Winter's Reach (The Revanche Cycle Book 1) Read Online Free Page A

hand for help. His eyes bulged from his purple, bloated face as he crashed to his knees. He doubled over, heaving, and a flood of cockroaches poured from his mouth. The fat brown bugs spilled out over his tongue in a blood-flecked stream, scrabbling across the man’s convulsing body as he choked to death at Stathis’s feet.
    “Please,” Stathis cried, pressing himself flat against the gallery wall and shaking his head wildly. “I don’t want the mask! You—you can take it. Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone, I swear it!”
    One of the housemaids ran past the open door, shrieking at the top of her lungs. A naked man blistered with tumors came leaping after her, bounding on all fours. He paused in the doorway, turning his toad-shaped mask and wide, mad eyes to regard Stathis. The man’s engorged tongue waggled out through a slit in the mask; then he turned and jumped out of sight. A moment later, the maid’s screams went silent.
    Vassili shook his head. “Sorry. We can’t accept your offer. The mask doesn’t belong to us.”
    A roach tried to climb up Stathis’s leg. Frantic, he shook his foot to flick it off.
    “
Who
then?” Stathis’s voice rose, shrill and breaking. “Who does it belong to?”
    “Me
,” said an icy voice that coalesced from the air around him.
    The balcony doors blew open on a gust of frozen wind. Autumn leaves rolled in across the polished floors, red and orange and dying. The Owl followed.
    A feathered cloak hooded her straight black hair and cascaded down her shoulders, draping her in layer upon layer of tawny down. Eyes that could cut diamonds glared out from behind the pupils of her owl mask, locking on Stathis as she strode across the room.
    “Please,” Stathis babbled. “I didn’t—I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t even—”
    “Quiet,” the Owl snapped. She paused, crouching and scooping up the squirrel mask with one velvet-gloved hand. The tips of her fingers glinted in the light; tiny metal points were set into her gloves, the hint of claws.
    “She was only thirteen,” the Owl said, studying the mask. “Did you know that?”
    “W-who?”
    The owl mask turned to face him.
    “Squirrel. The Witch of Kettle Sands.
My apprentice
.”
    Stathis opened his mouth, then closed it. His eyes brimmed with tears.
    “I didn’t know,” he managed to whimper. “I didn’t know.”
    “She was blindsided by a miserable pair of bounty hunters, delivered up for ‘trial’ bound and gagged, and forbidden from speaking a single word in her own defense for fear she might ‘cast a hex upon the magistrate.’ In the end, all she could do was scream through her gag while they burned her alive.”
    “I d-didn’t
know
.” A tear trickled down Stathis’s pudgy cheek.
    “Tell me: where are Werner Holst and Mari Renault?”
    “I don’t—I don’t even know who those people
are
! I’m just an art dealer, that’s all—”
    “Where,” the Owl said, “is the book?”
    “What book? There is no book. I just bought the mask, that’s all. Eckhardt didn’t
have
anything else!”
    Despina nodded. “He’s telling the truth. We wrung his little friend dry. The mask slipped onto the black market a day after Squirrel was murdered. No book.”
    “Then the hunters took it for a trophy,” the Owl mused. “They must be terribly proud of themselves. So terribly proud.”
    She paced the gallery floor, cradling the mask in her hand, her feathered cloak sweeping out behind her. Down below the gallery, the last scream of the last servant died at the end of a wet, meaty
thump
.
    Stathis turned and pawed at one of the portraits, fumbling for a catch under the gilded frame. It swung on a concealed hinge, revealing a safe set into the wall.
    “Wait,” he begged. “Wait, I’ll show you—”
    It took him five tries, but he finally managed to turn the dial properly and unlock the safe. Inside was a smattering of treasures: a ruby necklace, more rings, a fat accounting ledger, and a