5. Max
Max
We cut through the western grounds. Even at that hour, part of the castle was awake, and every swing of the nightclub door spat out a blast of music.
Courtiers stumbled out. Fresh patrons slipped in. The air around it hung thick with booze, cigarettes, and the sweet chemical bite of something worse.
A house of sin in a kingdom of faith.
We passed it along the shadowed side of the path, heads down, hoodies up.
“The maids talk,” Josette murmured as we walked. “Half of them share a bed with guards, and guards with their boots off will tell you anything.” She kept her eyes on the hedges. “That’s all I’ve got, besides kitchen rumors and laundry gossip.”
“That’s how wars get won,” Nikolai said.
Xander had murdered Josette’s daughter. I knew exactly what she was carrying, and I wouldn’t tell her to put it down.
The west gardens were a maze. Twice we detoured, and twice we came out at the same moss-eaten fountain, as if the paths had traded places behind our backs.
The third time, I caught it.
None of us had decided to turn. Our feet had just preferred the other way.
“Stop.” I put a hand on Josette’s arm. “Nobody move.”
“Wards.” Josette’s breath caught.
“In the hedges. It doesn’t push you.” I turned a slow circle, tasting it. “It suggests. Then you think the idea was yours.”
Caspian looked back the way we’d come and swore under his breath.
“New plan,” I told the heirs, then turned to Josette. “Whichever way you least want to go, that’s our way. Whatever makes your skin crawl, we take it.”
“Why her?” Caspian asked.
“She’s got no magic. The wards will hit her before they touch any of us.” I watched Josette’s shoulders come up. “Her fear is our compass.”
Josette led us on. Thirty paces later she came up on the mouth of a black alley of cypress and turned away from it so fast she nearly walked into me.
“There,” I said. “You want no part of that one, do you?”
She swallowed and shook her head, and she didn’t look at the alley again.
“Good.”
I pushed into the dark. Caspian moved up on my flank, Nikolai closed in behind us, and the cypress shut over the path and blotted out the sky.
The deeper we went, the harder it shoved back.
The air turned hostile. Dread rolled over us in waves. Josette doubled over halfway down and retched into the hedge, and I put my hand on her back and held her there until she could straighten.
The rest of us just took it.
The misery meant we’d found it.
Then, at the far corner of the grounds, high above the hedges and rooftops, the night air shimmered. Like heat rising off summer stone, except there was no stone and no heat.
Glamour. It only showed deep at night, with nothing behind it but dark sky.
Through the ripple I made out the tip of a tower. A crown of dark glass panels faintly catching the light, tapering to a spire like an icicle hung upside down. The top floors only, floating on nothing.
His hoard glitters, my demon purred. We’ve found it.