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Raphael moved cautiously inside, but with his vampire vision, the dark wasn’t an issue. Me, I had to improvise. I’d snagged a branch from the marsh and concentrated, using one of the fire cards to light it. The magic had to work uphill to keep the waterlogged wood alight. The light was dim, barely enough for me to see the area directly in front of me. If Raphael stopped abruptly, I’d probably knock into him.

The air pricked against my skin. Gooseflesh pebbled on my arms as we moved past the entryway. The magic was thick in the air.

At the first fork, Raphael didn’t hesitate to go left.

“How do you know your way around?” I asked, my words echoing off the walls.

He paused, briefly running his fingers against the wall. Could he feel the magic radiating off of the stone as I could? “All that matters is I do. Now, doexactlyas I do.”

He pressed a palm into the stone again, and to my shock, the wall rippled like it was made of water. On the floor, the stone lit up splashes of red and blue. He moved deftly over them. Each lit spot sparkled slightly when his foot bore down on it. He only touched the red ones.

I slid my hand against the wall, trying to find the exact spot he’d used. The stone was firm, but when I pressed, it rippled for me, just as it had for him.

But that wasn’t all.

The tingling sensation of magic moved to a faster vibration, like I was shaking even as my body stood still. Like the ripples moved from the wall into me.

Like something was waking up.

“Little dove,” Raphael hissed, snapping me from the sensation. “Stop dawdling.”

“I’m not dawdling,” I grumbled, matching my steps to the red spots. As my foot landed, sparks flew and then the area behind me darkened. The vibrations no longer filled my body. I turned back and lifted my torch to look, but the path behind us was back to normal. Since it reacted to me, it wasn’t Raphael somehow using magic to navigate, but rather the temple’s own magic.

He paused at the next intersection, as if considering.

To the left.

I wasn’t sure where the thought came from, only that it was sudden, strange, and certain, but a second later, Raphael shifted and went down the path to our left.

A lucky guess. That was all.

The hall was identical to the one before, except there were three levers planted in the stone. Here, once again, Raphael seemingly knew just what to do. He pulled the first and third one.

Nothing happened, but he began to walk forward.

“What was the point of that?” I asked. I wanted to get a closer look at the lever system, to see how it worked, but he’d have a conniption.

“If I didn’t do that, the floor would’ve swallowed us whole as we walked across,” he said tersely.

“Really?” I frowned. I knew objects could be enchanted, but only temporarily. This place likely had been uninhabited for centuries, so how was this magic still working?

“This is the temple of a goddess. The same way the prison swallowed magic, her templebreathesit.”

Greymere drove witches mad by blocking their abilities. How would a witch react to the opposite? They should surely be drawn to magic like this, yet the place was abandoned. The Monastery had taken over the place of most temples, utterly devoid of magic by comparison.

Raphael turned the next corner but didn’t advance. He stopped so abruptly I nearly hit him. Confused, I peered past his arm, trying to see.

There was nothing.

More accurately, from the torchlight, there was nothing directly in front of the archway but a massive dark hole.

“What part of the wall do you have to press now?” I asked.

“None. This isn’t a magical trap.”

I frowned. “Then how do we get by?”

He pointed to the right, and I leaned forward to see what he was looking at. At the very edge, jutting from the wall, was a small lip, maybe three-quarters the length of my foot. It ran as far as I could see.