Read Online Death's Mistress by Karen Chance - Free Book Online Page A

mystery at all! The caretaker of the vault was suspicious when she just dropped by, unannounced and with no escort, but he could hardly refuse her entrance. But he checked everything as soon as she left, and Naudiz was missing.”
    “So everyone knew she’d taken it?”
    “Yes, but not what she’d done with it.”
    “They didn’t search her?”
    Claire laughed angrily. “Oh, they did. And you should have heard the uproar over that ! But Caedmon insisted, and of course they didn’t find anything. Or in her belongings, either. Then she left in a huff, saying she wouldn’t stay where she was insulted. And a few hours after she’d gone, after she was already to the damn border, they found out how she’d done it. She’d handed it off to a traitor in Caedmon’s guards, probably one of the bastards who tried to kill him—they never found out who all of them were—and he took off with it.”
    “And met her later to pass it back. Clever.”
    “That’s just it,” Claire said, leaning back against the porch railing. Red curls blew about her face, bright with reflected light from the house. Framed against angry green-black clouds, she looked a little otherworldly suddenly. “He didn’t.”
    “Didn’t what?”
    “Meet up with her. He also didn’t take it tosubrand, if that was the plan. Caedmon thinks it might have been. A person who can’t be killed can escape from anywhere, even the best-guarded prison.”
    I suddenly felt like buying this guard a beer. “Where did he go, then?”
    “The guards at the nearest portal recorded him going through an hour or so before the stone was discovered missing. He didn’t have authorization, but he knew a couple of them, and anyway, he was a fellow guard. They let him through.”
    “A portal to where?”
    “To here. To New York,” Claire told me urgently. “Caedmon thinks he’s going to try to sell the rune, that he double-crossed Efridís. The thing’s worth a fortune, and I guess it was just too much temptation.”
    “That was a lucky break.” An invinciblesubrand was not something I wanted to contemplate. He was already too close to that for comfort.
    “Yes, but it still leaves Aiden unprotected! Naudiz is here somewhere, and I have to find it before the damn Svarestri do. It’s the only way to ensure that—”
    She stopped, because the temperature plummeted about fifty degrees in an instant, like we’d suddenly stepped into a deep freeze. I looked down to see a pattern of ice creeping over the threshold, curling across the wooden planks of the floor. The day’s absorbed heat had kept them soft and warm against my feet, but suddenly they were hard and cold and slippery with frost.
    A glance out at the yard showed a swirl of small flakes spiraling out of the black sky, gilded by the glow from the house. I got up and walked down the steps, catching one on my palm. It melted immediately in the heat from my body, leaving a small wet spot behind. I smelled it, just to be sure. Water, ice.
    It was dog days in Brooklyn, and it was snowing.
    A few small flakes landed on my lips, feather soft. More drifted in the open side of the porch, collecting in Claire’s hair and shining, golden bright, on her lashes. “What is it?” she asked, frowning.
    “Get in the house,” I told her, my heart rate speeding up.
    “You said it didn’t matter—that the wards protect the porch as well,” she said, even as she gathered up the kids.
    “The wards were designed to stop magic,” I reminded her, a chill spreading through me that had nothing to do with the temperature. “Not the damn weather.”
    Like an exclamation point to my sentence, a fist-sized hailstone slammed through the porch roof, punching through the tin like a baseball through paper. It hit the old steps right in front of me, splintering into a thousand shards that flew everywhere. Pieces as long as my finger embedded in the railing, the side of the house and my flesh.
    “Dory!”
    My leg buckled, a sliver