Page 81 of Secrets of Graves and Gold

The first to enter is an even beefier man so vacant-eyed I’m expecting Rheave’s gesture toward him before it happens. Then a tall figure strides in with a haughty, authoritarian air that has me tensing up before my eyes lock on his face.

Julita gasps, her presence flinching in the back of my skull. It can’t— Oh, gods help us. Ivy, that’s Borys.

My stance stiffens even more. Borys, her brother—the one who introduced my ghostly friend to scourge sorcery by making her the subject of his sadistic experiments as a child. The brother who vanished on his way to enter Sovereign College three years ago and who she’d hoped was dead.

As he considers us with his lips curling into a smirk, the resemblance jumps out at me. He has the same chestnut waves as the woman I first saw dying in an alley, just long enough to tuck behind his ears. The same porcelain complexion, though his features strike me as sharper than I think Julita’s were.

“So,” he says in an arch voice that’s like a harder, masculine echo of Julita’s typical sultry tone, “this is the company my little sister has been keeping lately, is it? It’s a shame Julita couldn’t be here herself.”

If only he knew.

Julita chokes back what sounds like a wail, her presence twitching and trembling, rattling my thoughts even more. Oh, no. Oh, fuck. We have to get out of here.

I don’t know how justified her terror is. She hasn’t seen her brother in three years. It sounded as if he hadn’t managed to harm her much once she came into her own gift three years before that and could force him to accept her refusals.

Is she simply in shock, or is he an even greater threat than I could anticipate?

My magic thrashes to be let out at him, but it’s even harder to concentrate through my ghostly passenger’s frantic babbling. I swallow hard and imagine a leafy vine wrapping densely around me to bolster my control.

Julita never told the men she allied with just how painfully Borys involved her in his dabbling, but they’ve heard enough. Anger flashes in Alek’s eyes as he gets up from the table. Casimir’s hands have clenched at his sides.

Stavros keeps his voice even, but a thread of menace winds through it. “What do you want?”

Borys draws the short sword at his hip and waggles it at the bunch of us. “I heard the little pipsqueak sent some people to nose around and interfere with our work. You sparked quite the riot this morning. You couldn’t really think you’d get away with it.”

Rheave, the least emotionally affected of us all, stares at him with a totally deadpan expression. “We don’t know anything about that.”

I might believe in his ignorance if I didn’t know better. But it appears Borys knows better too.

Julita’s brother lets out a dark chuckle. “Nice try. It really is too bad that Julita couldn’t see this. Me, in charge of not just Nikodi but half the province as well. I’ve got too many more important matters to address to bother playing games with you lot.”

He makes a brisk gesture toward his underlings. “Take them. Preferably alive, but dead will do too.”

Julita yelps, the men lunge, and I latch my mind on to the image of that poor battered oak tree on the abandoned farm as tightly as I can.

I have to stop them. I have to.

My magic bursts out of me in a blasting force. It hurls the four closest men including Borys to either side, bashing their heads into the walls.

As the thump and crack of the impact resonates through the air, I have the sense of branches ripping off the distant tree. Nausea pools in my gut.

The men slump where they crash to the ground, a couple of them bleeding through their hair and so still they might be dead. Borys lets out a groan.

My mind whirls with a starker flash of panic. He’s going to murder us all. He’s going to stab his sword into me right now?—

I sway with the wave of dizziness, my gaze catching on the sword in question. It’s spun across the room away from Borys’s hand.

Before I can pick apart my confusion, the other two Order members hurtle straight at me with their blades drawn.

As I start to grope for my focus and power, Rheave leaps into the way with a wordless snarl.

He slams his fist into the nearer man’s belly with a sizzle of energy. A smoking hole sears deep into my attacker’s guts.

As that man topples over with a bloody gurgle and shifts into a mass of clay, Stavros smacks his prosthetic against the final intruder’s head.

The man reels toward Rheave, who doesn’t so much as blink before wrenching the attacker’s head around.

With a crack of the man’s neck and a gristly hiss, the daimon tears the head right off the man’s neck and flings it across the room.

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