Page 102 of A Reign of Roses
The doors of the hallway were all cracked open to various degrees. A peek into a spare bedroom. A sliver of a porcelain tub. Only one door was closed fully.
I yanked it open and strolled inside.
Oleander’s craft room was a battlefield—hides of leather fromevery animal I could name, white-bone tools for folding and pressing those skins into submission. A wooden tray of awls and rulers, brushes of every size, a massive sewing frame in one corner and a stained canvas smock tossed hastily over a well-worn desk in the other.
Griffin slunk into the room behind me, Mari and Arwen surely not far behind. “If he made it like he agreed to—”
I finished the thought for him. “Then it’s in here somewhere.”
My hand reached for the first tome I saw—one with a tan leather binding similar to the ledger from Reaper’s Cavern—and closed around nothing but air as an old man’s voice bit across the disorderly room.
“Do not lay a single oily finger on that.”
Griffin growled before I’d even spun.
When my eyes found Oleander, hobbled and gangly as he was, I snarled, too. His crafting knife was held to Mari’s trembling throat.
“Not afinger,” he repeated.
I moved for them—
And stopped myself. Likely for the same reason Mari hadn’t spelled him into an early grave. If we killed the old man, we’d never find the decoy ledger. Griffin must have come to the same conclusion, because for all the power shared between us, nobody had used an ounce of it.
Where was Arwen?
“Let the girl go,” I said once in warning. “We aren’t here to steal anything, nor to harm you.”
The man only pressed the knife closer to Mari’s neck, and Griffin took one intent step forward. I’d never expected the day it would behisfury I’d have to concern myself with. I lowered my brows in strict warning.
“I know who you are, King Ravenwood,” Oleander said. “I knowwhat you seek. And I request you leave my home,this instant.” The old man was trembling. So much so, the knife he’d pressed to Mari’s throat was at risk of severing her flesh unintentionally.
“I won’t ask you again,” I cautioned. “Let her go, or I will be forced to hurt you. I don’twantto hurt you, but I will.”
“Listen to him,” Mari urged, voice quieter than I’d ever heard. “He—”
“Out! Out of my house!” Spittle flew from the old man’s cracked lips and Mari flinched and that knife—it shifted just a bit too close for Griffin’s liking. Oleander was given no further notice as an arc of ruthless, glossy lighte snapped across the room and straight for the wrinkles in the old man’s head.
No, no, fuck—
Griffin’s lighte sputtered on impact. But not against the man’s flesh. No, it was a shimmering, iridescent orb of lighte that his power smacked.
Arwen’s shield.
Mari stumbled away from the deranged bookmaker and his knife as Arwen pushed through the doorway, panting. She snapped at Griffin. “What were you thinking?”
But my commander had already crossed the room to Mari and was brushing her hair from her face and checking her neck for any damage. Mari gasped in heaves as he assessed her. Oleander shook with fear, trapped inside Arwen’s bubble of lighte.
“Bring him here,” I said calmly, pointing to the craftsman’s chair. We had to play this very carefully.
Arwen did as I instructed, dragging a protesting Oleander to his desk in her luminous bubble of lighte. She deposited him in his seat and burst the orb around him.
“You’re crazy, you’re…witches!” he muttered, eyes wild, lunging from the seat.
I seized the old man by his shirtsleeve and tossed him back into the wooden chair easily, allowing twin wisps of my power to tether his arms and legs. They coiled, spindly and black, around the horrified man.
“Where were you?” I murmured to Arwen as the old man writhed and swore at us.
“Looking for you all. Mari and I got separated and then I heard the scuffle…”
