Evander
Water pours down the walls in steady, frigid streams. My head aches, and the smell of blood hangs thick in the air as I try to open my eyes for the fourth time in the last five minutes.
I think my skull might be cracked. I reach up to rub my throbbing temples but wince when I flex my hands.
My fingers are shattered.
“Syd?” I croak into the darkness.
“I’m still alive,” he replies groggily.
I open my eyes to slits. Faint light fills my vision. It’s enough to cause a searing pain to ripple through my brain. “Where do you think we are?”
“One-hundred-percent underground,” he answers shortly somewhere beside me.
I reach for him, unsure how far away he is, but the manacles binding each wrist to heavy chains only allow me to stretch my arms so far.
We’ve been here for a day at least. No food or drink has been offered. No one has come to see us or talk to us. The gaping wounds on my legs and chest from when we were brought into submission by the hellhounds itch, and my joints ache with fever.
We surrendered to give Kenna time to escape so she could find Brie.
We surrendered because we knew, without having to even talk about it, that we would be brought directly to Gabriel.
But right now, we’re weakening.
“You should have gone home,” I tell Sydney. “You didn’t need to get tied up in this.”
“I couldn’t just leave knowing how bad things were going to get.”
I slowly turn my head, every vertebrae singing in agony. “What do you mean you knew?”
In the fading light, I see him lying on his side a few feet away. His eyes are closed, and his mouth is open as he takes a ragged breath. “I saw something like this–an attack–a few months ago in my dad’s orrery.”
Sydney looks like shit–I’m sure I look the same, or worse–but I wonder if he might have been hit on the head harder than I have. “You see things in the stars?”
He coughs, then groans, murmuring something about ribs being broken. “Uh-huh.”
“You’re a mystic.”
“No, I’m not. I might see shit, but I can’t make heads or tails about what it means. It’s a useless, annoying gift, if I’m being honest.”
I have vague memories of my parents talking about King Isaac and his odd ability to read the stars. They chalked it up to him being a beast, one of the two guardians of the Moon Goddess.
But these traits are inherited, apparently.
“Are you willing to elaborate?” I ask, losing what little patience I have.
“I just knew I needed to be in Eastonia. Something pulled me here, and everywhere I go, Gabriel seems to go, too. Or, he wants to be there.”
I blink, unable to process what he just said. My head spins as I try to focus on Sydney, but his body goes fuzzy.
“I think we’re dying,” he says in a mere whisper.
“Likely,” I reply.
Silence swells between us, broken only by the water falling at our backs. Filthy, sulfur-scented water that stings when it touches my wounds, but in chains, I can’t move away.
“I don’t want to find her,” he says absently.
“Who?” Not Brie, surely. We’re not wounded and ill enough for Sydney to be giving up on his cousin’s infant daughter just yet.
“The woman from the ball,” he breathes. “My mate.”
I close my eyes and sigh. If I learned anything in my training as a Ghost, it's that a dying man will admit anything. It's a reckoning, a final attempt to lessen one’s burdens as death closes in.
I need to get us out of here, now.
“Why not?” I ask, just to keep him awake and talking.
More dripping water clouds the air between us. “Look at what you’ve been through for Kenna. What my parents and my aunt and uncle went through.” He takes another ragged breath, letting it out slowly. “Danger follows my family everywhere we go. I can’t put her through that. I won’t.”
“I’m sure your dad thought the same thing when he was young.”
He snorts a laugh, which is a good sign, but a door nearby wetly creaks open before he can reply.
Wordlessly, someone unlocks the manacles and lifts me up. My legs are worthless. I still can’t keep my eyes open as I’m dragged by at least three people out of the room. I hear Sydney groaning and hissing in pain behind me, which is a relief. He’s also been taken from the room, but to where?
The changing light behind my eyelids tells me we're being dragged down a long, narrow hallway. It eventually opens up into an echoing chamber where multiple conversations suddenly cease.
A low, cackling laugh I hear in my nightmares whispers through the air.
“It’s about fucking time,” I grumble, opening my eyes as far as they’ll go, which isn’t much.
Gabriel tsks, drumming his fingers on the remains of what looks like an ancient sacrificial altar. “Such foul language for a high born wolf. I guess you wouldn’t really act like a noble, would you? Having been essentially raised in filthy barracks.”
“Where the fuck is my daughter?”
“Your daughter?” he laughs, the sound like talons being raked down a chalkboard. “You mean the child stolen from my coven?”
“She was never yours!” I shout, but Gabriel just shakes his head.
“This is my coven. The women and the children they supply us are for me to use as I please. I would have let the child go, if you and your filthy blood mutt of a mate hadn’t shown interest in her. She must be very powerful if the royal family wants her, which means I need her.”
“She’s just a baby,” I say, my voice trembling.
“Our babies are just as powerful as adults,” he laughs, shaking his head. “But, you’re just a shifter. How would you know that? Silly me. Perhaps a demonstration is in order.”
My blood runs cold as he snaps his fingers and a thin, gaunt man appears, Brie shrieking in his arms.
“No!” Sydney shouts, wriggling in his restraints.
I watch in horror as the man lays my daughter on the altar in front of Gabriel. ‘Sydney, if you have other powers you haven’t mention, now would be the time to fucking use them!’ I scream down the mind-link.
* * *
Kenna
My powers surge. I have sudden tunnel vision as I look up at the ruins of the temple. It’s built into a rock face and sheltered by gnarled, dead trees. I can feel them–the Draven Coven. I can feel Gabriel’s power.
I close the compass and slide it into my pocket, then pull the hood of the dead Mystics cloak over my head.
I don’t have the mask. I wish I did, given I’m about to creep into enemy territory disguised as a mystic.
Thankfully, the entrance to the temple casts me in darkness until I reach a torch attached to the wall. I yank it free, wincing as a few fragments of embers sear my fingers, but edge down a wet, steep set of stairs.
It’s a terrible place to house what could be hundreds of people, based on the smell. Voices carry behind doors made of curtains on pieces of wood. Small fires crop up as I walk down what I believe might be the only hallway–leading to what, I have no clue–while people huddle against the sudden chill in the air.
I wish my mom would have hunted and destroyed every old ruin in Eastonia. It’s silly, of course. Most of the temples have been pulled from the ground and are now protected, turned into libraries and museums, or resumed being places of worship.
But for some reason, these temples resisted my mom’s Firestone powers.
I step over a pile of bloody, discarded laundry and wince, my nose crinkling. It smells awful down here. Horrible.
But I catch hints of… vanilla.
I almost gasp in relief, turning into a doorway. I lift the torch, careful to keep my face hidden, and feel my heart crack.
Blood coats the floor around two sets of chains and silver manacles. Evander and Sydney were here. I can still smell their scents.
Evander’s blood is on the floor.
Rage simmers to life as I slowly turn and walk out the door, finding myself face to face with two guards. I lower my head so they can’t see my face.
“What are you doing here, mystic?” one of them sneers. “Gabriel has been waiting for you.”
“Did you bring the princess?” the other asks.
“I didn’t need to. She is dead,” I say.
“Prove it,” one of them sneers. “You were supposed to bring back her head.”
Oh, fuck. I didn’t think of that.
Slowly, I raise my head, my face catching the light of the torch.
My shadows curl around the two men, strangling them before they can utter another word. They silently drop to the ground, motionless.
“Damnit,” I curse, reaching up to yank my hood lower over my face. I should have asked where Gabriel is right now, but he has to be nearby, right?
I follow Evander’s scent and walk down a rough, crumbling set of stairs leading into smoky darkness and through another stinky, filthy corridor.
I’m met by more guards, but they don’t question me. They simply open heavy, wooden double doors and usher me inside a huge, cavernous room.
“No,” I say, my throat closing around the word.
Evander, held by three guards with chains bound to his wrists, whips his head toward me.
“Kenna,” he mouths at the moment I lift my face to the light in the room.
Sydney looks over his shoulder at me with great effort. He looks horrible. He’s near death. Both of them are. Their wounds have festered.
What am I going to do?
But then I see Gabriel… and Brie. His hand rests over her stomach while she lies crying on an altar in front of him.
‘Kenna,’ Sydney says into my mind. ‘I can’t break us out. Not yet. I think we’ve been dosed with wolfsbane. I just need a minute to-to get my powers back. I’m close.’
“Well, how nice of you to join us. I was hoping to have just your head in attendance today, but this will do for now,” Gabriel says smugly. He motions to his guards. “Grab her–”
My shadow erupts around me, closeting me in shimmering, heatless silver fire.
“Let them go,” I shout.
Gabriel laughs, his eyes narrowing. “No.”
I could kill him. I could kill everyone in this room. But I don’t know how to protect Evander, Sydney, and Brie from my flames and shadows.
I need Evander and Sydney’s help to get her out, but they can’t get out of their restraints.
Dread settles heavy in my stomach. My powers flicker out. Gabriel motions to his guards, and Evander is shoved forward at the same moment Gabriel rounds the altar and pulls a blade from his belt.
“I’ll give you one single mercy before I kill you, Princess Kenna.” He toys with the blade as the guards force a thrashing Evander to his knees. “You choose. Your mate or this worthless baby who has no blood ties to you?”
Evander meets my eyes, pleading, begging me to choose her.
“I–” I try to get my powers to come back, but I’m in such despair that my powers only fizzle, little sparks springing from my fingertips.
Gabriel shakes his head, chuckling.
I hear the sound of gears groaning, and locks clicking, at the same moment Gabriel grabs Evander by the hair and slashes his blade across my mate’s neck.