by D. D. Miers
His lips formed a grim line. “I didn’t—but I hoped.”
If his magic couldn’t have been shared with me, I would have drowned. A shiver trembled down my body.
“Don’t think about it.” Aedan assured me. “It worked, that’s all that matters now.” He outstretched his hand just above the surface in offering. “Shall we?”
Hard as I tried, I couldn’t keep my lips from curling upward as I took hold and let him pull me beneath the water’s weight. Any remaining fear dissolved instantly as my hand rested in his.
Exhilaration sustained me under the crushing sounds of the waterfall. I held tightly to the rune our two fabled teammates had done nothing to earn. It was my prize, and I’d be damned if they tried to take this one, too. On the opposite side of the cascade, we reemerged, the sun now washing the land in the bright light of morning.
I breathed in deep, happy to have left the musty, dank air of the cave. Ronen and Darius lounged on the shore, their hair already drying while I’d nearly drowned.
“Did you get it?” Ronen was on his feet first, his attentions trained not on us, but into the water where he knew we’d be holding the rune.
“We’re fine, thanks for asking,” I snapped, causing Darius to laugh.
“Are you all right, Sloane?”
“I almost died, but here I am.” Apparently, I was bitter, too. We swam to the shore. Darius and Ronen both offered their aid in pulling me, and the rune that stayed firm in my grip, from the water.
“What do you mean, you almost died?” Ronen asked as he greedily eyed the rune I still refused to let go of.
“I ran out of breath. I nearly drowned.” I was going to blame Ronen and Darius for it until life truly did leave my body.
“Nearly drowned… Oh!” Ronen’s lips curled into a teasing grin. “Did your boyfriend finally kiss you?”
“Yes,” I retorted, even if it wasn’t entirely the truth. Regardless, it shut him up and ceased his ribbing as I snatched up my pack that lay at their feet. Un-cinching the top, I was about tuck the third rune inside when Darius halted me.
“What’s on it?”
I hadn’t really paid it any mind. I’d been far too preoccupied with the notion we’d found what we needed and could get out of that place. Flipping it over, I merely shrugged. There were a few lines drawn across it, the ends dotted with symbols that meant nothing to me.
“I don’t know. Another map of some kind?”
We huddled round the rune, dropping to our knees on the rocky shoreline. No amount of our peering at the rock seemed to make any sense of it. With how exhausted I was, I couldn’t imagine trekking all the way back to Inorah on foot to find our answers.
“Well, what now?” I asked, unable to halt the yawn that escaped my lips. I slunk away from the group, happy to simply lie down for a moment.
“Still not sure,” Ronen murmured, before I saw through the circle of their feet my pack being pulled open. In short order, all three runes laid side by side, mocking us like a lock we still couldn’t unlock.
Aedan sighed long and hard. I could tell the unknown frustrated him, and we only had so much time. “Should we just get it back to Caitrín?”
“No.” Ronen shook his head. “Well, yes. But wait just a moment, I think there’s something here…”
Their attentions poured over the stones, drawing my overwhelming curiosity. “You think what is where?” I asked as I shoved my nose back into the circle.
They’d set the trio up beside each other. Oddly enough, the engravings atop them seemed to intertwine, as if they made up a larger map of their own. The problem was now figuring out what it was supposed to mean.
“It almost…it almost looks like the old language,” Ronen murmured.
“The old language?” I asked in confusion. “What is that?”
“The old Fae language,” Darius answered as he began to read it aloud, or so I thought. I had no idea if the string of gibberish slipping from his lips was some ancient Fae language or Italian or Spanish. All I knew was Aedan’s brow lowered farther and farther as Darius continued.
“But, that’s—” Aedan’s protest was short-lived as we all jockeyed for a better look at the runes. The moment our hands touched the stones, the world around us tumbled out of control.
Any nausea I had ever felt prior was weak in comparison to the dizzying spin of my stomach. Blinded by a light brighter than the sun, I clenched my eyes shut and reached for something to cling to, but found my arms and legs flailing in a sea of emptiness. I was lost, no better than a lifeboat at the sea’s mercy amid a storm.
Then, suddenly, the storm halted.
Slammed down upon a surface as cold and hard as the stone on the shoreline, I reached for my head, uncertain if I’d bashed it hard on the ground beneath me, or if it simply throbbed from whatever magic had just exploded in my face.
“What the hell was that?” Every fiber in my body ached as I sat up, realizing with some trepidation that I no longer heard a waterfall. Instead, I heard urgent footsteps that forced my eyes open regardless of the throbbing that continued to assault my head.
In a room devoid of furniture, walls of iron bars closed me in, and Darius and Ronen ran out. They slammed the gates shut, and it took me a moment to realize they’d locked me in.
“What are you doing?” I screamed as I searched frantically for Aedan. He stood only a few feet from me, shock written all over his face. Yet, we were still separated by another wall of bars. We were imprisoned, in separate cells. In an instant, our prior companions set the locks into place.
“Ronen! Darius! How could you do this?” Though their eyes lifted in an emptiness that made my soul ache, they said nothing. I noticed Ronen held my pack, which apparently held all three runes.
“How could you do this?” My voice was shrill, my fears reaching new heights. They could kill me if they wanted. They could gut me and toss me to the wolves, but they still had Killion’s body, and I would not rest until he could, too.
Heels clicked down the hall, their persistent cadence pulling my attention to the same green eyes my brother had allegedly fallen for. If only he could have seen the bitch now.
“They’re doing what I told them to do,” Caitrín murmured far too smugly as Ronen handed over the pack of the runes we’d worked so hard to retrieve. The runes Fleur and Quinn had died for.
Enraged, Aedan grabbed at the lock and rattled it so severely the ceiling crumbled in wisps of dust. “You can’t just lock us up in here!”
Caitrín’s cold glare assured us they could and had. No matter how hard Aedan tried not to show it, I could tell grasping the iron burned his hands. I swore I felt his pain etched across my own palms.
“Caitrín…” I softened my voice, hoping a plea would work if anger did not. “We got the runes for you, so—”
“Yes, and thank you for that.” The kind woman I’d met when I’d been kidnapped into the group seemed to no longer exist. She’d played an act, and she’d fooled me well with her soft eyes and gentle heart. Now, she was cold and calculating as she turned a forced smile through the bars. “As soon as we figure out what to do with these runes you so graciously brought us, you won’t have to…be in there anymore.”
21
I ran at the gated door, pain slamming into my shoulder and splintering through my bones as I rammed into it repeatedly in a frantic attempt to escape. All the while, Caitrín paid me no mind, as if I were no better than dirt upon the sole of her shoe.
“Keep her alive for now,” she said with a nod in my direction. “Until we’re sure we don’t need her anymore. She’d be no good to us if we had to bring her back.”
“If you had to bring me—” The words clung to my tongue like tar as realization dawned. Caitrín and the others began to walk away, no regret evident at all. “You can’t do this!” I screamed after them, my voice echoing so wildly it made my ears ache.
Caitrín stopped, coolly looking over her shoulder. “I do believe I can, and I am. A
nd you—”
Aedan interrupted, hurt written on his face behind his scowl. “After all we’ve been through?” You’re going to tell me you changed sides?”
As shocking as this was to me, I imagined Aedan’s own sense of betrayal ran deep.
I wanted to avenge that hurt. “When I get out of here, I’m going to tell everyone what you’ve done. I’ll tell the world that—”
Laughter, sharp and cold, left Caitrín’s lips. “You’ll tell them what, exactly? Because I fail to see how anyone will believe you, given you are the traitor.”
Shock flooded through me, sharp and vivid, as Aedan growled beyond the barred wall. “You wouldn’t.”
“Ronen…” Caitrín smirked at the man who had yet to leave her side. “Who would the great people of Inorah believe first? Caitrín, Regent of the Secret Sect, or Sloane…an unknown human charged with betraying those she worked alongside, murdering her comrades, and hiding the runes for her own personal gain?”
“I hope that’s a rhetorical question,” Ronen snorted before simply walking out.
“I can’t believe you,” I yelled. “Any of you! Darius, please!”
Not even he wasted a second look as they all disappeared, leaving Aedan and me alone in our separate prisons.
“Even if we get out,” Aedan murmured, far more calmly than I could have made my own voice, “we’ll be considered traitors. No one will aid us. No one at all.”
“Unless she’s bluffing,” I spat, though I had no reason to believe she would be. Why else go through these efforts to merely lose it all in the end? Settling onto the floor, I pulled my knees toward my chest and wrapped my arms tightly around them. It was the closest I’d be able to get to an embrace, given a wall of bars separated me from Aedan, the only one in the place I could trust.
“Were they in on it, do you think?” My thoughts came out disjointed. “Fleur and Quinn, I mean.”
“I don’t know.” Aedan sounded so lost. He paced his cell, his eyes trained to the floor in some unreadable series of thoughts. “We have to stop them.”
“But stop them from what?” It made no sense to me why they’d done this. With a start, I jumped to my feet, my sharp inhalation enough to garner Aedan’s full attention. “She said I’d be no good if they had to bring me back. Does that mean she’s been…” The vision of the cavern full of bodies flooded my mind. It couldn’t have been far off from where we stood imprisoned, and it was where I’d last seen Killion’s body.
“No, that still doesn’t make any sense.” I couldn’t decipher why she’d have been the one to raise the dead when they’d stood directly in the path of what she’d wanted.
My breath left me in a heave as I returned to the cold floor. I could tell it would be a long and fitful night, were we to be trapped for that long. The cells were damp, quite matching that of the crypt itself. Perhaps we were in rooms dug into the ground, and that frigid, steady temperature would be enough to keep me from finding any restful sleep.
“We’ve got to do something,” I murmured. “I just…don’t know what.”
“We can’t do anything if we can’t get out of here, Sloane.”
“Yes, but…” Even if we could open the doors and waltz right out, I wouldn’t have had a clue where to begin. Not to mention the paralyzing fear that everyone would believe me some venomous traitor.
“She’s been different,” Aedan murmured, as if the offshoot thought would mean something to me.
“What are you talking about?”
“Caitrín. Something’s been different about her since… Well, since Killion died.”
Part of me almost wanted to roll my eyes. “Okay? So? That makes sense, doesn’t it?” Even if she had been some traitorous bitch all along, that didn’t mean she couldn’t have truly loved my brother.
“Well, yes…” Through the bars, Aedan settled on the floor across from me.
“Okay, so…what’s your point?”
“I don’t know yet,” he admitted, much to my dismay. “Just that she was off a little. Something was different. The way she spoke…her mannerisms.” He paused and shrugged. He was seemingly as lost as I was. “I just attributed it to Killion’s death, but what if it wasn’t?”
My eyes narrowed, dimming the already-dark space around me. “Okay. So, she was different. Was Killion? Beforehand?”
His moment’s hesitance left me worried until he shook his head. “No. Just Caitrín. What if something happened to her that made her that way?”
“What, like she was being coerced? Or forced to act a certain way?” I asked, entirely uncertain where his train of thought was going.
“Maybe. Maybe that or something else entirely. I mean, it seems a poor example, but your father clearly wasn’t himself. What if there are various levels of that kind of control?”
I nodded slowly, the pieces clicking into place, though I wasn’t sure I could trust them at all. “So if she was being controlled by Dark Fae who had something to do with this darkness and raised all those dead, then why leave the encampment for us to get through?”
“They may not all be connected.” Aedan slid closer to the bars, but was careful not to touch them. “And even if they were, wouldn’t it have seemed odd if they’d simply let us pass without trouble?”
My gaze drifted back toward the floor. I had so many questions, and no one to answer them. Yet, I wasn’t certain I truly wanted to know. Mainly, I wanted to know what had truly happened to Killion.
“Who was my brother with?” I asked with a start as my gaze snapped to Aedan’s. “The day he died, you said he was found at Nuxvar Pass, but he wasn’t with you. Who was he with?”
His expression narrowed before it again widened. “Caitrín.”
“Yet, only one of them died, Aedan. She came back alive, and pretended she hadn’t been there. Why?”
“She wouldn’t have killed him.” Aedan seemed utterly certain, and I trusted his word as simple fact. “So someone else had to. What if they’d managed to control her somehow? What if she’s no longer really her but being controlled by our enemies?”
My tongue felt dry as the desert sands. “That would mean we’ve just delivered the runes straight into enemy hands.”
22
“We have to stop them.”
Aedan was on his feet, rushing toward the barred door before I could protest. He barreled into it, the iron barely budging against the weight of him. Using his body like a battering ram, he repeatedly slammed into it. I could somehow feel the jarring pain behind every single motion.
“Aedan, stop!” I jumped to my feet and stared him down between the bars. “You’re just going to hurt yourself. There’s got to be a better way.”
Reluctantly, he stilled, his back toward me as he aimed to catch his heaving breath. “Who knows what they’ll do if we don’t stop them, Sloane. And how many people have no idea what’s right beneath their noses? They’ll change everyone, including me—and you.”
“I know.” I took another step toward him, the chill of the bars keeping me away. “But let’s think logically, okay? Beating ourselves senseless won’t get us through these doors. What about…your magic?”
He stared so blankly I wasn’t certain if my idea was outrageous or he was simply at a loss.
“The bars. I don’t know, heat them? Crack them? Stretch them?” I had no idea what the extent of his capabilities were, and science wasn’t exactly my specialty.
Aedan’s hands curled around a pair of bars. Immediately, his face contorted, pain making a mask of his skin.
“Aedan. Aedan, stop.”
He refused to let go, and I heard a loud creak of iron that set my heart racing. Yet, the longer I stared, the more I was certain nothing had moved at all. His muscles bulged under the strain without a single bit of progress.
With a great cry of frustration, he jumped back from the bars he’d so tirelessly tried to bend. His palms were raw and scorched, the fleshy red skin damp and bare to the world. It looked as if he’d simp
ly stuck his hands straight into a campfire, and held them there.
“We’ll find a different way,” I said, but his heavy paces around his cell told me otherwise. He wasn’t going to give up.
“I’ll be fine, Sloane. I have to keep trying.”
“Promise me,” I snapped, surprise at my demand jolting my eyes wide.
He turned toward me, his gaze softer than my own as he reached carefully through the bars and brushed at my cheek with the back of his hand. “I promise you, I will be fine.”
I reached toward his retreating hand, wishing I could hold it, but knowing it would only make him hurt worse. Maybe I didn’t have the strength of magic or huge muscles, but if I could just reach my arms outside the bars, perhaps I could pick the locks.
Unfortunately, the lock seemed well guarded by several extra bars. Still, I had to try. I reached out, but after a second, jumped back. My own skin scorched the moment it touched the iron, and my quiet yelp had Aedan staring in grave concern.
“What is it?”
“The iron…it burned me.”
Our eyes connected, and he urged me back toward the wall between us. “It must be the bond.” He settled his arms through the bars, the catch of his shirt and leather sparing him more pain. “Let me see them.”
Aedan’s palms were still blistered and burned, but was utterly concerned as he looked over the single stripes of scalded flesh on my own open hands. “It’s fine, really,” I murmured in a feeble attempt to convince him, but his head only shook in response.
“Just give me a moment, I think I can heal them.”
My lips parted in question, but I remained silent as his hands cupped my own, my palms facing upward. Warmth permeated my skin, his sudden flood of energy leaving me without chill in the freezing room. Seconds ticked past where I dared not destroy his concentration. Right before my eyes, my palms began to change.
The deepest burns faded slowly into flush pinks while the agony of burned skin ceased to exist. Somehow, with mere touch and concentration alone, Aedan healed my wounds. They were barely visible as the soft of his amber eyes pulled me in. He carefully slipped my arm through the bars over to his side.
