“I’m okay,” I rasp. Nick’s hand goes to my brow, his fingers pressing against my forehead, trailing down my neck and shoulder like touching me will give him the answers I can’t say out loud.

Evan toes at a pile of powder where one of the hellfoxes had dissolved. “There are three green piles. Sel’s hounds are blue.”

Nick leans around me to look at the pile himself. His blue eyes sharpen, and his jaw goes tight. “What happened here?”

No one looks at me. Everyone looks at Sel.

Selwyn Kane is an annoyed, slightly bored sorcerer for all that anyone can see. But I can see beneath that now. He’s nervous. Rattled. “Hellfoxes. Almost fully materialized.” He nods at the piles. “They stole the aether from my weapons. We went to ground, took the tunnels, but they found us somehow.”

Evan walks toward us, shaking his head. “But three? Working together in the same location at the same time? No Gate is big enough for three to pass at once. Where’d they come from?”

“They ambushed us at the graveyard.”

“Three Shadowborn ambushed you?” Evan frowns. “You can sense a non-corp imp half a mile away. How did these demons catch you off guard?”

There’s a crack in Sel’s facade. When he doesn’t answer right away, I feel Nick tense beside me. “How did they surprise you, Sel?” he asks his Kingsmage.

Sel meets Nick’s eyes, and I know then why he didn’t fully answer my question in the tunnels. “I was… distracted.”

Tor’s anxious glance between Sel and Nick, Evan’s uncharacteristic silence, and the subtle clench of the fingers holding mine are all the warning we get.

Nick stands to face his Kingsmage. “Distracted? By what?”

Sel swipes his tongue over his lower lip, a nervous gesture that looks unnatural on his face. “We haven’t seen a Shadowborn uprising in two hundred years. If you were planning one, what would you do? Use a scout to disable us first? Knock us off-balance? What better time to disrupt our ranks than initiation? What better opportunity to break the Table before it’s gathered than to take out our king before he is Called?”

“Thinking like a demon now, Sel?”

Sel growls in frustration. “It’s my job to think like a demon.”

Nick’s brow furrows as he makes the connections. “What does this have to do with Bree?”

Sel meets his gaze head-on. “That first uchel wanted you, Nick. It called for the Pendragon. How did it know where to find you? A goruchel need simply to pose as a Page—act as a mole—to uncover that information, and it’s only a matter of time before a mole exposes themselves.” Sel swallows, and a shadow passes through his eyes, but he doesn’t look away from his future king. I give him points for that. “I decided to accelerate the process.”