by Emma Dawn
But would Ivan?
Only one way to find out. The last hundred yards or so separated me from the fire when the sand erupted in front of me and a massive snake shot into the air. Cobra, that was what my brain told me while my adrenaline told me to run like a mad woman.
I slid to a stop once more. I had to give the snake credit, it was beautiful in all its terrifying glory. It swayed above us, a low hiss cutting through the night as it’s tongue tasted the air for us.
Torq was right behind me, and his hand found my arm. “Don’t move.”
“I need to get to the fire,” I said.
“We both do.”
I turned my head and looked at him. “No, we both don’t. Traitor.”
He jerked as if I’d slapped him. Tears stung my eyes. “You made me doubt him. You made me doubt all of them.”
“No, Rose, it isn’t like that.” His eyes were wild with being caught.
I only had to think about lifting him into the air, of flinging him to the side and it was happening. He screamed as he flew. The snake shot after him.
This was my chance, now or never.
Chapter Sixteen
Three’s Company
The Nope Rope went straight after Torq and I bolted for the safety of the fire that burned brightly, beckoning me home. I had to climb over a set of coils, the muscles in the body of the Nope Rope totally unreal in their barely restrained strength. In another life, snakes terrified me. But here, it was saving my life and the life of Liam and Ivan.
I knew it.
The coil shifted under me and there was a scream from behind me, and then the snake exploded in a blast of gore that threw me sideways away from the fire. I hit the sand hard, rolled three times and ended up on my belly breathing in fine sand particles. I coughed and sat up. Flecked with guts from the big snake I blinked and wiped something runny off my face and away from my eyes.
The Nope Rope was gone, and there was Torq, swaying on his feet. He went to his knees. “Rose, help me, I’ve been bit.”
His shirt had burned off—acid venom maybe. I could hope. But more than that were the massive puncture marks in his belly.
“I’ve been bitten, Rose. The poison, I need you to help me . . .I’m here to help you.” From his knees he swayed and toppled forward.
“No.” I said the word, and then pushed to my feet, and stumbled toward my goal. Ivan, Liam, and the fire.
I reached the edge of it as something grabbed my ankles and yanked me down to the sand. I screamed and Liam yelled back for me but we were too far apart. I knew it.
I kicked at Torq, hitting him in the head and shoulders, shoving him off me. I tried to use my magic or whatever the hell it was. I tried to pry him off, but just like with Jessop, there was a sense that I was being shoved downward, or being held back.
I looked up to see Gavin striding across the sand toward us, his face grim.
I screamed again in pure anger and frustration. I kicked with both feet, nailing Torq in the face. He let go and I crawled toward the edge of the firelight. I got my fingers through and Liam was there, pulling on me.
But Torq was trying to come with me.
“Help him through!” Ivan yelled, reaching for Torq. I lifted my hand and moved Ivan with my power, shoving him back.
“No! Liam, don’t let him through!” I kicked again and Torq released me. Liam yanked me hard and I was flat on my belly and back in the mountains. Covered in guts and blood. I shivered and shook my head, unable to find the words. Unable to speak. Was that Gavin? I twisted around to see a figure running across the sand. Not fast enough, asshole, I thought.
“What the hell happened? Why would you leave him behind if we could bring him through?” Ivan roared as he strode back to us. His face was a mixture of rage and confusion. I stared up at him and let my clothes melt away, reform, and slide back on me in a thick fur lined clothes once more. With that the worst of the snake guts disappeared too.
“He’s a traitor,” I whispered. “He’s working with Gavin to . . .end me. To steal my power, kill me, and then insert himself into the challenges.”
Ivan stared down at me, shock filtering over his face as he dropped to a crouch. “What are you talking about?”
“None of you talk about how you die, not to each other, do you?”
Ivan shook his head. “No. We don’t. It was not something Vincent wanted us discussing.”
“Liam,” I said softly. “Tell him who killed you in real life.”
Liam’s eyes closed. “Torq killed me. I found him out in the desert, and he killed me.”
“Why?” Ivan barked. “That makes no sense.”
Liam held a hand out to me and I took it. But what I really wanted was Ivan too. I wanted to sit with Liam and hang onto Ivan. He stiffened as if he knew what I wanted. Holding himself back from me still.
“Torq was working with a man—who I assume now was Gavin—and they were trying to find a way to bring all the supernaturals under the rule of the warlocks. I was sent in as a double operative. A spy. They thought I was going to work with them. I wasn’t, but my queen needed information on how they planned to turn the wolves and the vamps against one another. Torq caught wind that I was playing both sides.”
“And he killed you,” Ivan growled. “Fuck.”
“He can’t come back, can he?” A shiver trembled through me.
Ivan turned his gray-eyed gaze on me, sadness rolling through him. “Rose. You are going to go with Liam next to face his death.”
“Oh, my God,” I whispered. “We have to face Torq?”
Liam nodded. “Yes.”
Ivan crouched next to me. “I’m sorry, Rose. I’m so sorry I didn’t trust you more.”
“I didn’t sleep with him,” I blurted out. “Torq wanted to but . . .it wasn’t right.”
Ivan gave me a sudden grin that changed his whole demeanor. “You think that’s what I’m worried about?”
Torq’s words floated to me all too clearly. I looked away from the two men. The word slut was not something I had ever been called before, at least not by anyone who meant anything to me. This situation made the words all that much more painful.
“He hurt you?” Liam ran a hand down my back and I leaned into him.
“Just words,” I said. “That’s all.”
“Words have power,” Ivan said. “Anything he said was done to deliberately harm you, to break you down.”
“He didn’t know I was listening. He was speaking to Gavin about me.” I shook my head. “Can I have a break before the next challenge?”
Both men nodded. I stood and Ivan put a hand on my arm. “Don’t step out of the ring of light the fire casts.”
I bobbed my head but said nothing. I made my way to the far side of the area that held the light and sat with my back to them, facing away from the fire.
The thing was, I wasn’t entirely sure that Ivan would believe me, not over one of his men. But then it had been Torq who’d helped put it in my mind that Ivan might hand me over. That he might betray me for his men.
I put my hands over my face and leaned on my knees. I wished Dominque was there with me . . .my sister. I lifted my head, something akin to hope flowing through me. Dominique was my sister. I smiled into the darkness. And I was going home to her. I was going to find a way to bring the other men back, and we would all go home together. The darkness seemed to stare back at me.
And then it blinked.
I threw myself backward as the grawk launched toward me. I threw my hand up and caught the zombie in midair with my power, sending it back the way it had come. But others were behind it.
There was only one hope now. Escape into the challenge. Only this time . . . I twisted around and Liam was running for me. I planted my feet.
“No, you both have to come with me.”
Ivan shook his head. “No, I can’t.”
“You can and you will,” I said. “I need you to trust me, Ivan. The only way this is going to work is if we are toget
her.”
Ivan tensed and the sounds of the grawks drawing closer tightened around us.
I held a hand out to Ivan, and one to Liam. “Together. Or not at all.”
“Hurry up, man, she’s been right so far,” Liam barked.
With a snarl, Ivan took my hand and the three of us bolted toward the darkness on the far side of the fire. Why I thought it would work taking them both with me, I’m not really sure. Only that I knew they both had to be with me this time around, and because I believed that, I knew the challenge would mold around the three of us. The Chalice would allow this. She had to.
We stumbled forward as the night air shifted and changed from the cold of the high mountains back to the desert. I stepped and there was the crunch of something under foot.
I looked around and my eyes slowly told me what I was seeing.
“Nothing has changed. Like . . .it’s not reset to Liam’s death.” I let go of the two men and stared at the figure on the sand we all knew. A still dying Torq.
My heart lurched, which was stupid because he’d betrayed us all.
“Liam?” I whispered.
“Yeah. He needs to be going. Then maybe we can all make it through.” His accent seemed softer than normal. Or maybe it was that he didn’t really want to kill someone he knew even if the favor would not have been returned. I wasn’t sure which.
He went to Torq’s side and went down to one knee.
Except nothing from there on out went right. Torq screamed and shot upward, driving something into Liam. Ivan roared and leapt forward, yanking Liam back but it was too late. I knew it was too late already.
Ivan stumbled back, Liam in his arms. I grabbed onto Liam, taking his hand and holding it to my face even as it cooled. His eyes met mine. “For you, Rosie. Only for you.”
The world around us shifted and there was a moment of quiet while the challenge reset. The desert faded into a forest of evergreen trees and the sand was no longer sand but a thick mat of moss. I knelt there, Liam breathing out his last as the wooden stake stole his life.
“We have to go, now.” Ivan’s voice was thick with emotion. His hand slipped around my waist, lifting me from Liam. I stared back as he all but carried me away. “There is a pack of wolves coming for me. For us.”
I looked up at him finally, barely seeing him through the shimmer of tears in my eyes. “So much death, Ivan. I can’t . . .I can’t watch you die too.”
He looked down at me and his jaw ticked. “Then we have to move. When I died before, I led them to the east.”
“North,” I said without hesitation. “We head north.”
His eyes locked onto mine. “Toward the Chalice.”
“Yes. It’s the only way we are going to get out of here alive,” I whispered. He looked away. “Can you run?”
I nodded and he put me down. I took a big breath, then a step and another and another. In a matter of a few strides, I was running flat out. As I ran I smoothed my clothes out, slimming them so I wouldn’t have the heavy bulky warmth needed for the mountain air.
Arms and legs pumping, the smell of the forest flowed through me and I breathed it in. It seemed to fill me, the smell of fresh green and living things, giving me a burst of energy.
We ran for hours. I did what I could to cover the trail behind us, to keep it swept clear but it was hard to concentrate on both the flawless running and leaping of downed logs and the trail behind.
Ivan began to slow ahead of me. I followed his lead once I caught up to him. “Here,” Ivan said. “The wolves believe this place to be haunted. They will not willingly come here.”
Here turned out to be a rundown building that could have been a castle at one point with all the turrets and peaks I could see. I shivered as I looked at it. “Yeah, I can see that.”
“Even if it is haunted, we’re already dead.” He took my hand and tugged me forward. I didn’t resist.
“Was that supposed to be comforting?”
He shrugged. “If we’re dead, then we’re ghosts too. So, nothing to be afraid of.”
“Unless it’s something worse than ghosts,” I said.
He stopped, and gave a shiver, and I stopped with him. “What?” I whispered the question.
“I hadn’t thought about it being something other than ghosts,” he said.
Well, that was just awesome.
Chapter Seventeen
Haunted, My Ass
The castle we walked toward creaked and groaned in the wind and curtains fluttered and danced through the broken windows. Nope, this was not going to happen. I put on the brakes and tugged Ivan to a stop.
“I can’t go in there.” I couldn’t say why but whatever was in there was not good and it was more than a mere ghost.
“We have to,” he said, “there is nowhere else for us to hide that the pack will leave alone.”
I shook my head again. “No, I’ll find us something else close by.”
“There is nothing else close by!” He shook his head. “I don’t want to go in there either, but I don’t . . .”
Ivan didn’t want to die. And I didn’t want him to die.
I walked to the right of the house, thinking.
He caught up to me and frowned, but he said nothing. I turned away, my mind racing with possibilities. I’d hidden with Mars in a shack. Jessop in a tree house. Torq in a camouflaged tent. I just had to figure out what would keep the wolves away as clearly as the house. I pushed my foot against the moss, thinking. The moss. I bent down and ran my hands over it. Maybe I’d watched Lord of the Rings too many times, but going underground seemed like a perfectly plausible solution. “Here.”
“Here where?” He crouched beside me as I began imagining the space under the moss with a heavy trapdoor. One with a viewing hole so we could see the people—or wolves—who came toward the house.
I slumped when I was done, fatigue rolling over me. “Why is it only sometimes?” My words barely made sense, because I was thinking part of the question. Why was it when I manipulated this world, only part of the time I got tired? The other part it didn’t bother me in the least. Like when I’d been with Torq, I’d had all the energy in the world. Mind you, I still hadn’t wanted to bed him and had used sleep as an excuse.
Ivan lifted the trap door and carried me down into the cozy space. The door dropped silently behind us and I thought about all the scents that could deter the wolves. The smell of the Nope Rope would be good.
The last of my energy slid away and I closed my eyes. Ivan laid me on a bed and he stripped my clothes off me and then he was beside me, naked. “Your skin is like ice,” he said.
I mumbled something and turned so he was spooning me. Blankets and Ivan’s warmth surrounded me and I thought I would fall asleep. Maybe I was asleep. I’m not sure. Because what I saw with my eyes closed felt very real, though a part of my brain said it wasn’t real-real. Just kind of real.
A woman stood in front of me, dressed, but then again not really. She wore a dress but it was flimsy and see through and her body was clearly visibly through the material. Like me, she carried her curves well, though she had more height than I did.
Her hair fell in dark red waves around her shoulders and over her chest. Green eyes stared into mine. A trickle of blood ran from her neck down over her left shoulder. A bite mark maybe?
“Do I know you?” I asked.
“Do you?” She smiled. “Do you know me, Rose?”
I frowned. “I asked first.”
She laughed. “I am the Chalice, Rose. And you have fought your way to me. You have brought Ivan all the way to this place. But . . .”
“Oh, God. I don’t like the sound of that ‘but.’” I said. “But what?”
“Will you help us all, Rose? Your power here is like mine, only stronger. You can manipulate this world, you can help me save it.”
I frowned and shook my head. “That makes no sense. What are you talking about?”
The Chalice sighed and tipped her head back as if to lo
ok at the stars above, only there were no stars, just darkness.
“Vincent and his minions are destroying this world. It was meant to be a place of peace for those who have died. A place to make right the wrongs you may have committed in your life.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Vincent has torn it down, created the grawks and made the ladder that pushed my family into outer darkness. That kind of evil was never meant for this place.”
“Why would he do that?” I said. “He acted like he wanted me out of here.”
“He does want you out of here. Because he knows you have the strength to take him on, to stop him.” Her eyes were mesmerizing and I looked away. “He knows you can stop him, Rose. You can stop him and reverse the grawks to their former lives.”
I snapped back to her. “What?”
“You can bring your men back, Rose. You can have them all at your side. But you must promise to fix this world. It is the only way.”
“And if I don’t?” The pull of my life on the other side of this was very real, and I had to know all my options. Even if I didn’t think I was going to take it. Her eyes closed and she shuddered as if she was about to deliver a bombshell.
“Then you may take Ivan and go. You may escape with him into the living world and be free of this place. But when you die, you will not come back with this power you have now. And this power you carry is not for the land of the living. There you will be a null, one without any strength. You will be vulnerable.” Her eyes opened, but she looked past me, through me.
Her words resonated on an off chord, and I didn’t like it. My bullshit meter knew something was up, but what? Her throat bobbed as if she would say more, but ever so slightly she shook her head. As if being held back.
I cleared my throat before speaking. “I . . . I don’t know the answer.”
“You have a little time to decide, a window of safety to consider your options. Love him, Rose.” The Chalice motioned behind me and I turned to see Ivan sleeping on his side, his body curled around me. Which was weird because here I was standing, talking to this woman. “Love him and follow your heart. If you choose to face Vincent, you must do so alone. He waits for you inside the house. I, too, am there. It is why I can reach you now. Vincent holds me hostage. He waits to see you through to the land of the living. To force you to go.”
