A burst of energy barreled through me, throwing me backward. Caylus caught me as my vision blurred, then cleared. Res stood before me, the lightning gone, his silver eyes back to their usual stormy gray, wings lowered to his sides as things came crashing to the floor.

My lips parted as I took in the chaos. Shattered pieces of plates and bowls littered the floor, scones and cakes torn apart and scattered. A bread knife had been driven into the wall right where Caylus had been standing. Outside, broken branches hung at awkward angles on trees along the street, leaves scattered like flower petals.

What in the Saints’ name had just happened? The ground had shaken. Thunder alone couldn’t do that. It was like—

“Caylus?” A voice called from outside the door. “Caylus, what’s going on in there?”

We both spun for the door. The locks were undone. Caylus had forgotten them in his excitement to see me. I shot forward, but it was too late.

The door opened.

Twenty-Six

The new girl from the bakery stepped inside.

I froze, my mind racing as she surveyed the room. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t know.

“What happened here?” she asked, her face growing slack as she took in the damage, her eyes sliding across the island, to me…and right over where Res was standing.

She looked at Caylus expectantly.

My breath shuddered, and I locked it in my throat. Had she not noticed Res? I glanced at Caylus, carefully sculpting my expression into something calmer.

Caylus blinked at her, startled. At least she wouldn’t find his behavior strange; he was always a little strange.

“The storm,” he said, and that was it.

The girl’s brow furrowed. “The shaking did all this?”

“Yes,” I said too quickly. But half my mind was on trying to understand how she hadn’t noticed the three-foot-tall crow behind me.

Her gaze fell on the knife sticking out of Caylus’s wall. She placed her hands on her hips. “You were doing another one of your experiments, weren’t you?”

“That too,” I said. “The shaking messed it up. It exploded.”

Her expression grew hesitant. “This’ll come out of your pay, Caylus.”

He nodded, but his face had gone empty. His mind was somewhere else, likely wondering the same thing as me: why in Saints’ name didn’t she care about Res?

Giving the room a final sweep, the girl let out a sigh of resignation and stepped back out onto the landing, closing the door behind her.

For a moment, the room was utterly still. Then I bolted for the door and turned lock after lock so fast, I scraped my knuckles. Slumping back against the door, I faced the room.

Res was gone.

My heart stopped. I blinked, thinking it a trick of my vision, but he wasn’t there. Yet I could feel the cord pulsing between us.