It was magical. She loved it, in the way a prisoner long held under lock and key loves his first glimpse of open sky. She felt safe and secure in this enchanted underground city.

But, most of all, she felt free.

“It’s not half as wonderful as you think it is,” muttered Honor, sweeping regally into her rooms beneath a low, carved archway of stone. She’d installed thick white curtains on either side of the entrance, plush and sound dampening, so that when she released the tasseled ties that held them back, the velvet panels fell together with a swish and a billow, and the sound of flowing water from beyond was instantly muffled.

“If you’d spent your entire life sleeping in a bedroom the size of your sitting area, you might disagree,” Lu said, eyeing the sumptuous white divan flanked by a pair of fat, snowy armchairs that surrounded a low grate of glowing embers sending up feathers of orange ash into the air. The entire room was sumptuous, outfitted all in white, from the furniture to the draperies to the rugs underfoot, and Lu wondered briefly why her sister insisted on having no color in anything she owned, from her clothes to her décor.

Everything in Honor’s world was bleached as bone. Colorless. Bloodless. Even her dragon form was pallid as the full moon.

Honor sniffed, clearly disagreeing with Lu’s assessment. Moving to her bed, an elaborate, four-poster affair of downy pillows and gauzy curtains and white fur throws, she stripped off her jacket, casually tossing it atop the coverlet. Her boots followed, thrown one after another over her shoulder to land in hollow thumps against the stone floor, then she padded barefoot back to where Lu stood near the entrance.

She held out her hand. “C’mon. There’s not much time.”

Lu followed as her sister towed her past the bed, around a gnarled column of stone into an adjacent chamber. It was a bathroom of sorts, though there was no shower or bath. But there was a vanity with a mirror, lighted by small, flickering votives set into niches into the stone, and Honor pushed her down onto the small padded bench before it. She stood behind Lu, gathered her loose hair into her hands, and began to work the strands into a braid.

“Funny,” Honor said after a moment, her voice neutral, “that we’d both wear our hair this long, even though we’d never met.” Her eyes met Lu’s in the mirror, and Lu glimpsed the pain her sister tried to hide behind her bland looks and flavorless tones, her hard and frigid persona.

She reached up and grasped one of Honor’s wrists. “We’re coming back,” she said, her voice quiet but vehement. “You know that, right? We’re going to bring her back . . . and if . . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say the word father, so she just said, “if Leander is there, we’ll bring him back, too.”

Honor stood still for a moment, eyes downcast, her face a shade paler than bone. She worked her wrist free from Lu’s grip, and her fingers began slowly to thread through Lu’s hair.

“Honor,” Lu said, her throat constricting. “Please. Say you know we’ll come back.”

For the first time since she’d met her sister, Lu saw an emotion other than anger. Raw emotion, laid bare and unapologetic. Her face twisted, her voice shook with the force of it.

“You want me to lie to you so you’ll feel better? Well, sorry, but the answer’s no.” Her fingers tugged at Lu’s hair, jerking her head back as she wound the strands together. She kept her eyes on her work. “I don’t know that you’ll come back. I don’t know anything. And neither do you.”

Tug. Yank. Lu’s head jerked to and fro.

“All these ‘Gifts,’ all these ‘talents,’ all this ‘power,’ and still we’re just as helpless as a pair of bunny rabbits being chased by a pack of wolves!” Honor’s voice rose in perfect counterpoint to the rising shaking in her hands, in her body. The mirror affixed to the wall skittered a few inches left, and Lu’s heartbeat jumped with it.

“But Magnus—”

“Magnus is good at what he does. He’s never failed one of his retrieval missions, but there’s a first time for everything. Did you catch that little exchange between him and Demetrius?”

“Yeah, what was that all about?”

Honor made a sound of disgust. “Demetrius dreams the future. It’s his Gift.”

Lu bolted upright. “So they already know how this plays out!”

Honor pulled her back by her shoulders, and continued braiding the long strands. “D’s Foresight isn’t an exact science. And it’s sporadic; he didn’t know Magnus would find you, for instance. But he saw something.” Her eyes met Lu’s in the mirror. “‘We’re all cogs in the machine?’ Could he be any more cryptic?”

Lu knew Magnus wouldn’t tell her what their exchange had meant, even if she begged. She also knew she couldn’t eavesdrop on his thoughts, not only because that was wrong, but also because he’d sense her and shut down. She decided she’d just have to figure something out, because she desperately wanted to know what he and Demetrius knew.

“Magnus wouldn’t let me come along if Demetrius had Dreamt I’d get hurt.”

“Like I said, his Dreams aren’t an exact science. Sometimes they’re bits and pieces, a puzzle that has to be deciphered, not a picture fully developed. And if you get hurt, you’ll heal.” Honor’s voice lowered. Gained a new, darker edge. “No. Getting hurt isn’t the worst thing that could happen.”

She tied a small elastic band around the end of Lu’s braid, and stepped back to inspect it. Lu wondered why she’d bothered to braid it when she was supposed to be doing something to make it look different, but then Honor said something that snapped her back to cold, hard reality.

“Consider for a minute what happens if they catch you.”

Even though she’d thought the same thing, hearing it aloud was like a slap in the face. “They won’t.”

Honor’s snort was derisive. In the mirror, her expression was a contradiction of pain and worry, confusion and resignation, and Lu felt something shifting in her, a profound change swelling to the surface faster than Honor could contain it. Suddenly, her face was transfigured by misery.

“Don’t be so sure. Overconfidence is an excellent way to screw up. Because if you get too complacent and they do catch you, you’ll be spending the rest of eternity in a sealed cell!”

In one swift, smooth motion, Honor unsheathed a small knife she had hidden at her waist, pulled Lu’s braid taut, and sliced it cleanly off only an inch away from her exposed neck. Her shorn hair fell forward around her face in a short, perfect bob.

Lu leapt from the chair and whirled around, her hands lifting to her head, her eyes wide and disbelieving. Honor just stood there with her long, severed braid dangling from her hand like a beheaded snake. She was breathing hard, eyes glittering, hands trembling at her sides.

“Don’t get caught,” she said, the words ragged, harsh. “I only just found you. I can’t lose you again.”

Then she dropped both the knife and the severed braid, and pulled Lu into a hard hug, sobbing.

Lu couldn’t help it. She started to laugh.

She wrapped her arms around her crying sister and laughed. “You crazy, unstable, psycho witch!”

Honor sobbed harder, hugging Lu so tight she could hardly breathe.

Morgan’s voice, hesitant, came from behind the drawn entrance curtains. “Ducks? Everything all right?”

Honor pushed Lu away, angrily wiping tears from her face, and left Lu by the vanity while she began to pace like a caged animal in front of the smoldering fire in the sitting area in the adjacent room. “Fine!” she yelled. “Everything’s just peachy friggin’ keen!”

You really don’t deal with emotions well, sweetie, Lu thought. Honor’s answering shout reverberated inside her head.

SHUT! UP!

“Morgan, come in,” said Lu, hurrying to the other room. When Morgan stepped through the curtains and saw her, she clapped a hand over her mouth, staring.