Page 35 of This Dark Descent
Then he was gone.
Ari stared at the decimated sculpture. At the smears of gray like blood and the dismembered body that had once been whole. She stared and saw something else entirely.
Though her parents had tried to hide it from her, she’d snuck out night after night to explore the spellbook. To run her fingers over its humming surface and feel the rough cut of its pages. That was how she’d discovered the spell, translated in her Saba’s careful hand.
DIRT FROM HOLY LAND.
WATER NEVER BEFORE POURED INTO A VESSEL.
ATRUTHSTONE TO BIND THE MAGIC.
THE BINDING, CLEARLY SPOKEN.
He’d had all the ingredients, perhaps intending to try the spell for himself, the clay already made, the truthstone glinting in the moonlight upon his desk. So she’d shaped the rough approximation of a creature, pressed the stone into its head, and said the spell.
Her Saba had walked in when the last wisps of white light had left her lips.
He’d startled the golem.Hergolem, half-mad with weak spellwork. It’d attacked, tearing into him with teeth and claws. She’d screamed at it to stop, but it hadn’t listened. Then Rivkah was there, ripping the beast from their Saba’s flesh.
Ari had seized a hammer, driving it into the creature’s skull again and again until it fell still. Its body slowly melted from blood and bone and fur to the soft clay from which it’d been born. But it was too late to stop her Saba from bleeding out, too late to prevent her sister’s fearful gaze.
Ari stared at the decimated horse, at her hopes of earning her license, at the truth of what she was exposed, and watched as the horse crumpled.
CHAPTER 13
ARIELLE
ARI KNELT INa sea of clay.
Reid hovered beside her like a mourner standing vigil. It would take days to reconstruct the horse and finish the detail work, time that they didn’t have. The race was in two days, and Mikira expected the horse in the morning.
A shadow fell across them from the doorway.
“What happened?” Damien had a gun drawn, his back pressed into the doorframe so he could see both rooms simultaneously.
Reid clutched Widget to his chest. “Loic.”
A preternatural stillness overcame Damien at the sound of his brother’s name. His hand tightened on the revolver. Reid’s booted toe nudged his, and something passed between them in silence, until at last, Damien’s finger slid away from the trigger, and he holstered the gun. He approached her, faltering for only a moment when he saw the clay fingerprints staining her face, and reached out to gently take her hand.
Ari watched him help her to her feet as if from a separate place inside herself. The images of her Saba’s death were still fresh in her mind, alongside the knowledge that someone else had witnessed her creating a golem, someone who clearly wasn’t on good terms with Damien.
“The horse…” she whispered.
Damien pulled a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and dipped it in oneof the clean buckets of water Ari had been using for the clay. “My brother is a fool,” he assured her, lifting the cloth to her face. As he carefully carved away the clay, his fingertips brushed her cheek, and she felt his hand tremble. It was only for an instant, but she felt it all the same—the barely contained rage.
An unfamiliar feeling stirred deep inside her, warming her from her core. She could practically feel Reid staring at them.
“He’s so detached from his heritage he wouldn’t know a golem from a statue.” Damien cleaned away the last of the clay and let his hand drop. She resisted the urge to lift it back to her face. “He probably just thinks he destroyed a commissioned piece of work, but I’ll have him followed nonetheless to make sure.”
It wasn’t a surety, but it was enough to release the knot in her chest. She forced herself to face the dismembered beast. “The race is two days from now. What are we going to do?”
Damien surveyed the golem’s remains. “Can you rebuild it in time?”
“Perhaps, but sloppily. And I intended to do the enchantments in batches, and then bring the horse to life the following day. Now…”
“You’ll have to do them all at once.”
She nodded. Damien was familiar enough with enchanting to understand how dangerous an endeavor it would be. Five enchantments, two of them ethereal, and a golem spell? Even the most powerful of enchanters couldn’t manage all that at once without pushing their bodies to the limits of survival.
