Her lungs hurt.

Clio huddled in the corner, her scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth as smoke displaced the air. She counted in her head, silently chanting each second as it passed.

Carrying Madrigal, Ash leaped through the hole in the outer wall, his terrifying wings lit by the fire before he vanished into the darkness. The moment they were gone, she burst from her hiding spot. Leaping through the scorching flames, she rushed into the antechamber and fell to her knees beside Lyre.

His dead eyes stared blankly, his skin white and body so still, marred by dozens of bloody cuts. Her eyes darted to the hole in his lower abdomen, stained crimson but no longer bleeding. To bleed, his heart needed to beat.

Two hundred and forty-three seconds since he had fallen. Just over four minutes.

She fumbled at her throat and snapped a gemstone off her chain. Tearing Lyre’s shirt open, she laid the gem on his chest, then used a granite shard to cut the pad of her thumb. Blood welled and a single drop fell onto the stone.

Touching the bloodied gem, she activated the spell. Green light, tinged with red, flared across his chest. She laid her hand over the gem and focused her asper into his body.

Deep inside him, a minute weave in her green magic slept. So tiny, so buried, that Madrigal hadn’t sensed it. She’d spent hours practicing the spell under Lyre’s direction, hours perfecting it before she’d woven it into his body. He hadn’t been able to demonstrate the complete spell for her, so she’d had to learn the hard way.

She channeled a spark into the slumbering weave. It flared brightly, linking with the spell in the gemstone, and both weaves turned red. A pulse of magic rippled through Lyre’s body.

His chest heaved under her hand.

Tears of relief spilled down her cheeks. He gasped desperately, eyes rolling back. Sucking in another breath, he started to cough. She pulled his scarf over his nose and mouth to filter the smoke.

“Hold on, Lyre,” she whispered, not sure if he could hear her over the roaring flames.

She pushed to her feet and rushed to Lyceus’s fallen body. In his chest, there was no pre-woven spell to revive him. He was well and truly dead, his life snuffed out by the blood curse she and Lyre had woven together.

If Dulcet were alive, she might have thanked him for showing them how to kill Lyre—and how to bring him back again.

She wormed her hand into Lyceus’s inner shirt pocket and pulled out Lyre’s KLOC and its key, the shadow weave glowing so brightly she’d seen it through the fabric. Tucking it into her pocket, she snapped the last gemstone off her chain and set it on Lyceus’s chest. A touch of magic activated the weave.

As she backed away, the gem erupted in a wave of searing white fire. Lyceus’s body vanished under the devouring flames. When the Rysalis family returned, there would be nothing but ashes left—both bodies, they would believe, consumed in the inferno.

Racing back to Lyre, she drew his arm over her shoulders and helped him to his feet. He pressed a hand to the wound in his stomach, his face deathly pale. Taking shallow breaths of the smoky air, she pulled him out of the antechamber and into the main room.

Beneath the roar of flames, a different sound rose—shouting voices. The ward on the main entrance flickered and flashed as something hit the door. Daemons were coming, Ash had said before he left. How many were out there, filling the corridor and trying to get in? Would the ward hold against them?

She guided Lyre past the vestibule and flame-engulfed bookshelves to the raised sitting area where fresh air gusted in through the shattered wall. As Lyre sank weakly to the floor, she leaned into the gap, scanning the black sky. It was empty.

“They’re coming,” Lyre said hoarsely.

Another slam against the door, then an explosion shook the wall. A burning bookshelf collapsed in a burst of sparks. The daemons outside couldn’t break through the ward so they were breaking down the wall instead.

She put her back to the hole and sank down, sick terror gathering in her chest. Sucking in the deepest breath she could manage, she put her hand into her pocket.

“Get into glamour, Lyre,” she whispered.

He stared at her like he might argue, his eyes exhausted and shadowed by pain, but instead, his form shimmered. The dark tattoo on his cheek vanished as he slipped into his human form.

She pulled glamour over her nymph form, then, shoulder to shoulder with Lyre, she inserted the key into the back of the clock and wound it. With the key still inside the device, she looked up at him, her heart racing. They could use glamour to protect the weavings they carried in their daemon forms, but they could protect nothing else from the devastation of the shadow weave.

He put his hand over hers and pulled the key out.

The gears turned, the second hand whirling around the clock face. She watched the seconds tick down, her pulse hammering. Finding Lyre’s hand, she clutched it, their fingers entwined so tightly it hurt.

The vestibule wall exploded inward. Hunks of rock tumbled across the floor, scattering flames, and six hulking daemons poured inside. Security guards, furious and eager to punish whoever had infiltrated their tower.

She squeezed Lyre’s hand tighter as the clock counted down.

Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.

The enraged daemons spotted her and Lyre. They surged into motion.

Six. Five. Four.

The first two reached the stairs to the raised sitting area.

Three. Two.

The lead daemon swung his pike around, bringing the point to hover in front of Lyre’s face.

One.

The shadow weave erupted from the clock. For an instant that lasted an eternity, it engulfed her in icy power that pulled her body apart at the same time it sucked every particle of her being into her center like a black hole had spawned in place of her heart.

Then it ripped out of her, an expanding bubble that passed through every solid material—the granite floor, the daemons standing on it—then raced down twenty-four floors of the tower to the rocky ground beneath. She couldn’t see it, but she could feel it gathering strength and speed as it consumed the magic of every daemon on the island, every spell, every ward.

With a boom like a tidal wave, the shadow weave hit the surrounding river and the water absorbed its power.

Quiet fell again. Clio slumped beside Lyre, her glamour gone and her body screaming with exhaustion. With a shaking hand, she reached for the three lodestones Ash had charged for her, protected from the shadow weave by her glamour. The minuscule delay between the shadow weave’s touch and losing glamour—thereby exposing the lodestones—had been enough to spare them.

Power flooded her body, hot magic that rushed to fill the void the shadow weave had left.

Beside her, Lyre shuddered as golden light shimmered over him—his aura revitalized as he too drained the lodestones he’d saved for this possibility. He straightened, glancing across the collapsed and groaning troop of daemons that had been about to kill them. A couple of the toughest ones were trying to push up from the floor, trembling from shock.

A quiet chirp behind her. Clio turned.

Zwi perched on the broken wall. The dragonet tilted her head and trilled at them, unharmed by the shadow weave.

“You’re here,” she gasped in relief.

The dragonet hopped inside and black flames whooshed over her small body, expanding rapidly. When they dissipated, the large dragon spread her wings, holding them out of the way.

Clio helped Lyre mount, then grabbed the dragon’s mane and hauled herself onto her back. As Zwi took a lumbering step toward the gap in the wall, Lyre slipped a gemstone from his pocket. Light flashed and he flicked it over his shoulder.

Zwi took three running steps, then sprang through the hole. As she sped away in a fast glide, cool air rushed over Clio, whisking away the stench of smoke. Clutching the dragon’s mane, she glanced back.

Golden light blazed from the breach in the pristine white tower, then roaring flames gushed out of it.

She faced forward, grateful for Lyre’s arms around her. The city below was eerily silent, no sound or movement. She focused ahead on the dark silhouette of the shore, refusing to look back at the flames leaping from the twenty-fourth level. The daemons in the tower room were dead. No one could know survivors had escaped the burning wreckage.

Lyre Rysalis, master weaver of Chrysalis, was dead, and soon his family and all of Hades would know.

* * *

Zwi swept downward. The dark ground rushed to meet them with more speed than Clio would have liked before the dragon flared her wings. Zwi met the ground in a rolling trot to absorb the last of her momentum.

The instant the dragon stopped, Lyre slid off with a shaky exhale. As she hopped down after him, Clio remembered he wasn’t fond of heights.

They’d landed near a hill, the ley line waiting on the other side. Patting Zwi on the shoulder, Clio looked across the river where a faint orange glow marked the Ivory Tower’s top.

“So, you made it.”

Choking back a scream, she whipped around. Ash stood a few paces away, back in glamour. He seemed unharmed—or at least no more harmed than when she’d last healed him. In a flare of black fire, Zwi shrank down to dragonet size and sprang onto his shoulder.

He scanned Lyre from head to toe, taking in the countless cuts scoring his limbs. “Alive again?”

“Mostly.” Lyre glanced around the dark, marshy hillside. “Where’s Madrigal?”

Ash jerked his thumb over his shoulder, pointing toward the ley line. “Unconscious. Spelled unconscious,” he added at Lyre’s worried look. “I’ll wake him up in Asphodel so he can report immediately.”

“Good.” Lyre arched an eyebrow. “So, the only three people who know I didn’t die are right here.”

“Three might be too many.”

Lyre shrugged. “I think I can trust you two.”

Surprise flickered in Ash’s eyes, then the faintest smile curved his lips, gone so fast Clio wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it. “Get lost, incubus, and stay that way.”

With no more farewell than that, he walked off. His dragonet looked over her shoulder and trilled sadly, then they both disappeared into the inky darkness.

Glancing at Kokytos, Lyre heaved a sigh. “Well, that almost went to plan.”

“It could have been a lot worse,” she murmured.

“It would have been, if not for you. Your weave worked perfectly.”

She stepped closer and touched his cheek with gentle fingers. Then she smiled teasingly. “You defeated your father. Does that make you the deadliest weaver in the three realms now?”

He laughed, then pressed a hand to his punctured gut, wincing. “No, I don’t think it does.”

She wrapped her arm around his waist. “As soon as we’re out of the Underworld, I’ll heal your wounds.”

Shadows gathered in his eyes. “Where are we going next?”

She looked toward the unseen ley line as sharp sorrow awakened in her chest, compressing her lungs.

“Irida,” she whispered. “It’s time to go home.”