“Yes,” Midas agreed dryly. “You’re horrible for preventing him from harming himself or others while you finish rescuing him.” He glanced toward the hall. “We’re still missing one.”
Yeah.
We were, weren’t we?
I was trying hard not to think how satisfying it would be to walk out on her without looking back.
I wondered how she liked the dark, the bugs, the fear of never knowing when the next strike would land. I wondered if she had used her time to reflect on the bad things she had done, if she had promised the goddess she would make amends to anyone she had wronged, or if she had spent her confinement cursing Hecate and asking why a paragon such as herself had been brought so low.
“Stay here with him.” I swallowed the bile welling up my throat. “I have to do this alone.”
Midas clenched his jaw. “All right.”
Exiting the room, I stood in the hall and counted the remaining doors then recounted them.
I was tired, I was sore, and Ambrose loomed over me, crackling with power.
That ought to frighten me, but I was more afraid of this, of facing my mother.
The shadow rested a hand on my shoulder, and his energy spilled into me, giving me a boost.
Puzzled and exhausted, I glanced over at him. “What was that for?”
Ambrose made a heart shape with his fingers that he thumped against his chest like it was beating.
“Um.” I had no idea what that meant. “Thanks?” He kept going, and I reached in my pocket. “Here.”
Unsure what else to do, I flung chocolate at him, which he swallowed without a hitch.
Linus and I would definitely have a talk about this peculiar behavior.
And…I was back to stalling.
Anything to stop myself from identifying the final door and opening it.
The door beside Boaz’s exam room opened with a twist of my wrist. It was clear, but that made the next doorknob that much harder to grip. It too expelled a stale breath of fetid air that built a knot in my throat because I couldn’t tell if I felt relieved that I hadn’t found her yet or guilty for hoping I didn’t find her at all.
Power tingled in my hand when I reached the last door in the hall, and Ambrose took his time with it. As much as I wanted to claim he was building the suspense so the reveal would be that much more brutal, I couldn’t fault him there. He was full as a tick, swollen with power, even after sharing with me, and he had little appetite left.
A breath of magic hit me in the face, soft as an exhale, and then the ward collapsed on itself.
This knob hurt when I gripped it, like cupping broken glass, and I half expected blood to spill through my fingers.
Ambrose set his hand over mine, a jolt of energy tingling through the contact, and I turned my wrist.
“I don’t know what you’re up to,” I told him, “but please don’t make me regret this.”
The room was dark, darker than the others. Or maybe my vision tunneled when I saw her sitting there. It hit me then, her age. Her fragility. The lines around her mouth cut deeper these days, and the hollows in her cheeks stood out in stark detail. Her cracked lips were thin, hard lines gone white from pressure.
On the floor, she sat with her spine rigid and her legs folded beneath her. I noticed tracks in her makeup where tears had fallen, but I wasn’t foolish enough to assign their cause to any emotion other than rage. Her clothing was neat, if soiled, and she regarded me through sharp eyes that cut me to the quick.
Without saying a word, she conveyed her utter disappointment that it had taken me this long to find her.
Not enough, not enough, not enough.
Of all the monsters I had battled, I feared this one the most.
At least she hadn’t come out swinging like Addie and Boaz.
“I’m here to get you out.” I lingered in the doorway. “Can you stand?”
“I can.” Mother rose to her feet with a hand braced on the floor. “How are the others?”
“They’re alive.” I wavered on whether I ought to offer her my arm. “Do you need help?”
“No, thank you.” Her chin rose higher. “I can manage.”
With her the most lucid of the four, I decided I would question her. “Who took you?”
“One of your friend Tisdale’s mongrel gwyllgi.” She limped around the room, palm flaking paint as she dragged it along the wall. “I didn’t catch her name.”
“How do you know she belongs to Tisdale?”
“I recognized her from the Faraday.”
The next question left me with a dry mouth. “Was she working alone?”
“There was another woman.” She paused to catch her breath. “She gave us the injections.”
“She drugged you.”
“Yes.”
That confirmed my suspicions. “Can you describe her for me?”
Dragging in a sharp hiss through her teeth, she did, and my heart plummeted at her description of Liz.
Dropping my chin until it almost bumped my chest, I muttered, “Frakking hell.”
This as good as confirmed that Ares, or whoever wore her, had enlisted Liz for her skills.
But was Liz working with her by choice or by force? Usually, it was a no-brainer. This time, I had doubts. The coven had kept my family alive, though they were as yet untested. Who was to say they hadn’t done the same with Liz? Maybe she had been acting as the unwitting warden of this place all this time.
Either way, the pack had suffered a critical breach, and I had worked alongside Midas long enough to have endangered my team through exposure as well.
Alone, Ares and Liz each held enough power to fracture the pack with intel they had accumulated while occupying sensitive positions. Both of them? If they were working together? The information they could supply the coven on the inner workings of the pack were catastrophic. Worse, the odds of them using their positions to place more of the coven’s agents within the pack was astronomically
