LITMIR.BIZ

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remain in the mortal realm indefinitely. Word is, it’s because of—”

      “Rhea Carlisle.”

      Polly tipped her glass toward him. “The quetzal’s sister-in-law, yes. And today you crashed the quetzal’s wedding. I take it Leo Ström is the reason.”

      “One of a couple of reasons.” Lucien swirled the wine in his glass, thinking about Theia’s large eyes. And the way she’d held on to his arms after he’d saved her from choking.

      “And would another of those reasons be Rhea Carlisle’s identical twin?”

      Lucien glanced up, caught off guard. “Why in the world would you say that? I just met her today.”

      Polly shook her head knowingly. “Those Carlisle women have a way of getting under a man’s skin. I’d be careful of that one if I were you. She’s deceptively humdrum.”

      “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “She’s very normal.” Polly said the word as though it were a terrible insult. “Very sweet. People think of her as the least talented of the bunch, but I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near her with a secret I didn’t want found out.”

      It was a warning he’d be wise to pay heed to.

      “As for Ström, he used to come in here with a redhead years ago. A real redhead.” She grinned and flipped her hair. “Not like me.”

      “And?”

      “And apparently she’s a rogue Valkyrie. A couple of regulars knew her—also Valkyries—and didn’t care much for her.”

      That was the missing piece. The Valkyrie must have been the one to create the revenant. And somehow she’d made a deal with Rhea Carlisle.

      * * *

      Full of mango lassi and sweet Kashmiri naan, Rhea wasn’t interested in reading an old man’s treatises about the history of the Covent written in longhand. Which suited Theia just fine. Alone, she wouldn’t have to hide what she was looking for. She drove Rhea back to her car before heading to Phoebe’s place with Rafael Diamante Sr.’s archives.

      Puddleglum, Phoebe’s Siamese tabby, curled up with her in the guest bed while she pored over the materials, looking for anything about the Smok family. As she turned the pages, she noticed a peculiar effect when she lingered on an entry: the text on the page began to shift beneath her touch. Rafe hadn’t mentioned anything about magically enhanced pages, but here it was. Like clicking a magical hyperlink to load a page of related content, touching a reference in the text made the copy on the page transform into the detailed document to which Diamante referred. When she lifted her finger off the page, it returned to the original journal entry.

      Fascinated, Theia thumbed through an entry on the Smok family’s history. But it wasn’t about the Diamantes at all. It was an accounting of Madeleine Marchant’s belongings, given to the nobleman who had been her benefactor—none other than one Philippe Smok, Vicomte de Briançon. And among those “belongings” were Madeleine’s children: seven daughters, in fact. Seven sisters.

      The Lilith blood allele—a hypothesis Theia had formulated when she and Rhea had first traced their genealogy—was passed down through recessive genes, only resulting in the Lilith phenotype when daughters were born to two carriers of the gene in Madeleine’s direct line. And this always seemed to result in the birth of seven sisters with the gifts. But she hadn’t realized that the first set of sisters were Madeleine’s own daughters.

      Puddleglum plopped down in the middle of the journal to announce that Theia was done reading. She hadn’t realized how late it had gotten. Lying back on the bed and staring at the ceiling, she tried to work out what Lucien Smok’s game might be. There was no way his appearance at Phoebe’s wedding was a coincidence. Rafe was right. She should keep her distance. But if his family had a connection not just to the Covent but to Madeleine herself, then Lucien surely knew it and had sought them out deliberately. Theia had to find out what he was up to. Particularly with regard to Smok Biotech.

      The arrival of the vision was the first indication that she’d actually fallen asleep.

      It flew out of the night like a carrion bird, circling overhead, waiting for death, casting a heavy shadow on the creatures below: the crow. The wolf. The dragon. The flying thing drew closer, and now she was looking up at it, standing with her sisters. It was both a vulture and a reptile, a prehistoric lizard with wings—a pterodactyl, perhaps—its head birdlike, with glowing red eyes, bat-like wings stretching out from the lizard body.

      In the distance, a rooster crowed, and the sound became a screech in the thing’s beak, a scream of laughter as it dived, talons outstretched.

      The rooster crowed again. Light blazed through a crack in the blinds. Dawn light. The rooster was somewhere outside. Nice. Phoebe hadn’t mentioned the built-in neighborhood alarm clock. Theia pulled the pillow over her head and rolled onto her side.

      Before the cock crows twice. What was that from? Something in the Bible, she thought. New Testament. She hadn’t been to church in years, but she remembered it now: Peter’s denial of Christ. The cock outside had crowed twice. Not that unusual, probably. But why was that sticking in her head? Cock, not rooster. Theia giggled, knowing what Rhea would have to say about it.

      Cock crows twice. The vision came back to her in a rush. It wasn’t the Bible phrase she was thinking of, after all. The flying thing—it hadn’t been a pterodactyl like she’d speculated in the dream. It was a cockatrice. And it was coming for them.

      In middle school, she’d once gone with a friend to her church, an evangelical one. The preacher had spoken of some mad theory about human-animal hybrids and the evil plot of godless scientists who wanted to bring back such things as griffins, harpies and cockatrices. His theory claimed such creatures had roamed the earth before the Great Flood because of the sins of unnatural men who’d bred them, and God had wiped them out.

      Theia had barely been able to contain her laughter, and her friend had been furious. Even at twelve, Theia understood enough science to know how idiotic such a theory was. Nobody was trying to splice genes across species to create monster hybrids, and even if they did try, it wouldn’t work.

      Except... Lucien Smok had said Smok Biotech’s research at NAU was both scientific and supernatural. And what was more supernatural than mythical creatures that turned out to be real?

      She certainly hadn’t believed dragons were real until recently, when she’d seen two of them with her own eyes. Dev Gideon shared his form with the dragon Kur, and Rafe was a scion of Quetzalcoatl who sprouted iridescent feathered wings and snake flesh and commanded the dead. And she hadn’t seen Leo shift, but according to Rhea’s account of their time battling another ancient dragon in the Viking underworld, he could transform into a serpentine creature with the destructive energy of the mythological Jörmungandr—who maybe wasn’t so mythological after all.

      What if the Smok family’s “magical-adjacent” connection was that they were bioengineering other such creatures?

      Theia unhooked her arms from the pillow, and her eyes focused on the crimson business card on the nightstand. If she wanted to get to the bottom of this, she was going to have to take Lucien up on his offer.

       Chapter 4

      Lucien’s phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He’d been out on a job all day and had turned his ringer off. He took it out and glanced at it, surprised to see a voice mail notification from Theia Dawn. And annoyed that it seemed to make his heart beat faster.

      Theia’s message was brief: “We should talk.”

      Somebody else had talked, obviously. From the tone of her voice, he could tell she was better informed about the Smoks than she’d been yesterday. Lucien lay on his back on the Berber rug on the floor of his penthouse suite while he returned her call.

      He

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