Page 154 of The Scarlet Veil

He nods again, his eyes narrowing as he studies the air in front of us. “I’ve never scented it stronger.”

Warily, he stretches out a hand, and instead of passing through thin air as it should, it—it thunks against something. My mouth falls open. Hastily, I too fling out a hand, and my fingers collide with cool, smooth glass. Gasping, I drag them left and right to gauge the size, the breadth, of the invisible object before me. “It’s a coffin,” I breathe after several seconds, my voice tinged with disbelief. “Michal, it’s acoffin.”

He doesn’t answer, and when I pull my fingers away, they’re covered in blood.

As if I’ve uttered a magic word, the coffin materializes on a platform before me, and inside it, Pippa lies just as cold and still as ever. My heart twists, leaps, nearly cleaves in two as I gaze down at her. Even in death, her raven hair falls exactly as I remember it. Her rose lips are just as full. If not for the gruesome stitches down one side of her face, she might only be sleeping—an enchanted maiden waiting for her prince.

My bloody fingers press harder upon the glass. They further smear the strange symbol I never noticed in my dream: an eye with a line slashing through it in blood. Pure, unadulterated hatred pounds through my veins as I realize the Necromancer must’ve drawn it there. He must’ve known I’d come. “Can you help me with the lid?” I ask Michal in a low, fierce voice. The Necromancer will not have my sister, and he will not have me either. “Weneed to move her body before he comes back—”

A choking sound is his only answer, and I whirl, confused.

The tip of a silver blade protrudes from his chest.

It takes several seconds for the sight of it to penetrate—for my mind to understand the darkness seeping across his shirt, for my eyes to widen in horrified disbelief. Though I reach for him instinctively, he staggers backward, staring down at the knife as if he doesn’t understand it either. Blood spills from his mouth.

“Michal.”

I rush for him now, but someone seizes my nightgown from behind, wrenching it backward until I collide with someone’s chest. Though I try to whirl—stabbing wildly—Babette slams my hand against Filippa’s coffin, and the silver knife slips from my fingertips. It skids across the ground and knocks into a polished boot.

“I didn’t want to do that,” says a horribly familiar voice. “Ihopedyou would come alone.”

Wrenching his Balisarda from between Michal’s shoulders, wiping the blood on the blue of his pants, Frederic steps into the glow of my witchlight, and his smile is more genial than I’ve ever seen.

Upon his wrist, he bears the same smeared eye as the coffin, and this—this can’t be happening. Perhaps I’m dreaming again—or—or something else, something sinister—becauseFredericcannot be a blood witch. Because Frederic cannot behere, on this islet, with the hidden corpse of my sister.

“Hello, ma belle,” he says fondly. “This might come as a shock, but you have no idea how much I’ve wanted to meet you. Properly, this time”—lifting his Balisarda, he shakes his head with whatlooks likeregret—“without all the trickery. Would you believe I consider you something of a sister too?”

With a casual thrust of his hand, he pushes Michal into the water, and I watch, frozen, as the immortal, all-powerful vampire king reels backward, as he clutches his bloody chest with a desiccating hand.

Frederic must’ve grazed his heart.

No.

My entire body seizes at the possibility, and I can’t move, can’t breathe, can’t stop that deathly gray from creeping up his wrist. My mind refuses to believe it. Babette still holds me fast, however, and though I lunge toward him, her grip never falters.No. No no no no NO—

In the next second, Michal falls backward, slipping beneath the water without another sound.

Gone.

I press against Babette’s chest, staring at the spot where he used to be.

“Truth be told, I feel like I already know you. Pip was right. You have the exact same eyes.” Frederic’s voice—still affable, almostwarm—reaches me as if through a long tunnel, impossible to hear. Because the water into which Michal vanished has stopped rippling. Another wave crests upon the rock. It erases every trace of him until nothing remains at all. Not even me. “It killed me to look at them every day in Chasseur Tower.”

Michal is gone.

“I’m sorry, Célie,” Babette murmurs.

“As am I.” Sighing, Frederic clicks his tongue in sympathy before pulling a syringe from his pocket. Vaguely, I recognizeit from Chasseur Tower. The healers there once experimented with hemlock as a means of incapacitating witches, but the poison never differentiated between who used magic and who did not. I used the same injection on Morgane le Blanc. “But you never should’ve been with someone like that, Célie. Filippa wouldn’t have approved.”

My gaze snaps to his at her name. “Don’t talk about my sister,” I snarl.

“The same stubbornness too.” His gaze drifts over my face with a sense of deep longing. It lingers on my ivory skin, my emerald eyes, before he reaches out to capture a lock of my dark hair, testing it between his fingers. When I snap at his hand—unable to shove him away—the longing in his own eyes shifts, sharpens, into something altogether more harrowing. “Your eye will be the perfect match after I’ve brought her back.”

Sharp pain pricks in my shoulder, and the entire world goes dark.

Chapter Fifty-One

Frostine and Her Summer Prince

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