“Ma’am?” she repeated, moving the tray closer to my elbow. “More champagne?”

“No, thank you,” I said, putting my still-full glass on her tray. “I seem to have lost my thirst for it.”

“Men will do that to you, won’t they?” she agreed.

Her voice was pure country twang, although the hard, knowing smile on her face told me that she was much smarter than the aw-shucks demeanor she radiated.

Before I could tell her that Jonah McAllister was in no way my sort of man, she moved on to the next person. I shook my head. First, the woman working the door had frozen up at my appearance, and now a waiter was giving me tips on my supposed love life with the smarmy lawyer. The night just kept getting weirder and weirder.

I’d just started to wade back into the crowd in search of Finn when a sly wink of silverstone caught my eye, and I noticed one more display tucked away in a recess in the back wall of the rotunda. Curious, I wandered over and finally found something noteworthy after all.

Two silverstone rune pendants lay on a bed of blue velvet behind a sheet of glass. One pendant was shaped like a snowflake, the symbol for icy calm. The other was a curling ivy vine, representing elegance.

I knew the symbols, knew exactly what they meant.

I’d once had a pendant just like them, one shaped like a small circle surrounded by eight thin rays. A spider rune, the symbol for patience.

The symbol that was branded into my palms to this day.

My hands balled into fists, my nails digging into the spider rune scars there.

Mab had put the marks there the night she’d tortured me, using her Fire magic to melt my silverstone pendant into my palms. It had been one of the most excruciating things I’d ever endured, but it was nothing compared with the utter shock I was feeling right now.

Because the snowflake was my mother Eira’s rune. And the ivy vine had belonged to my older sister, Annabella.

Chapter 4

4

I leaned forward, until my nose was almost pressed against the glass, and studied every single millimeter of the runes. The pendants weren’t polished to a high gloss like everything else on view was. Rather, the chains they hung on were blackened, and what looked like streaks of soot and bits of ash clung to the surface of the silverstone runes, as though they’d once been in a fire and had never been properly cleaned.

They’d been in fire, all right—Mab’s murderous elemental blaze.