Years ago ice had devoured Crescent House.

Now ice was engulfing Four Moons House.

I could no more stop my sire than I could stop winter.

“Bee!” I cried, waving her forward from where she peered out the coach door. “Hurry!”

Without looking to see if she followed, I ran over the threshold into the building, looking neither to my left nor to my right. The path I had taken on the day the husband I had not wanted had brought me here remained fixed in my mind so clearly it took no effort for me to turn right, left, left, and then right to reach the long salon I recalled all too well. Its glass doors looked onto an interior garden enclosed by the wings of the House and a high stone wall behind.

The mural painted along the salon’s walls, depicting the Diarisso ancestors guiding their kinsfolk and retainers and slaves along the hidden paths of the waterless desert to safety, had peeled and smeared and turned brown in patches where flames had begun to eat through the walls. Yet the strong-as-iron women and handsome men clothed in gold and orange strode undaunted, their chains of magical power and secret knowledge wreathing them like vines. The paint glittered with flashes of light as ice penetrated the walls. It made the mural seem to move, as if the ancestors were walking still into the future they had made for themselves out of the devastation of what they had been forced to leave behind.

The glass doors opening onto the garden had cracked and shattered from the heat. I wrapped the hem of my skirt around my hand and opened metal latches so hot they burned, then kicked down the framework of glass doors sagging on their hinges.

I could not count the number of people trapped in the garden. Some had been trying to lift others out over the back wall, but judging from the shouts beyond the wall and the scorched tops of trees, I guessed that several fire mages and soldiers had been stationed there to prevent anyone from escaping. Nearby a big cat roared.

I hated Drake all over again. What manner of man cared more for his own perverted sense of honor and pride than for people’s lives?

Winter chased through the doors and kissed the air. Snowflakes drifted prettily through the chamber on a lazy wintry breeze. I shivered.

Bee did not need to be told what to do. How someone so small and lovely could bellow in quite that ear-shattering manner never failed to astound me. “Everyone! Listen! You will immediately follow me out the front doors. Now! If you stay behind, you will die.”

Her honeyed voice had the rare gift of impelling people to obey without pausing to needlessly quibble. Nor were the people of Four Moons House fools: A fire-ravaged structure would soon collapse. We did not have time to explain the real danger.