Laila forced herself to turn to the last girl. Her hair, dark and threaded with ice, fanned out behind her neck. Though her skin had long since paled and turned mottled from the cold, Laila could tell she was dark-skinned. Like her. Laila steeled herself as she reached out and heard the girl’s last moments:

“My family will curse you,” spat the girl. “You will die in your filth. You will be slaughtered like a pig! I will be a ghost and rip you to shreds—”

The patriarch of the Fallen House gagged her mouth.

“Such a sharp tongue for a pretty face,” he said, as if scolding her. “Now, my dear, if you please … hold still.”

He raised the knife to her face and began to cut.

“You were to be my last attempt,” he said, talking over the muffled sound of her screaming. “I thought the others would be instruments of the divine, but it would seem as though my greatest treasure wants a particular sort of blood … picky, picky.” He sighed. “I thought you might be the one to see it, to read it, but you’ve disappointed me.”

Laila winced, her eyes rolling back at the ghost of the girl’s pain.

“I know one of you is out there, and I will find you … and you will be my instrument.”

Laila pushed back from the last slab, a terrible numbing sensation creeping through her body. It happened when she read too much, as if there wasn’t enough left of her to be in the present. Her mouth felt dry, and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking. All those girls had been killed as a sacrifice that hadn’t even worked. They were dead for nothing.

Laila slid to the ground, her face in her hands, her back pressed to the ice slab. She didn’t feel the cold. She felt nothing but the aching thud of each heartbeat.

“I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I’m so sorry.”

Moments, or maybe hours later came the urgent footfall of someone outside the morgue. Her back was to the door, and she didn’t turn right away. It was probably an attendant come to tell her the physician, priest, or police officer would take it from here. She would look like a fool to them, standing and weeping, her hands shaking. But instead, she heard:

“Laila?”

Séverin. His voice sounded choked, out of breath.

“Laila!” he called out again, just as she grabbed the slab and hauled herself up to see Séverin standing in the doorway.

In his sable coat with his snow-damp hair, Séverin looked like something summoned by a curse. And when he stepped forward, the ice-light of the morgue rendered his eyes the color of deep bruises.

For a moment, they merely regarded each other.

Mistress she might be in name, but not in any practice.

He might walk with her to the bedroom suite they shared at night, but he had never stayed there since that first night, much less ever got into the bed with her. The past few mornings, she had woken up alone. To see him now—standing hardly five feet from her—jolted her. So much reading rippled her own perspective, and she felt, for an instant, dragged back into a past that belonged to another life. A past where she was happily baking a cake in the kitchens of L’Eden, her hands dusted with sugar and flour. A past where his eyes were once lit up by wonder and curiosity. A past where he once jokingly demanded to know why she called him Majnun.

“What will you give me to know the answer?” she asked. “I demand offerings.”

“How about a dress sewn of moonlight?” asked Séverin. “An apple of immortal youth … or perhaps glass slippers that would never cut your skin.”

“None of those things are real,” she’d said and laughed.

He stared at her when she laughed, his eyes never leaving her face. “For you, I’d make anything real.”

The memory faded, dragging her back to the cold present.

“You’re here,” Séverin finally managed. “I tried to … I kept…”

Séverin raised his hand, not looking at her. The diamond jewel caught the light. Laila looked to the table beside him, the one holding her Forged necklace that he used to summon her.

“Why did you think I’d be gone?”

“The others,” he said, raising his dusky eyes to hers. “They’ve gone missing.”

21

ENRIQUE

As Enrique leaned out of the ice grotto and into the strange sun-steeped city, he wished he had a better sense of self-preservation. Part of him wanted to make Zofia and Eva return to the grotto, but the other part wanted to walk farther. His foot dangled off the precipice, and the sunlight held him in thrall. Only then did he realize the ruined courtyard had stolen something dangerous from him: his curiosity.

In the sanctuary, nine female statues served as pillars, propping up a ceiling of wooden slats. Time had eroded their details, but Enrique still caught the suggestion of gathered silk and slender diadems around their foreheads. Painted walls behind the statues caught his eye. The scenes showed nine hooded women prostrating themselves before the nine Greek goddesses of divine inspiration, the muses. Enrique recognized them by the emblems hovering over their heads—Erato and her cithara, Thalia and her comic mask—a bit of gold leaf still clung to the image of a lyre in the hands of Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. The Forged paint allowed the images to shift, so that one moment, the objects the muses held were hale and shining. The next, they splintered apart in a cyclical pattern of made and unmade. When he looked at the women by the goddesses’s feet, his whole body recoiled. Each of the nine women in the painting held out their arms, but none of them had hands. And there, piled behind the muses’ feet: a collection of hands severed at the wrist. Like offerings.

Sacrifice.

Enrique flinched from the gruesome painting as bits of tales and research snapped together in his mind. His thoughts leapt to the dead girls in the ice grotto. Nine of them, all without hands. He suspected they’d served in some capacity as guardians, but now he saw the direct link to the Order’s lore of the Lost Muses, the ancient line of women tasked with protecting The Divine Lyrics. What if it had never been a myth? What if—

A rasping sound choked off his thoughts.

“You shall not take another.”

A wizened old man stepped into the light. He raised his hand in the air. The nine statues lifted their feet off their stone pedestals and brought them to the ground. Dust sifted through the air, and the ground trembled as nine blank faces turned toward them slowly.

“We’re leaving!” shouted Enrique. “Right now—”

Zofia and Eva stumbled backward. Enrique leaned farther out of the Tezcat portal, clutching it one-handed, his other hand held out to hoist them back inside when something whizzed past him.

He jerked back, but not before something sharp flew past his ear. His grip slipped on the rough stones of the portal wall. Just as he tried to grab hold, Eva pulled on his hand and the icy floor skidded out from underneath him. Blood rushed through his ears. At the last second, he flung out his arms, breaking his fall against the hot, sandy floor of the courtyard.

“The portal!” shouted Eva.

Zofia hauled him to his feet. Enrique whirled around, ready to clamber back inside the portal … but it was gone.

“It just … it just disappeared,” said Eva, blinking back tears. “We’re trapped.”