But .. . how could he fight her when she held Sarai’s soul?

He clamped his jaws shut to keep unwise words from flying out of his mouth. Breath hissed out between his clenched teeth. His fists clenched, too, but there was too much fury for his body to contain, and Lazlo did not yet comprehend that he was no longer just a man. The boundaries of his self had changed. He was flesh and blood, and he was bone and spirit, and he was metal now, too.

Rasalas roared. The creature that had been Skathis’s, and hideous, was Lazlo’s now, and majestic. Part spectral, part ravid, it was sleek and powerful, with vast mirror-metal antlers and such fine rendering that its mesarthium fur felt plush to the touch. Lazlo didn’t mean the beast to roar, but it was an extension of him now, and when he clamped his own mouth shut, Rasalas’s came open instead. The sound ...When the creature had screamed down in the city, the sound had been pure anguish. This was rage, and the entire citadel vibrated with it.

Minya felt it rattle through her and she didn’t even blink. She knew whose rage mattered here, and Lazlo knew it, too. “I don’t speak beast,” she said as the roar died away, “but I hope that wasn’t a no.” Her voice was calm now, even bored. “You remember the rule, I trust. There was only the one.”

Do everything I say, or I’ll let her soul go.

“I remember,” said Lazlo.

Sarai was by Minya’s side now, rigid as a board. She was suspended in the air, like she was hanging from a hook. Horror and helplessness were plain in her eyes, and he was sure the moment had come—the impossible choice between the girl he loved and an entire city. A rushing filled his ears. He raised his hands, placating. “Don’t hurt her.”

“Don’t make me hurt her,” Minya spat back.

A sound came from behind Lazlo. It was part gasp, part sob, and, small though it was, it spidered a crack through the atmosphere of threat. Minya cast a glance to the other three godspawn. Ruby, Sparrow, and Feral were still reeling with shocks. The citadel’s lurch, Sarai’s fall, and this stranger carrying her back to them dead. It was shock upon shock, and now this.

“What are you doing?” Sparrow asked, disbelieving. She stared at Minya with haunted eyes. “You can’t... use Sarai.”

“Clearly I can,” replied Minya, and to prove it she made Sarai nod.

It was grotesque, that jerk of a nod, all while Sarai’s eyes pleaded with them. It was the only weakness in Minya’s gift: She couldn’t keep her slaves’ horror from showing in their eyes. Or perhaps she simply preferred it this way.

Another soft sob tore from Sparrow’s throat. “Stop it!” she cried. She came forward, wanting to go to Sarai and grab her away from Minya—not that she could—but she stopped short at the corpse, which lay in her way. She might have gone around it or stepped over it, but she came to a halt and stared. She’d only seen it from across the terrace, when Lazlo laid it down. Up close, the brutal reality robbed her of breath. Ruby and Feral came up beside her, and they stared down at it, too. A whimper escaped from Ruby.

Sarai had been impaled. The wound was right in the center of her chest, an ugly ravaged hole. She had hung upside down, so the blood had run up her neck, into her hair, saturating it. At the temples and crown it was still cinnamon, but the long waves of it were wine-dark and clumped into a sticky mass.

The three of them looked from Sarai to Sarai and back again— from the body to the ghost and the ghost to the body—trying to reconcile the two. The ghost wore the same pink slip as the body, though it was without blood, and there was no wound on her. Her eyes were open; the body’s were shut. Lazlo had kissed them closed when he laid it down, though it couldn’t be said that it looked peaceful. Neither did, the one lifeless and discarded, the other frozen in midair, a pawn in a treacherous game.

“She’s dead, Minya,” Sparrow said, a tear tracing down each cheek. “Sarai died.”

With a little chuff, Minya said, “I’m aware of that, thanks.”

“Are you?” asked Feral. “I mean, because you called this a game.” His own voice sounded thin to him now in contrast to this stranger’s. Unconsciously, he deepened it, trying to match Lazlo’s masculine burr. “Look at her, Minya,” he said, gesturing to the body. “This isn’t a game. This is death.”

Minya did look, but if Feral was hoping for a reaction, he was disappointed. “You think I don’t know what death is?” she asked, amusement quirking her lips.

Oh, she knew. When she was six years old, everyone she knew was murdered in cold blood, except the four babies she saved just in time. Death had made her who she was: this unnatural child who never grew up, who never forgot, and would never forgive.

“Minya,” said Ruby. “Let her go.”

Lazlo couldn’t know how unusual it was that they were standing up to her. Only Sarai ever did that, and now, of course, she couldn’t, so they did what they knew she would do, and lent their voices for hers, which had been silenced. They spoke in little surges of gathered breath, their cheeks flushed violet. It was frightening, and also freeing, like pushing open a door that one has never dared try. Lazlo waited, grateful for their intervention, and prayed Minya would listen.

“You want me to let her go?” she asked, a dangerous glint in her eyes.

“No—” he said quickly, reading her intent, to release Sarai’s soul to evanescence. It was like a fairy tale, a wish unclearly phrased, turned against the wisher.

“You know what I mean,” said Ruby, impatient. “We’re family. We don’t enslave each other.”

“You don’t because you can’t,” retorted Minya.

“I wouldn’t if I could,” said Ruby—rather unconvincingly, if truth be told.

“We don’t use our magic on each other,” said Feral. “That’s your rule.”

Minya had made them all promise when they were still little children. They’d put their hands to their hearts and sworn, and they had abided by it—the occasional rain cloud or burned bed notwithstanding.

Minya regarded them, gathered now around the stranger. They seemed all arrayed against her. She gave her answer slowly, as though instructing idiots in the obvious. “If I didn’t use my magic on her, she would evanesce.”

“So use it for her, not against her,” Sparrow implored. “You can hold her soul but leave her free will, the way you do with the Ellens.”

The Ellens were the two ghost women who’d raised them, and there was a problem with Sparrow’s innocent statement. The women, they all now noted, weren’t currently exhibiting “free will.” If they had been, they would not have remained apart, huddled behind the metal barrier Lazlo had made when he fought off Minya’s assault. They would be right here with them, tangled up in their business, clucking and bossing as was their way.

But they were not, and as this dawned on them, their shock pivoted in this new direction. “Minya,” said Feral, appalled. “Tell me you aren’t controlling the Ellens.”

It was unthinkable. They weren’t like the other ghosts in Minya’s sad, dead army. They didn’t despise the godspawn. They loved them, and were loved, and had died trying to protect them from the God-slayer. Theirs were the first souls Minya had ever caught, on that dire day when she’d found herself alone with four babies to raise in a blood-spattered prison. She could never have managed without them, and it was as Sparrow said, or at least it always had been: She used her magic for them, not against them. Yes, she held their souls on strings, like she did with all the rest, but that was just so they wouldn’t evanesce. She left them their free will. Supposedly.

Minya’s face tightened, a flash of guilt no sooner showing than it vanished. “I needed them. I was defending the citadel,” she said with a special glare for Lazlo. “After he trapped my army inside.”

“Well, you’re not defending it now,” said Feral. “Let them be.”

“Fine,” said Minya.

The ghost women emerged from behind the barrier, freed. Great Ellen’s eyes were fierce. Sometimes, to get the children to tell her the truth, she turned her whole head into a hawk’s. They could never defy that piercing gaze. She didn’t transform now, but her gaze pierced nonetheless.

“My darlings, my vipers,” she said, coming over. She seemed to glide, her feet not touching the floor. “Let’s have an end to this bickering, shall we?” To Minya, in a voice equal parts fondness and censure, she said, “I know you’re upset, but Sarai’s not the enemy.”

“She betrayed us.”

Great Ellen clucked her tongue. “She did no such thing. She didn’t do what you wanted her to. That isn’t betrayal, pet. It’s disagreement.”

Less Ellen, who was younger and slighter than her broad, matronly cohort, added with some humor, “You never do what I want you to. Is it betrayal every time you hide from a bath?”

“That’s different,” muttered Minya.

To Lazlo, watching, with the awful sensation that his hearts were in a vise, the tone of the interaction was bizarre. It was so casual, so entirely not on par with Minya holding Sarai’s soul prisoner. They might have been scolding a child for hugging a kitten too tight.

“We should all decide what to do,” said Feral in his newly deepened voice. “Together.”

Sparrow added, with a note of pleading, “Minya, this is us.”

Us, Minya heard. The word was tiny, and it was huge, and it was hers. Without her, there would be no “us,” just piles of bones in cradles. And yet they gathered around this man they had never seen before, and stared at her as though she were the stranger.

No. They were staring as though she were the enemy. It was a look Minya knew very well. For fifteen years, every soul she’d captured had looked at her just like that. A frisson of... something . .. ran through her. It was as fierce as joy but it wasn’t joy. It shot through her veins like molten mesarthium and made her feel invincible.