by Elena Lawson
I knew my expression must be betraying most of my thoughts, but I couldn’t help it. I tucked my hands into the pockets of my jeans and my face heated. I wished I could just tell them I wanted them all the same way as I just had Elias. And if they were just a little patient with me, I fully intended to have each and every one of them.
Damn, did that make me a bad person? A…a hoe?
I grimaced at the thought. No. This was different. It wasn’t that I just wanted to…have sex with a bunch of different guys. I wanted more than that. Relationships. Ones that lasted—with each of them.
Though I was starting to truly think Draven didn’t feel the same way as I did about him. I bit the inside of my cheek. I could still keep him, though, couldn’t I? As a friend? That would have to be good enough.
“The run was fine,” Adrian finally said, breaking the tepid silence with his gravelly voice.
Cal clucked his tongue and lifted his head enough I caught the green glow of his eyes still shining—telling me his brother wolf was still simpering just beneath the surface. “The shifter has been around here a long time,” Cal supplied, and my shoulders slumped.
Oh. This was about the shifter they scented out in the woods.
Not about my escapades between the sheets.
I wanted to smack myself for being such an idiot. My blush burned brighter.
“We found her marks all around the villa. Even a few spots on the inside of the walls, but also as far as fifty miles away. Some of them were pretty old. Other marks—the ones closer to the villa, were fresher. Maybe a few weeks old. A month at most.”
She?
So, it was a female shifter, then. My heart ached for her if she was all alone out there.
“No sign of her, though?” I asked them, my gaze flitting to Draven as well, I knew he could track almost just as well as my familiars could.
Cal shook his head. “Nope. There were no fresh tracks or marks, either.”
“So then maybe she’s gone?” I offered, perching on the edge of the sofa nearest Adrian.
Adrian pursed his lips. “Maybe,” he acquiesced. “But I don’t think so.”
Cal inhaled deeply in an extended sigh and rose from the sofa, stretching. “The full moon is in three days,” he said, and his voice was hard when he spoke, his jaw taut. “We’ll see if she comes around. The shift can happen before the sun is even fully set if the shifter is still sensitive to the change,” he added. “So, you’ll be staying inside that day,” he said, turning his fiery gaze on me.
And I realized he wasn’t asking. His words were a command.
Adrian rose as well. “And all night, too.”
“We’ll take care of it if she comes within the walls,” Draven added, picking something out of his nails that looked suspiciously like animal fur. I wondered if he’d found a meal, then…
A fraction of a second later his words sunk in. “Wait,” I said, my brow furrowing. “Don’t hurt her, okay? If she comes around, she may just need help,” I implored them. “Guidance.”
“And she’ll have it,” Cal snapped. “But if she can’t be controlled, I won’t have her presence risking your safety. We’ll have to take care of it.”
A shiver ran down my spine at how easily he condemned one of his own for something as trivial as my safety—which, in case he hadn’t noticed has been threatened a lot lately—a shifter in the woods was the least of my concerns.
“What do you mean, take care of it?” I asked him, a bolt of dread curling around my spine—pooling in my stomach like acid.
But he didn’t answer, and all of them left the room in silence.
It was late. Much later than I thought it was. If the grandfather clock in the corner of the library was to be believed it was nearly midnight. Cal and Adrian were asleep upstairs—and I’d been considering crawling in with them and leaving my whole bed for Elias—wanting to feel the comfort of our witch-familiar bond soothe my riled magic and lend me strength.
I’d grown so used to having them near, when they left for their run, I’d felt their loss like a chunk of my soul was flying through the trees with them. But after what they said about the female shifter in the woods, I felt uneasy.
I didn’t think they would kill her, but what else could they have meant by take care of it? It was bothering me so much I couldn’t sleep, so here I was, near midnight and trying to work out the stupid riddle of sigils, incantations and drawings on Donovan’s parchment. The near twin to the one my father had tucked away in his journal.
Cross referencing it with the pages in the blood magic spells and sigils books wasn’t helping. There were tiny pieces that could have been related, but no way to definitively tell. Not for the first time, I thought maybe we should get some outside help…and the only person I could think of was Granger.
She was the Sigils Professor before she was Headmistress. And she was my friend. And she was planning to visit here at some point, anyway…but…after everything that’d happened, how could we put our trust—our faith—in anyone else.
Sterling and Donovan turned out to be monsters. I wouldn’t allow myself to think of Granger as being anything like them. But…what if someone she knew was like them and she decided to share this sensitive information with them? I knew the idea was far-fetched, but so was everything else in my train-wreck of a life.
Sighing, I took another pull from the open bottle of French wine I’d saved from the cobwebs in the wine cellar. It was sweet and tart, and though I’d never been a particular fan of wine, I could see why Elias liked it so much. After the first few sips, it went down smooth as silk.
I shoved the books away from me on the desk and leaned back in the chair. Maybe I should just try to get some sleep?
Elias might have some insight on the things we’d uncovered since getting here yesterday—I was actually a little surprised he didn’t want to get right to it. But I supposed a six-hour drive and a good hot shower would put anyone to sleep.
Almost without realizing it, my gaze fell on the closet across the room and I pressed my lips together, considering. Listening carefully for any movement upstairs, I rose from the chair and crossed the room, pressing the cabinet to open it before I could change my mind.
As my fingers curled around the smooth plate of hammered pewter, I shivered, feeling that same odd sensation run through me. As though the magic imbued within it was whispering to me. Caressing me.
My own magic wavered to life in my veins, drawing up through my heels and coiling up through my core as though it wanted to reach out and touch the mask itself. I would have been elated at the sensation if it weren’t for the sense of foreboding that came along with it.
If it weren’t for the fact the mask looked like something out of a horror film.
Pursing my lips, I shoved down the feelings of dread. It was just a mask. A creepy mask—a magically imbued creepy mask, albeit, but still just a mask. Besides, maybe you had to actually put it on to activate whatever spell it had attached to it since I’d already tried looking through the eye holes at all angles.
I tugged the elastic band from my wrist and pulled my frizzed-out hair away from my face, tying it into a knot at the nape of my neck to get it out of the way.
Here goes nothing. I lifted the mask, inhaled sharply, winced in anticipation, and slapped the cold metal surface against my face.
All at once the world fell out from under me. The world tilted up, blurring through the narrow slits of the mask until I was falling straight through the floor. If there was even a floor anymore. It was dark. A scent-less, sound-less, all-consuming dark that was so oppressing it made my ribs feel as though they would crack under the invisible pressure of it. My stomach lurched into my throat and I whined into the dark at the strength of the dropping sensation that wreaked havoc on my nerves.
My voice echoed back to me as though I were underwater, or in the depths of the darkest, deepest cave known to mankind.
I wrapped my arms around myself, my lips parted to sc
ream, but then I remembered the mask. It was the mask. If I just took it off…
I reached up to peel the thing from my face, but a split second before I could, the world came back into startlingly sharp focus. Solid ground materialized under my feet and my body, still buoyant from the lack of gravity, rebelled against the heaviness, crumpling to the cool tile beneath me.
Tile?
The floors in the library weren’t tile…they were warm wood.
And it wasn’t this cold in the library, either. Not with the embers in the hearth still pumping ambient heat into the room. Unless…this wasn’t the library.
Pulse thudding loudly in my ears with hands shaking from the aftereffects of adrenaline, I pushed myself back to standing, huffing through the cut-out in the bottom of the mask. It smelled of moss, dust, and cold stone with an undercurrent of something sweet.
I fell immediately back to my knees, almost unable to draw the strength needed to rise. I shook my head, trying to clear the fog, but it remained, and something heavy settled in my chest. When I reached out a hand to the wall to try to stand again, the feeling only worsened and drew my hand back as though burned. I craned my neck to get a better look around myself.
Wherever I was, I was far away from La Casa Rosa. I could feel the dullness, and the ache of the loss of my familiars that only happens when they weren’t anyplace nearby. I loathed that feeling. But for whatever reason it seemed at least ten times stronger than usual. Near painful.
I was in a stone corridor. Darkness behind me, and a faint, flickering, orange light ahead. The corridor itself was peaked at the top, and the stone spoke of age I couldn’t fathom. This place was ancient. A castle, maybe? Where the fuck was I?
Swallowing to clear the lump from my throat, I froze, breathless as I realized the culprit of the weigh in my chest. Running through the stone walls like veins in the body of a living thing was the telltale black shimmer of bindstone. The gems were a natural combatant to witch—and fae power.
And they could only be found in one of three places.
The immortal lands of Emeris, and Meloran.
And in the depths of Kalzir prison.
Testing the theory, I attempted to draw on my power, pulling as hard as I dared, but nothing came, nothing save for a strangled whisper of magic that died a mere second after it was born.
So, it wasn’t just the loss of Cal and Adrian that was making me feel so drained—it was this place.
My heart in a vise, I cursed myself. How the hell was I going to get out of here if I could portal back?
What had I done?
Traitorous tears stung at my eyes, but I chased them off with hard breath and pushed against my knees, finally able to rise from the dust-covered floor.
There couldn’t be bindstone everywhere. I just had to find my way to another chamber. One without the shining black gems adorning the walls like morbid black tinsel. Yes, that’s it. Just find your way out and then portal back.
Fuck, I hoped none of the guys had woken up since I left. I shuddered to think what they’d do if they found me missing. The villa would be torn apart by the time I got back.
Shut up, Harper, you’ve got bigger problems…
With knees still wobbling like Jell-O, I kept up a slow and steady pace forward, moving toward the wide space ahead where there was light.
The open maw of the hallway looked out onto a room unlike any I’d ever seen and I stopped in my tracks. My breath dying in my throat. Where the hell am I?
I blinked into the orange and white light. It was still dim in the cavernous space, but not nearly as dim as it had been where I’d landed back in the corridor. The room looked almost to be hewn from stone, itself. As though hollowed into the bowels of a mountain. Ice ran through my veins and I shivered at the chill of the place, my breath clouding in front of my face when I breathed hard enough.
The floor here was a patchwork of interlocking stones, laid in a spiraling pattern, the circles growing smaller and smaller until they reached the center where the gray stone ended and colorful tile-like stones began. They depicted an image, the edges trimmed in gold. A blood red rose with two gilded swords running through the middle, their sharp points protruding from the bottom of the bud.
The symbol of House Thorn. My family crest. Cyprian’s family crest.
My pulse pounding anew, I jerked my head in all direction, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. Hallways like the one I was standing in the precipice of were carved into the circular room the whole way around. There had to be at least forty of them, maybe more. And in the place almost directly across from me, set into the stone where there would have been one last hallway, sat a throne instead.
If you could call it that…I’d always imagined thrones to be great gilded chairs with high backs and cushioned seats. This was not that.
This was a stone chair sat atop a three-step stone dais. Though it’s back was high, it didn’t look to be even remotely comfortable. Matching bolts of crimson fabric ran down along either side of it, hung from somewhere far above.
Looking up, I found I had to squint into a bright white light. A hole was cut into the stone ceiling far above my head. Hundreds of feet high, and sweeping my gaze around, I saw that there were balconies above the corridors, too. Small single person outcroppings with little pillar-like railings where people could stand and watch the goings on below.
I shivered at the thought of being watched in this place and stepped a little further into the room to check each one—making sure there was no one there, allowing myself to breathe as I discovered I was alone.
When my gaze went back to the stone chair across the room, I noticed something that hadn’t been there before—or perhaps I hadn’t seen it?
Carved into the high backing of a chair was a symbol. It was difficult to make out from this distance, but I thought I recognized it, thought I couldn’t be certain where I’d seen it before. I walked a bit closer, trying to get a better look, my hands clasped together at my waist to stop their trembling.
Gritting my teeth, I squinted into the bright light coating the floor in a perfect circled around the symbol of House Thorn. Gasping, a bolt of shock raced up my spine and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. The symbol carved into the stone had begun to…glow.
Oh shit. Why was it glowing? Had I done something? Triggered something?
I searched the floor around my feet, looking for a stone that wasn’t like the others. Maybe I’d—
I almost didn’t hear the echoing footsteps over the rushing of my blood in my ears. First one set—to my right, and then another echoing from the opposite direction. There was no way to tell which of the corridors they were coming from.
As though shocked back to life, I darted back the way I’d come, my footfalls slapping so loudly against the hard stone floor that I cringed at every running step.
Shit. Shit. Shit!
I launched myself into the peaked stone archway and flattened myself against the wall, my breaths coming hard and fast. I tried to hush them, breathing heavily to subdue the racing of my heart, but as quietly as I could. The stone doorway was shaped so there were small inlets on the inside of the peaked frame. The space was small, but it would have to be enough to conceal me.
I was afraid if I made a run for it the opposite way down the corridor, I’d be seen fleeing, and I didn’t think that would be a good thing. I was definitely not supposed to be here.
The thudding in my ears and the rushing in my veins never subsided, but my breaths evened out enough I was no longer afraid someone would think there was a rabid beast down this corridor. I tucked myself into the small inlet, brushing up against cool condensation and grit. Ugh.
Peering around the carved stone frame, I saw two figures had entered the chamber. Both hooded and cloaked, facing away from me—facing the throne.
I bit the inside of my cheek, afraid that any second they’d feel my eyes on them and turn around to find me hiding—spying.
Mo
re footsteps sounded in the deeps. Echoing, rising. Within a few seconds, it began to sound as though there were hundreds—the echoing sounds ricocheting around the curved stone. Oh fuck. I sent up a silent plea to whatever gods would listen that none entered from the corridor I was now hiding in.
From my spot amid the shadows, I could see a portion of the room as they entered. Tens of them. All looking exactly alike. Hooded and cloaked in black—the same material as the cloak I’d found in my father’s library at La Casa Rosa. Obviously, it had been meant to go along with the mask—since each and every one of the people entering the chamber was wearing one.
All the same, plain, creepy, hammered pewter, shadowed beneath the long hoods of their cloaks, only visible at all for the firelight torches lining the walls a bit above eye-level. They threw a ruddy orange glow against the metal, making them look like devil faces in the dark.
What is this place? Who the hell are these people?
My heart in my throat, I began to inch slowly away from the open mouth of the entrance to the hallway. As the masked people entered the room, they all stationed themselves in front of the vacant stone chair. Facing away from me. If I was stealthy enough, maybe I could—
“Welcome,” a rich baritone voice broke the silence, putting an abrupt end to the hush of whispers from the figures in attendance.
I paused, unable to help myself. Whatever this was—my father had been a part of it. He’d been a…a member? Which had to mean it wasn’t bad, whatever it was, right?
Cursing myself, I moved as quickly as quietly as I could back to the small inlet and tucked myself safely away into its shadow. If anyone on the left half of the room looked directly at me, I was certain they would see me, but with all of them facing the throne, perhaps I could be a silent spectator, and none would be the wiser.
I blew out a calming breath and found handholds in the grimy stone to keep myself steady. The bindstone humming within it settled even more heavily on my chest, suppressing my magic so forcefully it made my stomach turn and head spin. As the sensations subsided, I was left with a feeling of emptiness—a void in the place where power once ran.
