Page 46 of A Sanctuary from Shadow
“Rus raised her that way.” Uncle Neel’s voice cracked saying Daddy’s nickname. “I always warned him it was a bad idea.”
“This must end. The ruse isn’t protecting them anymore. We must tell them everything. We must take them back.”
Back where?
I heard a deep, mournful exhalation. “I promised Rus I’d let Amy finish college before we—”
“Are you mad? After tonight, we can’t keep her here. The bats have her blood, Neel. They’ll come back for her—they’ll find a way now that they knowwhere. Either them or something worse.”
Chills crept along my naked skin.What in hell could be worse?
“I thought you’d killed all the bats.”
“One got away. With the staff.”
“What?”
“Relax. It only flew off with part of it. Amy somehow managed to hack it in half.” There was definite pride in his voice. “They can’t use it while it’s broken.”
“Neither can we,” Uncle Neel grumbled.
“We have part of it. That should serve until we retrieve the other half.”
Uncle Neel harrumphed. “Colwort will surely take issue.”
“If he does, he can take it up with me. I’d be happy to shove his head up his ass.”
I would’ve laughed, but grief dulled any amusement.
“There’s another reason we must tell Amy the truth,” Briar continued, softer, so nobody overheard his next point. Either he’d forgotten my eavesdropping prowess, or he thought I was still asleep. “I didn’t kill all the bogeybats in Laurustinus’s room. Amy did.”
I pictured Uncle Neel staggering. “How?”
“Fire, Cornelian. She’s a fire sylph.”
A firewhat?
“That’s impossible,” Uncle Neel sputtered. “No fire sylphen have been born in millennia.”
“Except Amy. Didn’t the prophecy say the Aurora would possess rare, powerful gifts?”
“Enough with that, Briar. We don’t know Amy’s the Aurora!”
“But Ginny—”
“Ginny only predicted Amy would be special. She never went into specifics.”
I sat up at mention of my mother’s name, so rarely spoken. Why had Briar done the mentioning? By her nickname? Yes, he and Uncle Neel spoke as if Briar were ancient, but he was only 20 years old, a little boy when my mother died.
“Maybe because she didn’t want anyone knowing how powerful her daughter would be. With great power comes great reverence—but also great fear. And you know the Shadow Prince would move mountains to eradicate that threat. Or worse—to abduct her for his own use.”
Uncle Neel swore.
“Whether we like it or not, her gifts are awakening—on their own—without a summoning ceremony. I can already smell them in her blood. We need to get her back to Evereostre and find her a muse before she melts down like a nuclear reactor.”
Bewildered, I glanced down at my hands—slender and ordinary. The most disturbing thing about them was the blood outlining my broken nails, but the fire that consumed the bogeybats had come from somewhere.
Briar seemed convinced that it came from me, and if the human vaporizer thought so, who was I to argue?
