Bloodleaf (Bloodleaf #1)(59)

“Let me go!”

His hand tightened around my neck. “Where is the vial?”

“I don’t know what you’re—?” I couldn’t finish; he squeezed harder, cutting off my air.

“My relic,” he said. “The blood of the Founder. Where is it?”

I gagged and spluttered as stars began to dance underneath my eyelids. He relaxed his grip just long enough for me to say, coughing, “I don’t have it.”

“What have you done with it?”

“I’ve hidden it,” I lied, “and I’ve spelled it. If I die, it will be destroyed.” He let go of my throat.

“You think you can play this game, girl?”

“I’ve been playing a long, long time.” My hand had closed around the knife in my pocket.

“The quickest way to lose is to underestimate your opponent.”

“Exactly,” I said, and I slashed across his costume with my knife.

The fabric split open, revealing unblemished skin beneath. I went to strike again, but his hand came up to block me; the knife went straight through his palm and out the other side. I could feel the scrape of his bones against the blade as it went by, but when I pulled it back, it came out clean.

“There’s no blood,” I said, confounded. “You’re not bleeding.”

He sprang at me, grabbing my hair to yank me close, tearing the pins painfully away from my head. He laid his knife against my throat, rage in his bulging eyes. Flecks of spittle were gathering at the corners of his lips, which were curled back over his teeth in a savage contortion, mirroring the wolf mask. There was something about his face that was wrong, like a puzzle that had been taken apart and put back together with some of the pieces switched.

The desire to rend me limb from limb was stalking behind his eyes. Powerful. Primal. But I’d seen the silhouette of the man who’d killed me in Aren’s vision, and it wasn’t Toris. The attacker was too tall, too reedy to be him.

“If you kill me,” I rasped, “you will never get your relic back.”

With an angry growl, he shoved me to the ground.

I regained my breath in hard, barking gasps while struggling to my feet. He stalked away, clutching his bloodless wound as he went.

“Emilie?”

Zan was standing among the tall garden grasses, dressed in his typical linen shirt, long leather jacket, and breeches. “No costume for you, then?” I tried to sound unruffled, but my hoarse voice betrayed me.

“You didn’t stay inside,” he said accusingly. “I panicked when I couldn’t find you. You weren’t supposed to come out here alone.”

“You’re not my guard, Zan. You’re not my governess. I don’t need you to hover over me.”

“No? Because your own account of what is supposed to happen tonight says otherwise.”

“And if I’m supposed to accomplish your goals for tonight, I need you to step back.” I knew it was not Zan’s fault that I’d mistaken Toris for him and let myself be led so stupidly into danger, but I was angry at him anyway, because of how much I wanted it to be him. How confounding it was when it wasn’t. My throat still ached from Toris’s fingers, but my pride had taken the more grievous injury.

“I’m supposed to stand idly by while you let yourself get sacrificed?” Zan’s black eyebrows were drawn down into an angry V.

“Your plan, not mine.” I looked at the clock looming over the glass terrace doors. “It’s almost time.”

I was turning on my heel when Zan grabbed my arm. “I was wrong.”

“What?” I was startled; Zan didn’t seem capable of such an admission.

“You’re not bait. No one should be bait. I should never have suggested such a thing. I was wrong.”

I blinked up at him as he continued, “I hate using you. I hate seeing you in pain, knowing I’m the one who put you up to it. If it weren’t for the wall, if it weren’t for a lot of things—?”

Above us the clock began to chime.

“Midnight,” I gasped, pulling away. I raced toward the terraces, knowing that, with his heart, he could not follow. I made a sharp skidding turn and found myself in the exact location of my vision, directly under the clock tower. How appropriate, I thought darkly. What better location to execute a witch?

I saw him at that moment, twenty feet ahead: a man dressed in the costume of a third-century Renaltan cavalier, dyed black instead of blue. He was hunched over, back to me, alone in the moonlight.

No, not alone. He was crouched over a girl. A servant girl, from the look of her. One of the many who’d been manning the banquet tables, wearing those gleaming white aprons.

Only hers was not so white anymore. She was gagging and spluttering thick blood all over the front of it.

Red. Red. Red.

“Nihil nunc salvet te.” The man’s voice was low and liquid, like oil.

A flash of a knife.

The twelfth toll of the clock.

Streaks of blistering light above, and a scream.

My scream.

He plunged the knife into her chest.

I dove at him, brandishing my own tiny knife like a saber, inflicting a good-size slash on his forearm before he knocked my knife away. His face was a blank black mask, and I knew at once that he was costumed as the horseman of the Ebonwilde, a faceless executioner in Renaltan lore. I swiped at his expressionless mask with my fingers curled into claws, leaving red trails across his ear and neck. The mask wouldn’t budge. I snarled like a rabid dog until he struck a blow to my temple with the hilt of his knife: a glass knife, a mirror to mine. I saw swirling stars for a moment, but my mask took most of the blow, cracking across the right side.