XLIX
My feet stopped moving.
The violins didn’t falter so much as sour, the melody pulling thin and sharp until it scraped at the inside of my skull. Candlelight fractured across the ballroom walls. All at once, the glamour felt brittle.
Less like a dream.
More like something straining not to crack.
“I—” My throat closed around the words. “I didn’t know.”
Victor’s playful mask didn’t just crack.
It shattered.
He took a step back, hands raised in pure panic. “Oh. Shit. I—”
He never finished.
“Victor.”
The voice didn’t cut through the music.
It cleaved the ballroom in half.
Heaton was there. He hadn’t walked over; he had materialized from the dark like a cold front, expression carved from the unforgiving stone of the mountain itself.
He held out his hand to me.
“May I cut in?”
It wasn’t a question.
Victor gave a short, humorless bow. “Please. Before you freeze the room solid.”
Then he was gone, slipping into the phantom crowd with all the grace of a man abandoning a crime scene.
Heaton turned to face me, and his hands closed around my waist, a cold brand through my silk skirts as he drew me in. Not into a dance, but into a stillness at the center of the room. The bond pulsed between us, hungry and furious.
He looked down at me once.
That was all.
My pulse went ragged anyway.
“Your heart is racing,” he said quietly. “And it isn’t from the dance.”
The words landed near my temple, low enough that no one else would hear.
“What did he tell you?”
I swallowed.
The music moved us in slow circles.
My thoughts did not.
I looked past his shoulder toward the thinning crowd, toward Victor already pretending to be occupied elsewhere, toward Kitty’s blue dress turning once beneath the chandelier light.
Heaton stopped our waltz, his grip tightening until I stumbled against his chest. He leaned down, voice a low vibration against my ear.
“Tell me, Madeline. Did he give you the highlights, or did he go straight for the throat?”
I saw the slow-motion suicide Victor had described.
The exhaustion behind the malice.
I forced the words out.
“What happened to your brother, Heaton?”
His jaw hardened.
“Straight for the throat, then.”
Anger rose too fast for me to stop it. Fear was easier to hold when it had teeth.
“Or maybe,” I said, “you should have mentioned that little caveat to the girl you’re sharing a nervous system with.”
“That,” he said, voice dry and rattling enough to make my next breath fog white between us, “is a story for the dead, Madeline. And you are still—infuriatingly—very much alive.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because it’s mine.” The words came out sharp enough to cut. “And because Victor had no right—”
Overhead, the chandeliers flickered violently.
The temperature plummeted until the lace on my sleeves shimmered with frost.
The ballroom lurched.
Gold walls flashed to blackened brick. Polished floors rotted beneath our feet, swelling with old ash and water damage before smoothing over again. The glamour spasmed, unable to decide which century it belonged to.
Heaton moved instantly, pulling me behind him, his body a cold, solid shield.
All around us, the phantom dancers faltered. Their perfect cadence broke at the edges, limbs jerking out of rhythm before dissolving into thick ribbons of smoke. The violin dragged into silence on a thin, final note.
Every head in the room turned toward the far archway.
Victor went white beneath his grin.
“I thought you said he wasn’t coming,” he snapped, the words aimed somewhere between Vera and the darkness itself.
Vera, for once, had nothing clever ready. Her glass lowered an inch.
“He said he wasn’t!”
An icy wind knifed through the ballroom.
Black smoke pooled beneath the archway, heavy and roiling like a storm of cinders. Red embers cracked through the dark, drifting across the floor like burning snow.
Heaton didn’t look back, but I felt the violent surge of adrenaline through the bond.
So thick it tasted like copper.
The smoke compressed.
Then split.
And a man stepped out of the swirling ash.
For one second, all I could think was: Heaton.
Then every difference hit.
He was taller by an inch or two, broader through the shoulders; his build carrying the same dark architecture as Heaton’s but stripped of all softness.
Where Heaton looked carved, this man looked honed.
The jaw harsher. The cheekbones crueler.
His dark hair neater, his suit spotless—high-collared black wool buttoned with precision that felt less elegant than severe.
He looked like a photograph that had refused to age.
And refused to forgive.
A silver flask dangled from two fingers, the amber liquid inside catching the broken light with a faint, poisonous glow.
“Well,” he said.
His voice was smooth.
“You disappear for sixty years, and suddenly everyone remembers how to entertain.”
He lifted the flask and took a slow sip, sterling gray eyes never leaving Heaton’s face.
Then he smiled.
“Welcome home, little brother.”
“You weren’t invited, Cal,” Heaton bit out.
The words were a low, vibrating snarl, but I felt the tremor underneath them.
A primal fear he was trying to choke out with fury.
“And yet, here I am.”
Cal’s attention shifted, slipping past Heaton’s shoulder to find me. He tipped his head, studying me as if I were a bug pinned under glass.
“An October,” he said. “Bold choice.”
His attention slid back to Heaton, and something ugly passed between them.
He took one step in our direction.
“Callum,” Heaton warned.
His hand ignited, an uneven blue spark dancing across his knuckles.
“Not another step.”
Heaton’s other hand closed around mine for one brutal second.
Cal laughed—a soft, melodic sound that made the frost on my sleeves thicken into ice.
“What’s this? You’re going to burn me? Again?” His mouth curved. “We’ve already done that dance, little brother. I’m still wearing the soot.”
He flicked a finger, and a bead of his own fire bloomed across his palm—hotter, brighter, smelling of pure sulfur.
His eyes darkened.
“But if you want to play,” he whispered, “let’s fucking go.”
Heaton squeezed my hand one last time.
Then he let go.
And launched.
One second, Heaton was beside me.
The next, he was a streak of shadow and blue fire cutting across the ballroom so fast the glamour split in his wake.
He put his entire weight into a shoulder-check that caught Cal square in the chest. They hit a marble pillar with a sound like a car crash—not bone on stone, but a deafening shriek of static that spider-webbed cracks through the plaster.
Heaton followed with a hook to Cal’s jaw. Blue fire arced from his knuckles, and Cal’s form pixelated for one flashing second, dissolving into chaotic points of light before snapping back into place.
Heaton didn’t give him a breath. He drove a knee into Cal’s midsection, caught a fistful of his immaculate waistcoat, and tore a smoking rent through the fabric.
The chandeliers exploded into sparks.
Cal barely rocked back.
He turned his head slowly, tasting blood, or memory, or both.
Then he smiled.
“Still starving, then,” he said softly. “What’s the matter, little brother? Afraid you’ll break your new toy?”
He caught Heaton’s wrist on the next strike.
Twisted.
Pain flashed through the bond so violently it felt like a hot wire shoved under my skin. My hand spasmed. I gasped, stumbling half a step before the sensation vanished, leaving only the echo behind.
Cal looked from Heaton to me.
His grin widened.
“You tethered yourself to an Anchor,” he said, driving Heaton backward until his feet dug trenches through the parquet floor, “and you’re still living on scraps?”
Heaton hit the nearest pillar hard enough to shake the room. Gold plaster peeled back in strips, exposing scorched wood and blackened brick beneath the glamour.
“You sanctimonious idiot,” Cal hissed. “Foxfire? On an empty tank?”
Before Heaton could recover, Cal caught him by the throat and lifted him. His boots kicked an inch above the floor.
Then Cal slammed him down.
The impact sent a shock wave through the floorboards. Glass rained from the chandeliers in a storm of glittering teeth.
“Heaton!” I screamed, stepping forward.
A stray bolt of blue fire sizzled past my face, searing a black line through my sleeve.
“Back,” Ruby snapped.
She appeared at my side so fast it felt like she had materialized from the candle smoke. Her fingers locked around my arm and yanked me behind her just as another arc of ghost-fire tore across the room.
Ruby threw both hands out.
An iridescent shield flared in front of us, thin as blown glass and trembling under the next impact. Across the ballroom, Theo and Kitty had raised their own spectral fields, faces tight with concentration as they corralled the violent energy spilling over from the brothers.
“This was a terrible idea!” Victor yelled, ducking behind a marble column.
In the center of the room, Cal hauled Heaton upright by the neck and slammed him back into the wall.
“You think a little October light makes you better?” Callum hissed. Sulfur-bright heat rolled over his palm. “It just makes you a thief. Still stealing to pay for a soul you already sold.”
Every hit Heaton took came through me sideways—dull, displaced, but real enough to make my vision swim.
Not the full force.
Thank God, not the full force.
Just enough pain, enough nausea, enough sickening internal crunch to tell me exactly when Callum’s fist connected and exactly when Heaton’s form flickered.
Then the tether punched pain through my chest so hard my knees nearly gave.
Ruby caught me with one hand, her shield vibrating under the assault of stray sparks.
Cal paused.
His eyes tracked the way I doubled over.
And his smile turned cruel.
“Oh, that’s rich,” he said, looking at Heaton. “All that noble self-denial, and she’s the one paying for it.”
He shifted his grip, still pinning Heaton.
“If you were fully charged, she wouldn’t feel a thing. But you’ve tied her to an empty well, haven’t you?”