It was a verse from that most infamous of banned books: the human Bible. The book her father so loved, and spent hours reading, the curtains drawn, his face rapt, his lips moving soundlessly over the words.

“Oh,” said Morgan, sounding more than a little mysterious, her lips curved to a Mona Lisa smile, “this is going to be so much fun.”

She and Magnus shared a look. If she didn’t already know Magnus was about as unsmiling as anyone could get, Lu would have sworn she saw a small, upward curve to his lips, there then instantly gone.

He said, “We can get started tomorrow. Right now there are a dozen Assembly members fidgeting in their chairs waiting for me.”

“Us,” Morgan corrected, but without rancor. He sent her a sidelong look. She said, “Oh, I know, they can’t start without you, but I’m sure everyone is much more interested in meeting the guest of honor today.” She waved him on. “We’re right behind.”

“Ladies first.” His tone was calm, but tension tightened his shoulders. He didn’t seem to appreciate Morgan’s breezy dismissal, but she shrugged that off, too, leaving Lu to wonder if there was anyone this formidable woman feared. Even Lu already had a healthy respect for the temper she could see, barely leashed, simmering under Magnus’s careful control.

Morgan raised her brows at Magnus. She turned to Lu. “I’m sorry, do you see any ladies present? Because all I see are a couple of badass birds who could really use a—”

“Morgan!” Magnus’s shout echoed off the stone.

Morgan sent Lu a wicked smile, then said to him, “You do make for easy pickings, ducky. You know I can’t resist.”

Along with flared nostrils and hands that had curled to fists, that muscle began to flex in Magnus’s jaw. He said slowly, “Do not. Make me tell your husband. You’re being incendiary. Again.”

Morgan pressed her lips together. Lu saw it was because she was trying to bite back a smile. “Moi?” She pointed at Lu and said innocently, “I’m not the incendiary one.” Then without waiting for an answer, she knelt, gingerly scooped up the broken remains of the collar and announced, “I’ll take this over to Beckett. See you at the Assembly in two shakes.”

And she was off.

Magnus watched her go, muttering to himself, “How the hell Xander puts up with it, I’ll never know.” He raked a hand through his hair again, something he seemed to do when disturbed—which Lu guessed meant he did it frequently. “You should be resting. I’ll bring you something to eat, clean clothes.”

“No.”

Magnus turned to her, startled at the bluntness of her answer, and, judging by his glower, none too pleased another female was being disagreeable.

“Morgan said everyone wanted to meet me. And I want to meet them.” She paused a beat. “Besides, I’m not hungry. And I can rest when I’m dead.”

She thought she saw it again, that fleeting amusement. But he was apparently so good at quashing anything except growls and scowls she really wasn’t sure if she’d imagined it. His face was wiped swiftly clean of any traces of emotion.

“All right,” he said, “come with—”

“First explain something to me.”

He’d been turning away, but snapped back in place as if pulled, his lips thinned to a line.

That muscle in his jaw is certainly getting a workout.

“Morgan just told me something—several things actually—I’m finding a little hard to process.”

“Such as?”

“Mainly that I might have been the cause of the Flash. That can’t really be true . . . can it?”

He considered her in stony silence for what seemed an eternity. Finally he said, “We can discuss this later. Right now I have to—”

“Was I?” Lu stepped closer, her voice rising. She took another step toward him when he didn’t answer, and he twitched, as if tensing to run.

“Was I somehow the cause?” She’d emphasized each word, moving even closer, until finally they were almost nose to nose. She had to look up to meet his eyes. This close they were as warm and rich as melted chocolate, though their expression fluctuated between anger, alarm, and a strange, raw ambivalence.

I’m not going to light you up, she wanted to say, seeing how uncomfortable he was. Instead she repeated herself when he refused to answer.

“Magnus. Tell me. Was I somehow the cause of the Flash?”

He swallowed. His gaze drifted to her mouth, then he blinked and turned his head, staring off into the darkness. He said, “There’s no somehow about it.”

No. Oh God, no.

The room seemed to tilt, sliding sideways from center, a slipping spin that had her stomach flip-flopping like a dying fish. She heard Magnus say her name, saw him reach for her with the alarm in his eyes turning now to wide-eyed panic as the whole world came crashing down over her ears.

Wars. Death. The destruction of an entire planet.

Because of me.

A part of her dove into full-blown, indignant, there’s-no-way-in-hell denial. But another part—a darker part, the part where the animal lurked—believed it. Fully and immediately, she grasped the thing that had always made her father so afraid.

She wasn’t just a monster.

She was pure evil.

Magnus caught her as she stumbled back, sagging against the wall as if her knees wouldn’t support her. Her eyes were still open, half-lidded and blank, so he knew she hadn’t fainted, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. She’d simply stopped. Stopped breathing, stopped responding, stopped looking at him as if he was holding a life preserver and she was in the middle of the ocean, drowning.

He’d just taken that life preserver and flung it off the other side of the boat, right into the hungry maw of a shark.

“Hope! Hope, talk to me!”

The pulse in her neck fluttered wildly. Her face had blanched ghostly white. She blinked once, then put her hands over her face and moaned. It was a low, wretched sound he recognized as one of a creature whose soul was in cinders.

He’d made that sound himself, too often to count.

His hands were gripped around her arms before he could think, and he eased her to the floor. “Just breathe. Just sit here a minute and breathe, heleti.”

She’d begun to tremble violently. She put her head on her knees, hiding. She said to herself, “The Romanian word for light,” then laughed a low, ugly laugh, a sound utterly devoid of humor. It might have been the most hopeless noise he’d ever heard. She lifted her head and stared at him with eyes that were huge and dark, still wearing those brown contacts that to his keen vision were so obviously fake.

“My name isn’t Hope. It’s Lumina. Which is the Romanian word for light. Because I caused the Flash.” That ugly laugh made another appearance, now accompanied by a manic glint in her eyes. “My parents had a really depraved sense of humor.”

“No,” he said softly, kneeling in front of her and still holding her arms, fighting the rise of panic and the urge to flee that always accompanied being too close. He pushed both emotions away and concentrated on her. On what she needed from him right now.

“No,” he said again. “Your name isn’t Lumina. You aren’t in the human world anymore; you don’t have to keep your human name. You’ll never again have to hide who you are, or what you can do. You’ll never again have to pretend. And you’ll never again be alone, do you understand? We’re your family here—”

“I had a family,” she said vehemently, her trembling growing worse. “They’re dead.”

“They weren’t your Blood—”

“It’s not about blood!” she cried, stiffening. “Family is who takes care of you, who sacrifices for you, who would take a bullet to keep you safe!” Her face contorted; she was trying not to cry. “There’re more powerful things than blood!”