With a sigh like a soughing breeze, the sentry spirit evaporated at that moment. Jadren flicked a supremely frustrated glare at the place it had been. “Figures,” he muttered.
“Quick,” Selly said, pouncing on the opportunity to talk while they were unobserved, “tell me what’s really going on.”
He gazed at her, varied emotions shifting through his magic, though his handsome face remained stonily composed. Something in his demeanor altered, subtle, but there, and he opened his mouth, leaning forward. A thump on the side of the carriage startled her and stopped him. The carriage came to a halt. She nearly screamed her frustration.
“What’s really going on?” he echoed with raised brows and a smug smile. “What’s really going on,” he said, raising his voice in ruthless mimicry of her breathless question, “is that you are the newest guest of honor at House El-Adrel. I don’t want to sound like an overwrought villain in one of the novels, but look on and despair, for your fate awaits you here and it won’t be a pleasant one. The sooner you realize that and resign yourself, the better off you’ll be.”
Catching and holding her gaze, he seemed to be communicating something else, his depthless black eyes a well of meaning, but she didn’t know what. The door opened, a strange creature that looked like a man but didn’t seem to be actually alive standing there. Jadren leapt out casually and surveyed something out of sight, his shoulders sagging ever so slightly. Then he held out a demanding hand to her, snapping his fingers when she hesitated. “Don’t make me have the automaton drag you out, poppet. It’s so unseemly.”
She put her hand in his, taking scant comfort from the way his fingers curled warmly around hers. This was the same person who’d understood why she panicked over crawling into a box, who’d held her while she cried, even if he had been awkward about it later. She gave him a tremulous smile, hoping for something encouraging in return, but it had the opposite effect. He hardened, sharpened, face growing cold and mean as he tightened his grip and yanked her out of the carriage. “When I say move, you move, familiar.” If not for his grip on her, she would have fallen, but he showed no remorse, looking away from her. “Oh, hallo, Maman. How charming of you to take the time from your busy schedule to greet us personally.”
Selly, regaining her footing from her abrupt exit from the carriage, felt her jaw sag in astonishment as she tried to take in the house looming above and around her. If you could even call the edifice by a word as puny and unprepossessing as “house.” She’d thought House Sammael was huge and menacing. This place was leagues beyond that in size. It also had little in the way of symmetrical architecture. Wings, towers, arcades, and other unidentifiable protuberances piled one atop the other, some of them moving on great cogwheels. It was made of or covered in metal for the most part—shades of copper, bronze, silver, gold, and platinum almost blinding in the sunlight—and exuded a power that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
Impulsively, without thought, purely on animal instinct, she tried to run. Only Jadren’s grip vising on her hand stopped her. “Maman, may I present Lady Seliah Phel,” he droned courteously, as if she weren’t writhing like a captured animal in his grasp. He sounded almost bored, but some aspect of his tone reaching her through her panic. He drew her closer, shifting his grip to her wrist, still firm, fingers lightly on her pulse. His metallic, mechanical magic seemed to tap along her frantically firing nerves, grounding like a lightning rod. She stopped tugging at his hand, wheeling back to search his stranger’s face. Wizard-black eyes narrowing in that same implicit warning, he nodded toward the woman standing before them, watching Selly with cruel-edged amusement. Jadren’s mother. Lady El-Adrel.
She was tall, wearing elegant ivory pants and a slim gold top with a jacket that matched the pants draping nearly to her gold high heels. Lightning bolts threaded through the ivory silk in a gold so pale it was nearly white, subtly flashing as she moved. With the same long nose as Jadren, she looked down it with wizard-black eyes, her long, straight and glossy hair raven-dark, threaded with platinum that evoked streaks of lightning in a night sky. She exuded power, malevolence, and a cold indifference in equal measures. No wonder Jadren hated her.
“Lady?” Jadren’s mother echoed, raising a thin, platinum-threaded black brow. “Surely that’s an inappropriate term for such a feral creature. Is it even housebroken?”
Jadren laughed as if he found that punishing joke truly funny. Somehow, among all the times he’d called her feral, it hadn’t struck her as being so cruelly directed. “The familiar is filthy, true, and not at all sane. Allowed to go fallow for most of her life. That’s a long story there, but suffice to say that the ignorant bumpkins of Meresin had no idea what she was.”
Lady El-Adrel considered Jadren, looking not at all impressed. They stood in an inner courtyard, open to the sky, the high walls topped by gold wire with lethally sharp spines studding it. It coiled, snakelike, constantly rotating as if driven by some clockwork mechanism. She couldn’t have run far, Selly realized, enclosed as they were—and she couldn’t have made it over that wall without being lacerated to the point of death. Jadren had done her a favor by preventing her attempt at flight. Or he’d simply stopped her from running to save them the trouble of recapturing her.
She wished she knew what to believe.
Behind Lady El-Adrel, blindingly smooth platinum doors stood closed, with no knockers or handles in evidence. Two of the non-human guards flanked the doors, the eye-holes in their metal faces empty as they stood unmoving as metal sculptures or a propped-up empty suit of armor. The lady herself seemed to pose with languid and predatory grace between them, like a lion in human form, guarding the gates to her domicile. She’d yet to offer Jadren any gesture of affection—or even to welcome him inside, as if waiting to be persuaded that her son was worthy of being granted entry. “I believe my instructions to you were to bring me Veronica Elal, not some…” She trailed off, looking Selly up and down, lip-curling. “Not some insane Phel by-blow.”
“Maman,” Jadren said in an affectionately chiding tone, “Veronica Elal is duly bonded to Lord Phel. I witnessed it myself.”
She transferred her raking gaze to him. “I heard he was dead.”
Jadren snorted. “From Igino? Yeah, no. We just came from there, obviously.” He gestured to the Sammael carriage. “Young-and-dumb Sergio made his bid to capture the Elal familiar, too. Phel rescued her and now both Sergio and Sabrina Sammael are missing, presumed dead. At least by me, knowing what I know of Phel.”
“Mmm.” Lady El-Adrel made a moue along with her fake sound of sympathy. “I should send Igino a note of condolence.”
“He didn’t seem all that broken up,” Jadren confided.
“He does have many potential heirs, much as I do, so I’m sure this development only simplifies matters for him.” She smiled with a lethal baring of teeth. “A form of natural selection that eliminates heirs too stupid to survive.”
“Funny, that’s what he said.”
Selly, feeling indeed like an incidental side-note to the conversation between wizards, flinched internally at the cold assessment. It seemed targeted at Jadren, though he showed no sign of being bothered.
“Suffice to say, darling Maman,” Jadren continued, “Lady Veronica Phel is beyond anyone’s reach now. What I’ve brought you is just as good, if not better. Valuable. Igino wanted her, but I convinced him of your prior claim.”
“Did you.” Lady El-Adrel looked more excruciatingly bored than ever, though her black eyes gleamed with some inscrutable emotion as she transferred her piercing gaze to Selly. “I remain unimpressed.”
“Give her a feel. She’s potent. Better, she’s unbonded and untutored. A blank slate,” Jadren added coaxingly. “You know how you love that.”
She flicked him a glance. “Impertinent child. Don’t presume to know what I like.” But she glided forward, reminding Selly of a marsh snake with its venomous and stealthy attacks. She only realized she’d tried to run again when Jadren’s grip tightened on her further, something that didn’t seem possible, that hand already numb from having the circulation cut off. Selly wasn’t short by any measure, but Lady El-Adrel seemed to loom over her as she cupped Selly’s face in her hands.
The woman’s magic arrowed straight into Selly, swift and piercing like an iron nail driven through her forehead, painful and horribly invasive. This wasn’t a gentle draw like the other wizards who’d tapped her magic. This hurt. And, though she fought the draining tide, she was helpless to resist, less able to flee with this wizard’s magic locked onto hers than she could from Jadren’s grip. That Jadren held her prisoner for this violation, that he’d encouraged his mother to do this, that he stood there watching impassively, no expression on that cold face she’d once thought handsome, finally convinced her of what she hadn’t wanted to believe: Jadren was her enemy. And he’d betrayed her most foully.
“Mmm.” Lady El-Adrel finally released her on that lilting purr, flicking her index finger over the corners of her mouth, as if to catch the last drops of something tasty. “Deliciously fresh, indeed.” This time, when she glanced over at her son, her expression had warmed considerably. “Perhaps I underestimated you. This is Phel magic?”
“Water and moonlight,” Jadren confirmed.
“Unexpectedly potent,” his mother mused. “It never seemed likely to me that anyone could do anything with those nebulous magics.”
