
“Then tell me this, girl,” the sergeant growled. “Where is your father now? Why wasn’t he in that room with everyone else? And why,” his voice slowed, “does the magic signature of that explosion belong to the Head Consul?”
Piper couldn’t breathe. Her knees gave out and she sat on the step again with a thump. “It’s not,” she whispered.
“It is,” the man said coldly. “The Sahar couldn’t be removed from its spot in the vault without the combined efforts of three skilled magicians. Perhaps that’s why he waited . . . although why he didn’t find some excuse to get his brother out of that vault first is beyond me.”
No. Impossible. Quinn wouldn’t have almost killed his brother. It wasn’t even conceivable.
“You’re wrong,” she choked. “You’re wrong.”
“Quinn created the blast. That is fact.” He leveled Piperel with a stare that held no mercy. “Now we must determine your role in this heinous crime. You say you heard the explosion from inside the house. Why didn’t you immediately investigate? You surely could have reached the vault before Quinn exited it.”