Our lips part at the same time. We’re nothing but hungry shadows. His hand on my back presses me closer, as if we could meld into one shadow instead of two. His other hand still holds my chin, and his fingers dig into my jaw in a way that should be painful but only makes me tighten my grip on him.

But then the image of his fingers wrapped around the stake in Adam’s chest comes back to me, and I break our kiss. His hands drop to his sides immediately, but he doesn’t move away.

The heaviness of our breathing fills the night until it’s almost suffocating.

If he knows what’s going through my head, if he knows why I broke the kiss, he says nothing. Instead, he just grabs my hand in the dark and squeezes it lightly. “Let’s go home.”

I nod, but that word doesn’t feel right, even though I desperately want it to.

CHAPTER 20

I wear a dramatic black gown with a skirt made of tattered layers of tulle and a black bodice with a single gold thread crisscrossing from my waist to my chest, where the stitching curves around the high neckline in a tangle of wild vines. My hand brushes along the banister of a curving set of stairs. I look like I’m ready to take an album cover photo. I’ve never worn anything like this, and I’m surprised by how much I like it.

I reach the bottom first.

“I hope we get there soon.” We’re on the way to the tithe. I pretended like I didn’t already know about it when my troupe told me. We’ve been winding down staircases and hallways for at least ten minutes. If the magic can take us anywhere we want, why is it insisting on the long way?

Xander huffs. “The house is playing with us today.”

It feels more like trickery than play, but I don’t want to say it out loud.

Turquoise paint peels off the next door, revealing streaks of bare wood beneath. Rust coats the doorknob and scrapes at my palm as I turn it. We step into a hallway re-created from a gothic horror movie. Faded blue wallpaper hangs in strips on the walls; the floor’s rough wooden planks are cracked and missing chunks; climbing roses reach up the walls and curl across the scuffed baseboards as if they long to drag this hallway into the gardens outside.

For a second, I think the magic’s missing from this particular part of the mansion, but then I feel it, a vibration against my skin like a throbbing bass. The sensation smothers my own magic. I glance around again. The magic isn’t gone—there’s too much. It’s grown wild.

“It’s fine,” Xander says. “We only have to come to this room once a year.”