“I’m not feeling anything. Logan, will you check too?”
He did, but he couldn’t find a pulse either. Sebastian’s skin was cooling rapidly, turning waxen right before their eyes.
He was dead.
Iz shook her head, still not accepting it. “No way. We didn’t hit the wall that hard. I took more of the brunt of it than he did. He didn’t even hit his head.”
“I saw, but ....” Logan shook his head. “He’s not breathing.”
“He knows magic,” Iz said grimly. “Way more of it than we do. Maybe it’s some kind of illusion.”
“Maybe. I’ll pat him down. I don’t know what good it’ll do if itismagic, but maybe I’ll turn up a pentagram or some eye of newt.”
He gave Sebastian’s lifeless body a thorough pat-down, even though touching Sebastian at all made him feel like his hands were covered with some kind of invisible slime. He didn’t turn up any eye of newt, but when he hit Sebastian’s pockets, he found first a set of keys—hopefully they would unlock Elizabeth’s chains—and then something he couldn’t identify by touch alone.
It had a hard, polished surface and a wicked curve, and it was pinning the lining of Sebastian’s jacket pocket to his ribs. He must have put it in his pocket for safe-keeping, and then when he’d hit the wall, the angle had driven it right into his side.
It didn’t feel too big, though. Would it really have been enough to kill him?
“I’ve got something, but I can’t tell what it is. Just a second—”
He tugged at the unseen object, but he had to yank it with all his strength before it would come free.
He recognized it as soon as he saw it, and it made his blood run cold to see it in his hand.
It was the basilisk-wyvern fang, the one Sebastian had used to force them into their cages. He had wound up with it buried between his ribs, and it had gone in so deeply that its poison hadn’t just paralyzed him—it had killed him immediately.
“I’ve had nightmares about that thing,” Iz said quietly. “And I wondered if it could really do what he said it could, or if I only froze up when he nicked me with it because my mind was playing tricks on me. I guess now I know.”
Logan slipped the fang back into Sebastian’s pocket. As far as he was concerned, the two of them could go into the grave together.
“I think Sebastian made you think your mind played alotof tricks on you, Iz. But it didn’t.”
Even in the dark, her smile was beautiful. All it took was the faintest glimmer of happiness to drive home yet again that she was the most stunning, breathtaking sight he could ever imagine.
“I’m starting to realize that,” she said. “And I hope you’re really starting to believe that it’s the same thing with you. You’re not who he made you think you were, either.”
He’d been thinking about that in the back of his mind ever since the two of them had gone through the portal into the cave. His hellhound hadn’t wanted to do it, because no animal, no matter how brave or loyal, wanted to walk right back into a trap that reminded it of fear and pain.
But he had done it anyway, for Iz and her mom.
His humanity had gotten him into the cave, and his hellhound had let him chase down Sebastian. Logan and Iz’s bond had let him leap through dragonfire and strike a major blow.
They were all entangled with each other, and yeah, he wasn’t always going to be one hundred percent human without a trace of animal instincts. That was just being a shifter, like Iz had said, and some of it was a kind of mental scar tissue. But now he knew he could be human when he needed to and whenIzneeded him to, and that meant everything.
And it meant that the easy, instinctual connection between the two halves of his soul was a good thing, not a bad one. Like the mate-bond, it could make him better and stronger.
He kissed Iz softly. “I think your hopes are going to be rewarded. Now let’s go get your mom, find one of Sebastian’s phones and call for backup—”
“Andeat something,” Iz said.
They went back to Elizabeth Benoit, with Logan poking his head into every side passage along the way to make sure that this place was as deserted as itfelt. All those empty cages filled him with a tremendous sense of satisfaction. They had freed Sebastian’s last hoard.
When they entered the shiftsilver mine cavern, Elizabeth let out a huge sigh of relief at seeing them again. Iz promptly stifled the noise somewhat by wrapping her arms around her mother and hugging the life out of her.
“Oh, here,” Logan said, fishing out the keys he’d taken off Sebastian. “I think these will work.”
“Good,” Elizabeth said, almost wryly, as Iz bent to unlock her restraints. “I would hate for the two of you to be forced to carry me back in this chair. It seems very pretentious.”