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She let go once Cowboy gave her a firm nod.

Feeling the annoyed grumble already building in my chest, I scowled at the two of them.

“Me, next,” I informed Cowboy. I dared him with my eyes to disagree, but he didn’t.

He only nodded a second time.

When the rope went slack, he and Javi pulled it up quickly, and then I was climbing into the same harness. I pulled myself over the railing with a lot less of the nimble grace I’d seen Kiko use, balanced briefly once I was all the way over, my booted toes on the edge, and looked to Cowboy. Like he had with Kiko, he gave me a nod, no expression on his face.

I let go, and instantly, I was falling.

I didn’t fall fast, or very far, but it shocked me enough to get my adrenaline pumping. After the rope caught, Javi and Cowboy lowered me the rest of the way down. I stared around as the cave floor grew closer, but it was hard to see much with all of the torches still lit on the catwalk above, blinding my eyes.

My toes touched the rock, and I gasped a little, letting my knees give under my own weight, then catching my balance right before I might have fallen. Once I was solidly on my feet, I quickly began unbuckling the harness and stepping out of it. Theinstant I was completely free of it, the harness ascended rapidly back up to the walkway.

We were further down than I’d realized.

From below, I guessed the height at closer to forty feet, not twenty.

I only looked up at the bridge for an instant before my eyes turned back to the scene we’d witnessed from above.

I could see a lot more now, with one of theyissotorches re-ignited on the cave floor. A running stream ran by the “island” we all stood on, which wasn’t an island at all, but a section of the rock floor that met up with the jagged wall, and what looked like part of an abandoned dig. The flat area of the dig still had chalk markings on the walls, and segments partitioned out in grids made of wood and string, labeled with different-colored small flags.

I glanced at the high ceiling above, and remembered there’d been a cave-in followed by a partial collapse that drove all the scientists out. This whole area had been declared unsafe by engineers in the time since, yet here we were.

Black stood in front of me and to my left.

Kiko stood behind him, her gun out, aimed at where Brick and Nick had been struggling by the wall a few seconds before. The outcome of that hand-to-hand fight suddenly became glaringly clear as my eyes followed theirs.

Brick now gripped Nick by the throat, with Nick’s back to his chest.

The vampire king held a long, splintered piece of wood, what looked like part of one of the two-by-fours used to partition parts of the archeological grid, gripped in his bone-white hand. He held the sharp end of the wooden stake tightly against Nick’s chest, right over where his heart lived.

When I looked up from Nick’s chest, I found Brick smiling at me.

Blood still covered his chin and his shockingly white neck, and when he smiled, his fangs were coated in blood, too.

He winked when we met gazes, but I didn’t see any humor in that stare.

“What is the human expression?” Brick drawled in his deceptively lazy voice. “I brought you into this world, young man, and I can take you out of it?”

Black, who also had a gun aimed at Brick, took a half-step closer, but stopped when Brick pressed the wooden stake harder to Nick’s chest.

“Seems poetic, doesn’t it?” Brick drawled next. “Wooden stake to kill a vampire? While it doesn’thaveto be wood, despite the myths, hearts are a bit of a weak spot for our kind, I’m afraid, just like they are with yours.” He looked down at Nick, then at Jem, and the fury in his eyes struck me as real.

“…In more ways than one,” the vampire king hissed coldly.

“Let him go,” Black growled. “You harm him, and––”

“Yes, yes,” Brick interrupted, impatient. “Can we simply dispense with all of that, Quentin? You must have known I never would let it go, as we once discussed. That it was an unreasonable impossibility from the very start.”

“We helped you,” I snapped. “That stupid house in New York. We played your little game, and nearly got ourselves killed in thanks––”

“And you got a rather posh honeymoon in exchange, if you’ll recall,” Brick drawled. “And my, did my eyebrows go up when I gotthatbill. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you took advantage of an old romantic like myself with some of those extravagances.”

My jaw hardened more. “Butwhywould you do this? How does it possibly benefit you to start another war between our races? We’ve held to our end of the treaty for almost two years. We haven’t gone near your people since––”

“And then we found anewtear in the world,” Brick cut in, his red eyes warning me coldly. “Yetanotherdoor where your people were entering.”