LOGINEMBER’S POVA spark lights up in my chest. It is a sudden, inexplicable warmth that I cannot quite process.Rather stupidly, completely lost for words and overwhelmed by the weight of her title for me, I only sheepishly nod toward her.“T-Thank you, Marjorie. Don’t go anywhere. I will be right back.”And then I am gone.I am rushing up the stone stairs, immediately wincing at my own words. Really? Don’t go anywhere? Where the hell would she go? I made sure she was locked up myself!But there is no time to dwell on my own embarrassment. The second I burst through the door and come back to the main floor, I am hit with deafening panic from every corner.The room is a logistical nightmare.The bodies have already been moved, but in their place, medical units are rushing about in protective coveralls.Queenie is slumped in a chair in the hall. She stares blankly at the marble floor, a shock blanket pulled tightly around her shivering shoulders.Nathaniel is ten feet away, barking clipped
EMBER’S POVMarjorie gasps softly. Her eyes go wide, the shock registering for only a split second before her face twists into a fierce, defensive scowl.“Don’t patronise me,” Marjorie spits. “You don’t have to say that just to make me feel better, or to try and mock me.”“I am being entirely serious, Marjorie.” I step closer to the iron, forcing her to look at me. “I saw it with my own eyes. On the day I sparred with her, when she blocked off my wolf. I thought I had hit my head too hard. She aged right in front of me. She was still Hale, but… withered. Knox did not see it, and I thought I was crazy all this while. She bled from her eyes, too.”“And heaved with so much fatigue,” Marjorie whispers, everything clicking, lining up.“Yes! She seemed physically exhausted. And yet, after the deaths of the maids, she looks far more revived than she ever has.”“She drained them,” Marjorie breathes out, a fresh wave of horror washing over her face. “Goddess above. She was feeding on my poor g
EMBER’S POV“I’ve heard her talk through the wall,” Marjorie says, her voice stripped of all its trembling. “She chants the same ugly words over and over, and it is in no tongue I have ever heard. She recites it for hours from strange, ancient books she guards like gold.”The chill runs all the way up the back of my neck.“And I have seen what she does when she is done reading,” she goes on, lower and lower, and I don’t stop her. I couldn’t if I tried. “I have watched her slide out of the hidden servant passages long after midnight, creeping into those girls’ rooms to stand over them in the pitch black whilst they slept. And then she goes straight to Celeste’s rooms. Three, four in the morning, without a single candle lit.”Her voice thins, dropping to an octave that spikes goosebumps across my skin.“I’ve watched her through the gap in the door, dressed in Celeste’s own gowns, turning slow across the floor. Swaying. Like she was being held. And there was no one there, Ember. I could
EMBER’S POVMy mouth goes dry. A sickening weight drops in my stomach.A whirlwind of thoughts tears through my mind.Is Marjorie actually trying to say that Hale’s grandmother had something to do with the feral gene? The same madness that destroyed Knox’s family?But how could that possibly be? The feral gene was generational. It was a curse in their bloodline. Knox told me so himself.Marjorie’s words make absolutely no sense. What could Hale’s grandmother possibly gain from poisoning her own family?“A-And you had the same dream?”She nods, slow.“Weeks back. First time in my whole life.”My heart pounds now, a fresh dread spreading faster by the second.“And what exactly did you see, Marjorie?”“I saw multiple red moons, cast right over the Sovereign.”“M-Multiple? Was it seven?”She lifts her head. Her bloodshot eyes come to mine, and they don’t waver.“Sixty-three.”The air seizes in my lungs. Everything inside me goes dead still.For a second, my mind goes completely blank, gra
EMBER’S POVIda. So that was her name.Hale’s grandmother, whom Knox had told me all about.The woman with the sprawling library and the endless books. The woman who commanded Hale’s absolute, eternal adoration even long after she was gone.I could only lean closer just as Marjorie continued.“I was much younger when Ida lived here—well, lived is an exaggeration, but she frequented this house enough times to have her own room in it. At the time, I was being mentored under my mother’s supervision. And my mother, who feared nothing on this earth, warned me off that woman with a stern face. Keep clear of Lady Ida. Don’t take her sweets. Don’t ever be alone with her.” She shook her head slowly. “And that was the very thing that made everyone sure my mother had gone mad. Because Ida, despite all her strange ways and the lavish oddities she brought back from her travels, was kind. Truly, famously kind. A trader, forever off on some long road to the far places—eastern, southern, and even the
EMBER’S POVHer face pales. Her brows pull into a tight furrow as she drags the memory back to the surface.“I didn’t read the exact hour off a clock, if that’s the stick you’ve come to beat me with,” she says, her voice hard. “I read it off Hale.”I freeze.“I watched her linger around that wing when she had absolutely no business being there,” Marjorie says, her chest rising. “I watched her slip out of those girls’ rooms in the dead of night. And every single time she walked away, their fever spiked. Every time she hovered over their beds, they faded a little more. I can’t tell you exactly what she wanted, but she always had this sudden, strange fixation on them right before they fell ill. Inviting them to shop with her, showering them with treats, insisting they join her for her hobbies.”I stare at her, the breath completely knocked out of me.Hale has been fixated on me for quite a while now, too.“The first night I tried to get the girls out and got stopped by the guard,” Marjor







