Greythorne (Bloodleaf 2)

The battle was over quickly, and Fredrick had risen from his chair, his arms outstretched in welcome. “Brother!” he boomed. “Thank the stars you’re all right!”

Kellan was stepping over bodies to get to him, eyes alight.

“Wait,” I said. Something was wrong. “Wait!”

And then I saw it carved into the skin of Fredrick’s forearm: the possession seal.

“It’s not him!” I screamed. “It’s not Fredrick!”

But it was too late. Fredrick had knocked Kellan’s sword away and had his right hand locked in an iron grip. Kellan gave a guttural cry as the bones in his hands began to snap. Fredrick clamped his other hand around Kellan’s throat and lifted him into the air, laughing. Kellan kicked and struggled, knocking one candelabra into the next, which fell into a tapestry behind the chair.

Not-Fredrick looked at me. “What are you going to do, Princess? You’ve already killed me once. Broke every single rule in the book to use my blood for your spell, and it didn’t even work. Maybe the second time will take.”

“Golightly,” I spat as Kellan continued to writhe in his grip. “You look . . . different. Put him down, and we’ll let you go on your way. No one will stop you or follow you.”

“And leave my new home?” he asked. “I just got it. This”—he looked meaningfully around the hall, apparently not noticing the flames that had begun to eat away at the tapestry—“is all mine now. And I—”

Rosetta had crept up behind him and knocked him off his feet as she shifted back into her human form and tackled him to the ground. He lost his grip on Kellan, who dropped to his knees, gasping for air, while Rosetta smashed Fredrick’s head into the floor and then drew her exorcism spell onto his back. Just as with the wolves in the woods, Fredrick’s body belched black smoke, twitched

a few final times, and then lay still.

Kellan groaned and attempted to gather his brother’s body into his arms, sobbing from the pain of his crippled right hand as he did. I tried to comfort him, but he shook me off. “He was my only family. He raised me. He took care of me. And then he tried to . . .” He squeezed his eyes shut, rocking back and forth.

“Kellan,” I said gently, “Fredrick would never have hurt you. That wasn’t him. This . . . shell . . . hasn’t been him for a while.”

Rosetta stood silently over him, obviously wanting to comfort him but lacking the instinct to know how.

Smoke was beginning to fill the room. “We have to go. Kellan, we can’t—”

He took a deep breath and said, “I’m coming.” Even here, in his darkest hour, Kellan clung to his cause. His duty. It was what gave him the strength to let go of Fredrick’s body and remove the Greythorne family sword from the dead man’s scabbard with his left hand, now that he could not use his right. He looked at me with the steely eyes of a soldier. “I told you I would see you to the end,” he said. “And I will.”

Kellan would guard me until his dying day. It was who he was. That devotion—that conviction—allowed him to leave his brother’s body in that burning room and not look back.

30

I finally figured it out,” I said quietly as Kellan guided us through the maze. “The bell is here. At Greythorne.”

Behind us, flames were beginning to appear in Greythorne’s windows. Above us, the black shadow on the moon had advanced. Ahead of us, Arceneaux was waiting with Zan.

“Aurelia . . .” Rosetta began.

I continued, “I believe it’s buried with Urso under the Stella, in the crypt. We’ll find it, and then we’ll ring it, and the bond will break, and Kellan won’t have to—”

“Aurelia . . . listen . . .” Rosetta said again.

“Mathuin didn’t take the bell,” I said. “At least, he didn’t mean to. Galantha pushed him through the Gray, and he ended up—”

“Aurelia!” Rosetta snapped.

“—?here.”

We had come to the Stella’s plaza and were standing beneath Urso’s statue.

Kellan and I both looked at Rosetta.

“I lied to you,” she said.

“What?”