Lahat ng Kabanata ng The crown system: four kings bound to me: Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 32

The first clue was the smell, Lucian noticed it almost as soon as the chaos in the courtyard started to thin out, once the last of the hellhounds had either been cut down or driven back through the breach. Underneath the smoke and the burnt mana, there was something else clinging to the scorched patch of dirt where Auriel had last been standing. Something faintly sweet, almost floral, completely out of place against the sulfur stink of everything else. He knelt beside the mark for a long moment, close enough that some of the healers glanced over at him with concern, and forced himself to actually think instead of just reacting. He'd smelled that exact scent once before, years ago, in a lecture hall during a unit on tracking magic he'd barely paid attention to at the time. A binding agent used to stabilize short range portals. Rare. Expensive. Not something a wild creature carried on it naturally. Somebody had built that barghest a door, and set it loose specifically to walk through