Page 110 of The Mirror of Beasts

“Nothing,” he whispered. “Leave me alone.”

“Yer the one calling me,” the girl sniped back.

“I’m not,” he said. “You’re not real.”

He ran his hands back through his hair, ripping his fingers through painful knots. Like all of the others in Avalon, this girl had needed to die. His lord saw no other option.

And when his master had explained his plan, the seneschal had understood, finally, the bottomless ache in him. He saw how he fit into the great puzzle of it all. He had found someone who would never leave him, who saw what he was and didn’t cower from it. He had belonged to something. Someone.

But the blood … There had been so much of it in the courtyard … And he’d quickly discovered that there wasn’t a chamber beneath the tower deep enough to muffle the screaming.

Or had he imagined that, too? Somehow the things he knew were real no longer felt that way, and his nightmares walked in daylight. His lord’s thinking had made so much sense on the dark isle, but the girl standing before him made all those reasons unravel, and he could no longer find that first thread.

“What did ye do?” the girl asked again. Flea. The girl’s name had been Flea.

“Nothing,” he grated out. His hands had been clean. He hadn’t killed anyone himself. Not the Avalonians, not Wyrm’s guild, not even the new Children they’d gathered from all across the Western world.

Not until Librarian.

Young Lark … ?

He choked on his next breath, welcoming the shifting, cracking bones of his spine.

Yes, he thought, now. There was peace in the shift. The hound didn’t know the girl. Didn’t care that Flea had died.

“Nothing,” he said again. “Nothing.”

“What did ye do?”

The question was as inescapable as his own reflection. Her voice turned singsong, mocking.

“What did ye do?”

“Enough, Tamsin!” he snarled, finally looking up. He realized his mistake immediately, heart hammering in punishment.

The girl stared back, her expression offering nothing. Not forgiveness. Not anger. Not even pity. It was the gaze of someone a hundred years older, not that of a child who’d lived only a handful of years. Who knew nothing about choices, or what it meant to live a lie.

And she never will, a voice whispered in his mind. Because of you.

He shoved up to his feet, letting the world sway around him. He’d get rid of her, and he’d ensure she couldn’t come back. That her soul was well and truly sealed in his lord’s gemstone with all the others.

His bare feet padded down the hall, avoiding the piles of broken glass and the plaster moldings that had fallen from the ceiling. The relics in the house had been destroyed the same way the ones in the guild library had: melted down into molten ore, rendered into ash. Each display of destruction an oath, a vow.

The wall sconces flickered feebly as he reached the stairs, following the din of the hollering and revelry from the dining room below, just off the front door. A flash of blond hair appeared in a mirror as he passed it, the small ghost trailing behind him, keeping pace even as he quickened his steps.

“—the next one will be a real beauty, mark my words—”

“—might keep her around a little longer for the hell of it—”

“Hear, hear!”

The ghouls lounged around the massive dining table and the map of the world that had been spread out over it. Little red pins marked the souls they’d claimed, now in the hundreds.

“A bunch of snot-nosed knaves,” Flea noted.

He whirled around, striding toward the study. If his lord was not with the riders, he would be there, keeping his own counsel.

Sure enough, Lord Death’s voice reached the seneschal before he’d even set foot in the foyer. The time spent as a hound had sharpened his hearing, and he only had to draw a little closer to the oak door to hear the murmured conversation inside.

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