She said it as if a blob of mud had just started quoting Shakespeare. Eddie was pretty certain he should feel insulted.
Lyssa squeezed his arm as she passed him. “Maybe you’re just that bad at magic.”
Morgana choked.
Lyssa ignored her and stopped in front of Lethe. Eddie protected her back, waiting for someone, anyone, to finally react. No one did. Just that one act of defiance had broken something in them. He could see it in their eyes.
Everyone, that is, except Ursula. . who gave him an oddly knowing look that was surprisingly kind, and resigned.
“I apologize for what I’m about to do,” Lyssa said to Lethe, then scratched the woman’s hand. Blood welled, coating her claw.
Lyssa placed it in her mouth and licked.
Everyone in that room sucked in their breath, as though punched. It was the kind of sound Eddie heard in theatres, watching horror movies. An uncontrolled reaction of shock and revulsion.
Morgana seemed the most undone, hands pressing down hard on her bony chest, as if she were trying to hold herself together.
“Oh, my God,” whispered the old man. “God save us.”
“Hey,” Lyssa said in a tense voice, and suddenly Lethe fell forward, staggering into Eddie’s arms. He tried not to let his hands touch her, afraid they were still too hot.
“Can you walk?” he said, keenly aware of Lyssa closing her eyes and swaying, her lips stretched in a grimace.
Lethe gave her mother a venomous look. “Absolutely.”
She pushed away from Eddie and ran to Lannes. She hugged him hard, pressing her cheek against his chest — but he remained frozen in place, grimacing with frustration and pain.
“Sweetheart,” he whispered.
Lethe kissed his chest and swung around to face her mother. No words. The betrayal in her eyes was enough — as well as the hate.
Ursula sighed. “Let him go, Morgana. You lost. You lost more than you had to.”
The woman stared at her daughter and swallowed hard as her pale, bony hands trembled. “You can’t be sure the baby will survive. There has never been a human and gargoyle hybrid. And if you do carry it to term, what then? What if the birth. . kills you?”
Lannes sucked in his breath. Tears glittered in Lethe’s eyes.
“Let him go,” she whispered.
“Let him go,” Lyssa said, flexing her claws. “Or I’ll make you.”
Morgana flashed her a hard look, one filled with fear and hate — but Lannes sagged forward with a grunt, reaching for Lethe in that same heartbeat of freedom. The desperate relief on his face hit Eddie in the gut.
After today — after so much violence and pain — it was like a star of hope, shining for one lost moment.
He looked at Lyssa and found her watching them, too. He reached for her left hand. She flinched when he touched her — and then relaxed — giving him soft, grim eyes.
It was as if she was reaching for him with just her gaze — and he felt himself reaching back, with all the cold broken pieces of his heart.
“Alice,” whispered Morgana, but her daughter deliberately turned her back and grabbed her husband’s arm in a white-knuckled grip.
Eddie couldn’t see her face or hear more than the murmur of her voice, but Lannes dipped his head, silver hair falling past his broad shoulders — and his eyes were hard and full of love as he whispered, “Yes.”
He looked past her at Morgana and the rest of the witches.
“If you come after us,” he said quietly, “it will be war.”
Eddie felt a shiver course through the room.
“War,” murmured Morgana, glancing at Lyssa. “I believe you.”
Lyssa did not move a muscle, but the sense of menace that had been growing around her seemed to spark and intensify, until it was as though actual doom was descending: a hard dread that was physical and cold as ice. Eddie felt it, but the sensation slid off him like water.
It did not slide off the rest of the room, though. He saw pale faces, hollow eyes, and fear. Fear that was sharp, biting.
“You damn well better believe it,” whispered Lyssa. “You go after any gargoyle, or your daughter—or their child — and there will be a storm that comes down on your head that you won’t rise from, ever. Do you understand me?”
Only an idiot wouldn’t understand. Eddie didn’t know if it was Estefan’s murder that made her so angry now, or if she had always been this full of purpose and intensity. What he was certain of, though, was that he wanted to bow his head from the odd, dark pleasure that filled him when he listened to her. He squeezed her hand, and though she did not look away from Morgana, her fingers tightened around his. Fire between their palms.
The witch trembled and looked at her daughter. “Don’t do this. Don’t go with that monster.”
“I love him,” Lethe hissed.
“Not him,” she replied. “Her.”
Lyssa started laughing again, but it was a strangled sound that put even Eddie on edge. Not with fear, but concern. He remembered how she had tasted her own blood — and the aftermath. Like a drug user coming down from a high.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the consequences of tasting someone else’s blood, if there were any. He didn’t understand magic or witches, or how any of this was supposed to work. . just that his job was to make things right and safe. Somehow.
Almost every witch in that room seemed to shrink from Lyssa’s voice.
“I’m the monster?” she asked softly, eyes glowing with golden light. Morgana stepped back, burying her hands against her long skirts. A tremor raced through her.
Ursula stepped toward Lethe and Lannes and made a shooing motion. “Go on, now. Quick.”
Lethe glanced back at the old woman, tears spilling down her cheeks. Lannes barely looked at her. His focus was on Lyssa. Eddie didn’t like what was in his eyes. Too much bad news. Like he’d just discovered that you could catch a terminal disease from breathing the air.
“We’re gone.” Lannes wrapped his arms around his wife and gave Eddie a haunted look. “Eddie—”
But he didn’t finish.
Lannes staggered forward, grunting in pain, nearly taking Lethe to the ground as he went down on one knee.
He was big. His body had been blocking the entire doorway. But when he moved, Eddie saw that someone else had been standing behind him.
Betty. Pale, beautiful, and smiling. Seeing her was like being slapped in the face by a nightmare that Eddie had, until that moment, forgotten.
She held a curved obsidian blade in her hand, which was dripping blood from the shallow cut that she’d made across Lannes’s back.
“A gargoyle, a dragon, and a roomful of witches,” she murmured. “What a perfect day.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was the knife. Lyssa looked at it, and for one precious moment, lost herself to memory. It was night, and she could hear the drip, drip, drip of blood on snow, and the rasp of sobs, and her mother’s quiet breathing as she begged, with dignity, for her daughter’s life.
And then the memory died, she blinked, and said, “Kill her. Quick.”
Eddie gave her a startled look, but Lyssa didn’t hesitate. She couldn’t. If Betty got away and told the Cruor Venator what she’d found, there would be another bloodbath. Lannes and his wife would never be safe. Neither would the witches, though frankly, Lyssa was a hell of a lot less worried about them.
She lunged toward Betty, claws out. An entire room separated them. Betty had time to blink, and raise her knife—