I massage my chest as I watch the magic swim in the glass. If I succeed, I’ll have the power to fix everything Lyon broke—to restore the systems of balance Michael put in place. Jack is here. Fleur is my prisoner. As soon as I do this, I can eliminate them both. So what the hell is stopping me?

I lean toward the desk. The magic leans away.

This will not end in any way you can possibly imagine, Douglas. It takes two eyes to see clearly. . . . You are now, and will always be, alone.

I rest my head in my hands. I should be searching for the eye.

A knock at the door pulls me from my thoughts. I push aside the angel ornament and call out, “Come in.” Lixue cracks open the door and peeks around it. The smell of shame wafts in with her, and I grit my teeth. “I thought you were setting up a surveillance team in Sommers’s room.”

“I was, Chronos. I mean . . . I did.” She steps inside my office. Her nose is swollen and her eyes are blackened. A ring of dark bruises circles her throat. “March and I . . . we were ambushed,” she says hoarsely. “By the time we got to Sommers’s room, he and Kai were already inside.”

I rest my knuckles on the surface of the desk and lean toward her. “Jack Sommers is injured. Kai Sampson’s been stripped of all four of her elements. There’s not a drop of magic left between them. Are you telling me two of my most senior Guards had their asses handed to them by a couple of powerless humans?”

“Not exactly, sir.” She clears her throat. “There was a smaze with them.”

I search her eyes for signs that she’s lying. But the memories of her fight with Jack are chaotic, the images of his dorm room too dark to see clearly. “Tell me.”

“It . . . it came out of nowhere. It . . . seemed to bind itself to Jack. It appeared to be . . .”

“Spit it out, Commander!”

“It appeared to be letting Sommers use its magic.”

My thoughts run back to the memory Lyon showed me of the moments leading up to Michael’s death. There had been a smaze in an orb, like the one Gaia always kept as a pet on her desk—Daniel Lyon’s smaze. Is it possible that this same smaze is the one helping Sommers?

No . . . no, I saw what happened to that smaze in Lyon’s visions. Gaia had given that smaze to Jack’s Handler when she made him a Winter. But what happened to Jack’s?

I can still save him. That’s what Lyon had said to Gaia. In the memory I’d seen in his eyes before I killed him, there had been another smaze. Another orb. It had been sitting on a desk. But not this desk.