Ascent: Book 3 of the Scorched Trilogy

by Lizzy Prince

  “Talk to the marked one. He knows these things.”

  “Who is the marked one?” my voice cracked as the words echoed around the small cavern, and Áine’s form shimmered in and out of existence.

  “You are the balance now Annie. You have the ability to stop my sister. It’s a part of you.” She smiled sadly at me, and I almost threw a handful of dirt at her, but she was gone before I could make my frozen fingers form a fist.

  “Shit. Shit. Fuck. Oh shit.” My throat was as dry as the damn Sahara as I tried to swallow down the terror bubbling up inside of me.

  She was gone, and I had no clue how the hell I was supposed to stop her sister from destroying the world. Just that this damned responsibility had somehow landed in my lap. What the fuck, universe? I didn’t have enough jacked up things going on? You had to throw one more catastrophe on my lap?

  I didn’t know how long I sat there, still on my knees, afraid to move because I hoped she’d be back. It was the vibration of my phone on the dirt floor that finally jerked me back to reality. Grabbing my phone, I slowly pushed myself up off the ground and stumbled out of the Mound, halting just outside the entrance as a fierce wind whipped across my face, reminding me that I was in a short sleeve t-shirt, a pair of dirty jeans, and soggy socks that felt a little stiff as though they had frozen.

  “You couldn’t have dropped me back off at Roark’s at least, Áine?” I thought bitterly as I looked around. I had no idea how the hell I was supposed to get back to his place. The phone in my hand vibrated again, and I saw a text message come in from Munro. My phone wasn’t set up for international calls, but apparently, I could still get texts. Let’s hope I could send them too.

  Munro: Where are you??!!

  Me: I’m at the Hill of Tara. You need to come get me.

  The little dots indicating that Munro was typing appeared to cycle forever, and I got the sense that he was writing and deleting a lot of different responses. I finally gave in and sent him another text.

  Me: Whatever you’re typing and deleting, the answer is yes, I am an idiot, but this wasn’t my fault. Just come get me, and I’ll explain everything.

  Munro: We’re already on our way.

  There was no way I wanted to stand next to the Mound of the Hostages to wait for them. I felt too exposed and was just waiting for someone to drive past and arrest me. Not to mention the wind was killing me. Crossing over the damp green lawn, trying to avoid the sheep poop that was liberally scattered, oh, everywhere. I finally made it to the little gift shop, miraculously managing not to step in any poop. Trying to stay out of sight, I shivered violently as the wind buffeted me from every damned direction.

  I heard the crunch of tires approach before I saw anyone since I was hidden around the corner. I poked my head around the building just enough to get a look at the car, praying the whole time it wasn’t the police finally coming to arrest me.

  “Oh, thank God,” I mumbled between teeth chatters and hobbled over to the van with stiff legs.

  Ryan was driving with Munro riding in the passenger seat, but he was out of the car before Ryan came to a complete stop. He ran over to me, wrapping his hands around my arms and rubbing them briskly as if he could generate some heat in my numb limbs.

  “Annie? How in the hell did you get here?” His face was stern, but I could tell he was worried as his hand settled on my back to help guide me into the van.

  “I’ll tell you as soon as I get warm,” I said, shivering uncontrollably.

  Warm air blasted over me as I got in the van, and I almost wept as my skin started to prickle like I was being stabbed by a thousand needles. But I didn’t care, I was just so happy to be out of the cold. Ryan turned in the driver’s seat and gave me a look that was just as serious as the one on Munro’s face. “Are you okay?”

  “Just frozen,” I said. My whole body shaking as I peeled off my socks and dropped them in a soggy pile on the floor.

  I fumbled trying to buckle my seatbelt but managed to click it together after a few quivering attempts. I brought my feet up on the seat so I could cover them with my t-shirt and warm them with my hands. Munro didn’t get back in the passenger’s side but crawled in after me so that he was sitting on the bench next to me. He pulled his sweatshirt off, revealing the barest glimpse of his stomach as his shirt lifted with the movement. Even in my numb, disoriented state, I couldn’t fight the little rush of warmth that enveloped me at the sight.

  “Here, put this on,” he said and before I even had a chance to grab it, he was unbuckling my seatbelt and pulling it on over my head. Normally I would have told him that I was fully capable of dressing myself, but right then, I wasn't sure I could. My body had locked up in reaction to the cold, and I couldn’t seem to lift my arms away from my body.

  Munro made quick work of dressing me in his sweatshirt, and I sighed happily because it still held the heat from his body. His scent of sandalwood and rain drifted up from the clothing, and I wanted to burrow down inside of it. Munro flipped the hood up to keep as much heat in my body as possible and grabbed my feet, shifting me slightly so that they landed on his lap. He lifted his shirt and placed them on his hard stomach like a fucking masochist.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Munro groaned when my popsicle feet hit his flesh. I almost laughed but my jaw may have been too frozen to move.

  The trickle of electricity that always flowed between us grew warmer, and I got the sense that Munro was using his magic to help warm me up. His element was fire, so maybe that was something he was able to do. I’d have to ask once I got use of my body back again.

  “Are you warmer?” Munro asked quietly, and I wondered if I’d actually dozed off for a moment.

  The warmth of the van and from his body after being so cold for so long made me drowsy, and I felt lethargic and slow. My tongue was thick and heavy in my mouth as I tried to answer him.

  “I am, thanks.” There was almost a slur to the words like I’d been drinking, but I think I was just that tired.

  “What happened, Annie?” Munro rubbed my feet as he asked his question.

  Ryan’s head tilted a bit in the front seat even though he didn’t take his eyes off the road.

  “Well, it sounds crazy, but…” I cleared my throat because it did seem nuts. “I was transported or teleported or magicked, gah, I don’t know what to call it. I was magically brought back to the Mound of the Hostages. I felt like there was something calling to me from there earlier in the day, but I’d ignored it. With everything that happened,” I said quietly with an apologetic cringe.

  Munro just looked at me like he didn’t understand what I was saying, and Ryan had a similar expression from what little I could see of his face. I powered through with my explanation.

  “I woke up on the grass in front of the Mound. There was this light inside of the cavern—”

  “You went in?” Munro said sharply, his hands squeezing my feet tightly in reaction.

  I shoved my hands inside the hoodie pocket and wished I had a hot cup of coffee. I blinked my heavy eyes. “I did. I could sense that whatever was in there didn’t want to harm me.”

  “How could you know that Annie?” Munro said on a sigh.

  “I just did, Munro. And when I got in there, Áine was inside.” I stopped giving them a moment to process what I’d just said. Ryan responded first, after almost a minute of tense silence.

  “Áine? As in one of the sisters?”

  “Yes. She’d been waiting to talk to me. To tell me things.”

  Munro’s grip loosened on my feet, and one of his hands moved up to my ankle, gently caressing the skin there.

  “What did she tell you?” he asked just as we pulled up at Roark’s place.

  “Let’s get inside first. Then you can tell us the rest. I’m sure everyone else is going to need to hear it too,” Ryan said as he turned off the car and twisted in his seat to look at me.

  We got out of the van, and I scampered to the door to the steps, my bare feet protesting
the frozen ground after having been warmed up in Munro’s hands the whole way back. When we got up to the apartment, everyone was waiting for us in various stages of sleepy wakefulness. Mari was pacing back and forth. Butch was reading a book, although his head was bowed so he could easily have been sleeping before we’d walked through the door. Lola had her head on Theo’s shoulder, looking pissed as usual, and Theo just looked like a zombie. I knew the feeling only too well. He may have even been sleeping with his eyes open. Huh.

  Roark was in his kitchen drinking something out of a mug, looking bored. I contemplated stealing it from him because it looked warm and therefore delicious, even though I had no idea what it was. I resisted though, since Roark seemed like the kind of guy who might punch you if you looked at him wrong. And with him, I’d guess one punch was a knock-out.

  “Annie!” Mari quickly closed the distance between us and wrapped me in a bone crushing hug. She had my arms pinned so tightly to my sides that I could barely reciprocate and ended up giving her little pats on her sides with my hands. They probably looked like little flippers waving around as she squeezed me.

  “What happened? Where are your shoes?” she said with a disapproving look that only a mother could give.

  Ryan ushered us into the main living area. “Let’s sit down, get Annie some blankets, and maybe something warm to drink. And then she can tell us what happened.” He quirked an eyebrow in Roark’s direction, who just rolled his eyes as if this was all a huge inconvenience.

  I caught the group up to the point where I’d stopped telling Ryan and Munro my story in the van. Roark brought over a steaming mug of coffee. He’d been listening from the kitchen, initially feigning disinterest, but I’d seen his back stiffen once I’d started sharing details.

  “It’s all I have,” he said gruffly as he handed me the cup. He was looking at me with a bit more interest since the details of my night had started unfolding. I thought he might leave the room, but he settled into a large armchair like he was invested in the story now and had to find out how it would end.

  “So what, she just waved her wand and poof, you popped up wherever she summoned you?” Theo asked, stunned by the events of my night.

  “I have no idea Theo,” I said rubbing my eyes. They were starting to itch because I was so tired.

  “What happened once you went inside the Mound?” Mari prompted, getting us back on track.

  I wrapped my fingers around my mug, soaking up the warmth. Munro was sitting next to me on the couch, and I leaned into him, needing the contact. “She told me that I needed to stop her sister and that we needed the lia fáil to do it.”

  Roark grunted, and I snapped my head in his direction, but he was pretending he hadn’t made a noise, even going so far as to yawn widely like we were keeping him from his beauty sleep. I narrowed my eyes at him, taking in all of the tattoos that covered the skin of both of his arms, and from the bare amount of skin I could see on his chest, it appeared that was covered as well.

  “Lia fáil? Did she tell you how to find them?” Munro asked, rubbing the back of my neck, not even making a dent in the tension coiled there.

  “What are the lia fáil?” Theo asked, sounding confused, and Lola gave him a look that told him to be quiet. “What!? Does everyone know what they are but me?”

  I shook my head at him. “Don’t worry. I didn’t know much about them until an hour ago. Áine told me there was a sword, spear, cauldron and a stone. We know where the stone is, because that’s where Cailleach was buried, but I have no idea how to find the others.”

  Ryan was sitting forward with his hand on his chin, looking almost comically like Rodin's sculpture, The Thinker. “She didn’t tell you how to find them at all?”

  “No. The only thing she said was that we needed to talk to the marked one.”

  I swore I heard another grunt from Roark’s direction and turned to look at him and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ryan roll his eyes before he also looked at Roark.

  “What am I missing?” I asked, looking between the two of them.

  “Care to share, Roark?” Ryan asked with his eyebrows raised.

  “Not particularly, Ryan,” Roark said dryly. He was such a kick. He was sitting with his ankle crossed over the knee of his other leg with his arms crossed. I was pretty sure he was trying to be intimidating, and it was working. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to hear whatever he had to say.

  I took in all of his tattoos and had an epiphany that seemed brilliant in my head, and then I immediately felt dumb for thinking it. My sleep-deprived brain didn’t seem to catch on in time because I blurted out, “Are you the marked one?”

  Half of the eyes in the room got large and round with surprise while the rest made their way to Roark’s direction as though I’d just made an astute observation.

  “Fuuuuck,” Roark said as he scrubbed his hand over his face. “Why the fuck did I let you people in my house?”

  Okay, seriously, who was this dude? How did Ryan and Munro know him, and why was he such a dick? Yeah, sure, okay, a whole passel of people showed up on his doorstep in the middle of the night, looking for a place to crash and shower. Granted, we were bringing with us a mess of ancient evil threatening to destroy the world. And maybe I was drinking his coffee but come on. There was a resurrected mummified evil witch roaming around Ireland, doing God only knew what. That alone should cut us some slack.

  “Apologies for inconveniencing you, but I was literally plucked from my sleep and transported twenty miles away. By a ghost. Who wants me to kill her evil twin sister. So, sorry if our shit is keeping you from your beauty sleep, but do you think you could possibly be bothered to tell us what it is you know? Because it’s pretty obvious that you know something.”

  Munro chuckled next to me so quietly that I mostly just felt it and was sure no one else could hear it. Roark was shooting daggers at me with his eyes, but I swore I saw the edges of his lips quirk up in the barest impression of a smile.

  “You’re plucky.”

  “No, I’m fucking tired and jet-lagged. Can you please just tell us what you know.”

  Mari reached over and gave my knee a little swat. “Language,” she admonished, and I rolled my eyes at her but smiled to show I didn't mean it. This whole situation was growing more and more ridiculous by the minute.

  “I’m going to go back to sleep unless something else interesting is going to happen,” Theo said with a huge yawn. He was sitting in the corner with Lola at his side and somehow managed to maneuver so that his back was to the room, and he was laying down with his face in the cushions of the couch. There were the soft sounds of snoring within a minute, and I shook my head amazed that he could manage to sleep through any of this.

  Everyone slowly turned their gazes back to Roark who looked more irritated than anything. He threw up his hands and shrugged his shoulders. “Fine, whatever. Yes, I’m the marked one.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It’s none of your Goddamn business,” he snapped back, but there wasn’t a lot of bite to his bark.

  Munro shifted next to me, his fingers resting on my neck. “Roark, do you know much about the lia fáil?”

  At this, Roark leaned back in his chair with an exasperated sigh. Munro asking that question directly cut through all of the bullshit and Roark’s dancing around giving a straight answer.

  “I do. And I know where at least one is hidden.”

  Chapter 7

  “They’re real?” I said and immediately felt stupid for asking that question. I’d just been launched across space and time to a different location where I’d talked to an apparition who’d told me the lia fáil were needed to stop her half-fae, resurrected, mummified, creepy-ass sister. Why would now be the time I started questioning if things were actually real?

  Roark looked at me as though he were waiting for me to finish my mental debate, and the small smirk on his lips made me think he could hear every word of my internal monologue.

  �
�Fine, don’t answer that,” I snapped. “Are they really from the Fae?”

  Roark gave me an assessing look. “That is a much better question.”

  “Jesus, Roark, stop being a dick. What do you know about them?” Ryan bit out in exasperation.

  Without bothering to look at Ryan, Roark pointed a surprisingly elegant finger at my arm. “Do you know what that is?” he asked instead of answering Ryan’s questions, and I heard a frustrated noise coming from Ryan’s direction.

  I still had Munro’s sweatshirt on, but I knew where Roark was pointing. He’d called me out on the mark earlier in the night when we’d first arrived. Only we’d been too shell-shocked and tired to do anything but go to sleep and I’d been able to avoid discussing the mark. Munro’s fingers, which were still brushing gently against the back of my neck, paused with the question. Lola leaned forward slightly, like things were just starting to get interesting. Mari frowned and looked worried while Butch gazed down at her with a similar concern stamped all over his features. All while Theo snored softly from his corner of the couch.

  There was a palpable tension in the room after Roark asked his question, and I was uncertain how I felt about it. One on hand, this was obviously someone Ryan and Munro knew well and were comfortable sharing our secrets with. On the other, he did seem like kind of an ass. Knowing that we really didn’t have much of a choice if we wanted to find the lia fáil, I pushed aside my misgivings and decided to put all my cards on the table.

  Pushing up my sleeve, I bared my mark, displaying my arm so that he could see it clearly. “I know it’s my family’s mark and that I got it from using soul magic.”

  There was a flare in Roark’s eyes, like he approved of my statement. But then he narrowed his eyes and dipped his head while his eyes stayed locked on me. “There are many stories of the two sisters, and we will likely never know what parts are true, but the lia fáil make an appearance in most of the tales.” He paused, rubbing his hands together like he was excited to tell this story.