7. Max
Max
The Glass Tower was exactly that. Walls, floors, stairs, every surface poured from the same armored glass, so clear the whole thing looked less built than frozen out of the night air.
Beautiful. And a cage.
Caspian and Nikolai stared at empty sky, jaws set, and nodded at me anyway. They couldn’t see the tower. They trusted that I could, and that it stood right behind the guards’ corpses.
I looked between them. Ready?
Always, sweetheart, Caspian mouthed.
We got you, Eirath. Nikolai didn’t need to mouth anything. It was all there in his crimson eyes.
Good mate material, my demon passenger purred. Always so responsive. So protective.
I let my Coldiron armguard flow into a dagger and opened a line across my palm. The metal hummed as it drank in the pain.
Then I pressed my bleeding hand to the glass door.
The ward melted away like frost under heat. My blood was on Xander’s contract, mixed with his own. It tasted me and recognized its master’s bargain, and his magic held the door open for his enemy.
The glamour fell away, and the tower snapped into existence for the princes.
Nikolai took point. Caspian guarded our back. I went in the middle, and my sister was somewhere above our heads.
The first floor opened around us like the lobby of a five-star hotel out of the old world. Low tables, deep chairs in cream leather, orchids in crystal urns, a coffee counter at the back with the cups racked in neat rows.
“Welcome home, Princess Morningstar.”
The voice came from everywhere at once, woven out of magic, and all three of us jumped.
“What the fuck?” Caspian had death cards twirling in his hands before the echo died.
Nikolai moved like a struck match, putting himself between me and the room, battleax already out from under his cloak.
So much for stealth. The tower knew me.
Stormglass light bloomed through the lobby. No one had come for us. Not yet.
“Stairs.” Nikolai pointed.
We climbed.
The second floor was an entertainment lounge, deep sofas walled in by a library where even the books were collection pieces, leather and gold leaf sealed behind glass. Through the floor, the lobby lay under my boots. Looking up was worse. Twelve stories of light stacked into a bright, layered blur.
We took the third floor at a run and came out in the trophy room.
Columns climbed floor to ceiling among display cases of relics and jewelry worth more than a mining district, and inside three of them hung living beings.
None of them human.
The labels said so.
A fox-spirit, three tails drifting around ember-red fur, her head bowed under the low curve of the glass.
A rock-skinned creature with a gem beating in its chest, watching us with tears that shone like cut diamonds.
A naga coiled three times around herself, scales dark red and gleaming, hissing as we came.
Owned. Shelved. Waiting on the Collector’s pleasure.
Caspian’s growl came up out of his chest, and I knew exactly where he’d gone. Some fucker would have built a column for his wolf.
“Not here,” Nikolai said. “Move.”
Light flashed, and six mages in high-collared gold coats materialized across our path with wands already up. The tower’s traps had finally woken.
They froze for a second when they spotted us. They might not have known my face. Every kingdom on the continent knew the heirs’.
“The Covenant’s own.” The lead mage leveled his wand. “Kill the vampire and the wolf. Keep the girl.”
Six wands went off at once.
Caspian’s cards left his fingers with a snap of air and went through two of them together. The witch nearest the stairs dropped, and the mage beside her folded on top of her.
Nikolai was already inside their line, his ax coming down through one and carrying on into the next in a single unbroken stroke. Horror froze on their faces as they died. They hadn’t underestimated the heirs’ power. They’d underestimated their speed, a different mistake but no less deadly.
They’d thought they were dealing with thieves.
My dagger flowed and split into twin chakrams, smaller than the ones I used in open battle, and the Coldiron chattered as it left my hands.
We fly! Cut! Cut!
They sheared through the last two mages in crossing arcs and came home to my palms, humming, delighted with themselves.
That was easy.
Good job! Easy job!
I’d braced for the whole building to come down around us with spells loose inside it. The tower rocked once and settled. Whatever Xander had built this cage out of, it was harder than anything we’d thrown at it.
Blood spread beneath the bodies, a red stain floating over two stories of nothing.
A few spells had gotten through to each of us. The armor under our casual clothes held. Our jackets came away pocked with smoking holes.
I went for the stairs. Nikolai got there first and shielded me with his body the whole way up.
The fourth floor was an ocean. Tanks of enchanted water hung in the glass like slabs of green light, a mermaid in one and a juvenile kraken in the next, but no six-year-old girl.
“Missy!” My voice went nowhere. Glass swallowed sound.
Up. The salt smell came with us.
The fifth floor was an aviary of the impossible. Firebirds were banked down to coals inside a warded cage. Two pink fairies flitted between blossoming trees under the dome.
And a third one. Blue, gossamer-winged, throwing herself against the glass. The wards lit and shocked her, and she dropped, then she came back and did it again. However long she’d been in here, she hadn’t stopped trying.
She hovered inside the glass in front of my face, eyes locked on mine.
“Just wait,” I told her. “We’ll come back for you.”
I didn’t know if she understood a word. She followed us to the wall and hit it again as we climbed.
The sixth floor was a garden. Carnivorous plants sat in planters. A tree hung with poison fruit. Vines lifting their blind heads to track us as we ran the aisle. One reached. Caspian took it off at the stem without breaking stride.
The seventh floor stopped Nikolai like a wall.
The old world’s pride lay under the glass.
A scorched spaceship. Satellite carcasses.
A flag whose colors had washed away to nothing.
My science nerd of a warrior prince stood in front of a burned hull that had once carried people off this planet, and for one second, he forgot there was a war on the stairs behind him.
Even the dream of the stars. Xander owned that too. A trophy like all the rest.
“Nikolai, this isn’t a fucking museum!” Caspian called.
Nikolai moved.
The eighth floor was crowns. Kings’ diadems, queens’ jewelry, whole kingdoms whose names had gone out of the world, and I ran through all of it without slowing down.
My breath caught on the ninth.
This floor held people.
Close to thirty supernaturals hung in the columns, and their massed magic pressed against my skin like pine needles. Powerful beings that had refused to bow when Xander came for them. So he’d shelved them instead.
Nikolai stopped dead in front of a lanky, long-haired swordsman floating with both hands at rest on a sheathed blade.
“Sir Ivo Belmonte. Fuck me.”
The swordsman’s eyes snapped open, one silver and one black.
“No, thank you, bloodsucker. You aren’t my type.”
Caspian laughed. “I like this guy. Being somebody’s trophy hasn’t taken the mouth out of him.”
“A legend who vanished two centuries ago,” Nikolai said, “and nobody ever guessed the address.”
Belmonte’s gaze cut between the three of us and stopped on me. “A giant she-wolf. That’s rare.”
Rare. The word went through me like cold water. If I’d ended up in Xander’s collection, my fate would have been a lot worse than this legend’s.
“Does every man have to bring up my size?” I muttered.
“He’s a dick,” Caspian agreed.
“If you aren’t the Saint’s minions, why the hell are you here?” The swordsman looked us over. “And how did you even find this place?”
“Have you seen a little girl?” Nikolai cut across him. “Six or seven years old. Did Xander bring her here?”
Belmonte’s mouth curled. “Free me, and I’ll tell you.”
I had no time for his bullshit.
“Little viper!” I was already moving down the row. “Missy! Little viper, it’s Max!”
Caspian paced me on the far side of the columns and shouted, “Missy! Answer us. Missy!”
The floor woke as I passed.
Not all at once. In a slow wave down the length of the hall, one pair of eyes opening after another, heads turning to track me. Brass plates were bolted beneath every column, and each one listed a talent, a rating, and a date of acquisition.
Not one of them listed a name.
A mage with a glasswright’s burn-scarred hands flattened his palm against the inside of his column as I came level with him. He looked thirty. His plate said he’d been shelved fifty years.
“Glass-singer,” he said through the wall. “I raised this tower for him. Every pane. Every stair. Then he sealed me inside my own work and bolted a plaque under my feet.”
I kept walking. He’d served the Collector once, and my sympathy was in short supply and already spent.
Twins next, palm to palm through the glass between their columns, frost blooming wherever their hands met. Their plate rated them separately and then together, and the together number was higher.
Then a gorgeous man with sea-glass eyes, mouthing at me through his wall with no sound coming out at all. His plate read SIREN, and somebody had scratched a warning underneath it about unsealing the column without stoppered ears.
I read his lips. Free us. Before the Collector returns.
“Missy!” I hammered the heel of my hand against a column. “Have any of you seen a little girl?”
The siren’s lips moved again. We stay under when we can. Years. Some of us decades. Centuries.
“I saw her.”
The voice came from behind me, low and smoky, and I wheeled.
A woman stood at the front of her column like she’d been standing there a long time, waiting for me. Forties, wide-brimmed pointed hat, earth-toned Puritan clothes three hundred years out of date.
A witch. Old bloodline, and powerful. He’d even kept her costume authentic.
“The elite guards carried a little girl up the stairs a few days ago.”
Which lined up with when Xander left for the Zodiac Covenant.
Hope and terror hit me in the same breath. “Are you sure?”
“She never came down.” The witch’s voice dropped. “Set me free, Heir.”
She was looking straight at me. Not at the two princes who’d come up to flank me.
“What did you call her?” Caspian demanded.
“The lost heir of House Scorpio and House Capricorn.” She smiled with crooked teeth. “Prophesied one.”
Caspian and Nikolai traded a look over my head, and there was no time in the world for what was in it.
“And the Oracle’s calling,” the witch said. “Your enemies are coming.”
A voice chimed inside my skull, threadbare and unmistakable.
Child. Child. Come up! Quickly. Quickly!
So. The Oracle.
I ran for the stairs.