Page 15 of Property of Mako
It didn’t reach those empty eyes.
I’m not sure how I knew, but it wasn’t a human smile. It was more like a twisted mockery of the motion. “No, my dear. You’re here because you carry legacy blood. A whisper of something ancient. Do you feel it? The burn in your bones? The eyes of the old gods watching from behind the veil?”
No, I didn’t. All I felt was terror.
Then he reached out with icy-cold fingers, brushed my hair back, and whispered, “Your sister will come for you, of course. And when she does? We’ll have both of you.”
That’s when I realized this wasn’t just a random abduction. Nor was it only about me.
It was about Lyra too.
They wanted her too. Oh God. Memories of a time in my life I’d tried desperately to forget flooded back and things that I’d overheard made me pause—or maybe something inside her. Though I still had no idea what, I knew enough to be extremely afraid.
Before I knew it, he held my forearm in a bruising grip and had pressed something cold and metallic against my wrist. It was a small brand—not unlike a cattle brand, but one fueled and heated by something dark and sinister.
It seemed to burn through my skin, rewriting me from the inside out. I screamed out and tried to jerk away, but he held my arm in a punishing grip, his nails digging into my soft flesh. His lips curled back, and his canines elongated into glistening fangs. My vision blurred, and I think I blacked out.
When I came to, I was back in the mirror room on my cushion. The other girls were still humming. The chandelier pulsed like a sick heartbeat overhead.
But there was an empty cushion.
The dark-haired girl who broke the mirror.
Time ticked by, and she never came back.
That’s when I finally understood the rule here.
Pretty dolls don’t scream.
They just waited for the next hand to come along and wind them up again—or they quickly disappeared.
But I wasn’t a doll. Not yet.
If Lyra was coming for me, she’d better hurry—because, despite my resolve, I could feel myself disappearing, piece by piece.
Chapter 6
The Crimson Stage
Mako
The night was sharp around the edges, a dark and dangerous feeling. There was a heaviness in the air—as if the city was holding its breath.
Like a shadow, I moved through the underbelly of New Orleans—silent, patient, and pissed off. The Kings had rules about sticking your neck into Covenant business, but this wasn’t about rules anymore.
It was about patterns. Too many of them.
And patterns meant prey.
I’d spent the last forty-eight hours digging through the bones of the city—missing persons boards, blood dealers, whispered chains from exiled witches and half-mad familiars. Everyone had a similar story.
Girls gone missing. Mostly runaways. Orphans. No one the cops or society would miss—until Lily. From what Lyra had said, the cops were blowing off her sister’s disappearance. It made me wonder how many of the reported “runaways” were truly that.
They also had several things in common. All pretty. All young. All human—or mostly human. What was disturbing was that a few were rumored to be what we on the dark side of the world termed “amplifiers” or possessing “legacy blood,” but none of those missing would be old enough to know what that meant. They would have no idea they were walking gold mines.
Before, the Covenant minded its business, and we minded ours. If they were doing what I was afraid of, they had crossed a line and broken an ancient agreement.
Except the same thing kept coming up in the darker corners of the whispered underworld network—confirming my suspicions at every turn. The Covenant was extremely busy. Only this time, I had a feeling they weren’t trafficking humans to be used as mere chattel. We all knew they were behind ninety percent of the human trafficking that went on in the world.
