Page 24

Damon

K it found the small lever that opened the hidden entrance.

A false door with a stone facade groaned in protest as it pulled from its moorings. Slowly, it screeched open, revealing a square hole that opened into an unyielding darkness.

That black, gaping maw filled me with a sense of dread. It had my stomach dropping out while the metallic taste of fear coated the back of my tongue.

A sickening wave of familiarity washed over me. The pressure in my skull, the weight I’d come to associate with the barrier Chang had forced between my true memories and the reality I’d accepted for so long, gave a little more.

“…safe now…you’re safe…”

The echo of that voice, familiar to me but not , drifted to me from the black fog of hidden memories and I shoved it aside. There would be plenty of time to analyze all that shit later—or never. Never sounded pretty fucking good.

Whatever had happened in there was long past and no matter what it was, it changed nothing.

Whatever had happened in there…

Squeezing my eyes closed, I blew out a breath and accepted that knowledge. I’d been here before. At some point in my past, I’d been here—specifically, I’d been trapped down there .

And now I had to go into that black hole again.

I wanted to turn around and get as far away as I could and drag Kit with me.

I’d never relished being underground. Wolves could build the dens into caves and cats could go to ground wherever they had to, but after spending weeks trapped in the one where I’d been after my father died, even an open-air cavern was too closed-in for my liking.

But I’d never considered myself claustrophobic.

Now, as I stood at Kit’s side staring into that darkness, I came face to face with reality—I was fucking terrified.

A cold bead of sweat trickled down my neck as I eyed the dark, empty square.

Everything in me screamed not to do it.

I didn’t know what I’d find down there—

Liar.

It was the echo of the boy I’d been.

Sidik .

It was his voice saying that. His voice calling me out.

Because he knew why I didn’t want to go in there, he knew why sweat slicked the back of my neck and my hands.

He knew why my stomach was in knots.

One of those resurfacing memories rose up to haunt me.

“You will find out soon enough .” Those words spoken to me by a beautiful woman with cold malice in her eyes. It seemed crazy that I hadn’t recognized her when I saw her decades later. But then I’d been made to forget Reshi. I’d hated her instantly—a bone-deep loathing instantaneous from the second I’d laid eyes on her.

I closed my eyes. Not now . I didn’t have time for this.

The whisper of air currents stirring over my skin made me realize Kit had moved away from me.

I lunged for her but it was too late.

She’d already stepped forward into that dark, suffocating maw.

“Wait,” I growled.

She glanced back over her shoulder, the blackness cloaking her like a shroud. A frown creased her brows as she studied me. “What’s wrong?”

Blood roared in my ears. My heart crashed against my ribs so hard I was panting.

What’s wrong… ?

A taste I couldn’t describe crawled its way up my throat.

Not able to explain but unwilling to lie, I shook my head.

She glanced back down into the darkness.

“I have to go,” she said. The words were quiet and I got the feeling they weren’t even directed at me.

A prickle rolled over my flesh and I dragged air into my lungs.

A scent came to me, followed closely by another, and another…each one made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end.

As if she realized something had unsettled me, she met my gaze, eyes huge and dark in the pale oval of her face.

“You can wait up here,” she said.

“I’m coming.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it, offering a nod a few seconds later.

Holding out her hand, she waited for me to accept.

I hated how hard it was for me to close my fingers around hers, how hard it was to take the first step.

Side by side, we ventured down onto the first wide, roughly-hewn step.

Foul, fetid scents clogged my nasal passages. My cat recoiled, hating what we tasted in the air but I forged on, labeling each scent as I went.

Death—old bones.

Decay—dead bodies, but not as old as the bones.

Blood—not yet old enough to have been faded by the sands of time.

Other scents—gut-turning and awful.

People hadn’t just died here.

They’d suffered.

Under those scents lay something else and it made my skin crawl. What is that… The leopard inside hissed and snarled, back arched as the scent filled both of us with revulsion.

I took another careful breath and rolled the air around on my tongue, trying to break it down. I almost had it. Almost…

“…know…I know …”

Kit’s erratic whisper cut through the noise in my head, drawing me out of myself. I tightened my hand around hers. “Kit?”

Kit’s breaths came hard and fast and her fingers tightened around mine.

She jerked.

Okay, so she hadn’t been talking to me. This wasn’t the first time she’d done this since we got here, but she wasn’t talking to Lemeraties and there was nobody else around.

I didn’t expect a response, but I asked anyway. “Are you okay?”

I got an answer and it wasn’t one I liked.

“That blade—Death. He knows this place.”

It was a hushed whisper and only the lack of fear kept me from baring my teeth in fury. That fucking blade—it had tried to take her over before and it had freaked Shanelle out so bad, she’d gone white just trying to describe it.

“What do you mean, he knows this place?” I asked.

“The…he…” She stopped and blew out a breath before looking at me. “I’m not getting the full story, but I think Madae— Arsay tried to recreate the sort of soul-bonded weapon Lemeraties made. There’s an actual soul inside the sword, Damon. And he’s awake . He woke up about the time we arrived on the island. He’s not like my other weapons—he never has been. But I didn’t realize how different he was until he… woke up here. On the island.”

“So…Arsay wanted to make a cursed blade and she killed a guy to do it.” It didn’t surprise me. “I guess I’d be pissed, too.”

She bit her lip and looked down.

Dread gripped me and I followed the direction of her gaze, wasn’t surprised to see the damned sword in her hand.

I stiffened at the sight of it, regardless, because something about it had changed . The air around it rippled, like waves rising from concrete on a hot summer day, but this was charged with magic, something arcane and ancient. I’d almost say it felt witch-like but it was rougher even than that and witches already had a very basic, primal power..

“Kit?”

She nodded. “I know. I feel it, too. He was forged here—made in misery and suffering. She shoved him into a blade, trying to copy what Lemeraties and Charmian did when they bonded Lemeraties’s soul to the blade when Lemeraties made her oath. Arsay perverted it—she managed similar magic, but you can’t force that sort of oath. It has to be willing and come from the oath-giver only. She ended up cursing him instead and it’s driven him crazy.”

Gaze lifting to mine, she added, “She stole his life and cursed him to be trapped in here. That’s why he’s always felt so wrong—why the power in the sword always felt so off to me.” There was mourning in her words.

“You know who he is.”

Her throat worked. “If I’m right, he is Volund the Smith…also known as Wayland.”

A deep, resonant tone sounded in the air—like funereal bells—rising in the air before fading. It carried the weight of misery and wrath, making my chest ache before it faded.

And the sound came from the fucking sword .

Kit clenched her teeth and looked at the blade. “It is him.”

“I know that name,” I said, the words coming out rough and gritty. “Not Volund, but I’ve heard of Wayland.” We’d kicked around Europe for a couple of years before continuing onto North America and that name still carried weight in Germanic folklore. “I didn’t know he was real.”

Kit shot me a reproachful look and I rolled my eyes.

“He was real. Is real.” She hefted the blade and held it out in front of her, the flat balanced on the palms of her hands. “He’s been waiting for revenge, all this time. Just like Lemeraties. He recognized me the moment I found him. He…” Her full lips twisted and she darted a look at me. “He tried to take over the first time I touched him. He was still half-asleep otherwise he might have succeeded and it unsettled me enough that I kept him locked up and warded.”

Reaching out, I let my hand hover over the dull gleam of the blade.

“Can this kill her?”

It flared, bright as a supernova.

I flung up a hand out to shield my eyes. When my vision finally cleared, it was to find Kit still standing there and she had a smug little smile on her face.

“He says yes,” she told me. “He almost managed it when he was alive and his magic has only grown more potent while trapped inside this metal prison.” With a shrug, she added, “Those are his words, not mine. He’s been waiting for a chance just like this.”

There were a thousand questions I should ask.

Kit swung her head around and looked down the steep, hand-hewn steps. “I doubt we’ll find anything alive here. But we have to look.”

Another gust of wind kicked up and came whistling up toward from somewhere in the darkness below and it carried a scent on the current. I recognized it and it made my skin crawl.

But I said nothing. It was faint and I could be wrong.

“There’s another entrance to this place,” I told her, my voice gritty. “It might explain how people gained entrance to her room without anybody else knowing about it. We should find it.”

The steps gave way to a sloping downward tunnel before opening into natural underground caverns. The island’s natural topography had likely drawn Kit’s earlier ancestors here—the network of tunnels and interconnected caves would have made a solid shelter while they worked to build the more permanent settlement situated aboveground.

But that left these tunnels and caverns vacant. Had Arsay discovered them on her own or had she learned about them through Fanis?

No. That didn’t make sense.

Arsay would have already known, wouldn’t she?

If she’d had something to do with the sword—

Kit went rigid at my side, freezing in front of a deep, natural depression in the stone walls before us. It had been outfitted with metal bars in the front, forming a primitive prison cell. She peered into the gloom and I moved closer to see what had caught her attention.

A mummified body.

A deep, sonorous noise emanated from the blade, growing louder and louder until it made my teeth ache. My nose started bleeding. My ears popped, following immediately by a sudden, sharp pain as my eardrums blew.

“Stop!”

I barely heard Kit’s pained exclamation, the sound muffled thanks to the damage done to my auditory pathways.

Swearing, I tore a strip of material from the bottom of my shirt and wiped the blood from my face, coughing to clear it from my throat and nasal passages. Spitting the mess onto the cavern floor, I turned to Kit. My ears were healing and I could mostly hear although the sound of her heart, frantic and skittering, was more muted than normal.

There was another sound in the distance, subdued by rocks and distance, by unmistakable all the same. I checked the air again, hoping my senses had lied to me. But, no. It was the same scent I’d picked up earlier.

Fuck .

“Are you okay?” I asked. My own voice sounded distant and hollow. But I’d had my eardrums shattered before. They’d heal within the next ten or fifteen minutes. My concern was for Kit.

She gave me a dazed look but nodded. A trickle of blood seeped from her left nostril.

“You’re bleeding,” she said.

“So are you.” I tore another strip off my shirt and moved over to her, gently tilting her chin upward so I could wipe the blood away from her nose and upper lip. “How are your ears?”

“Ringing. But my hearing isn’t as sensitive as yours.” She looked down as soon as I’d finished. Frustration scored her voice. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Let me guess,” I said, wadding up the cloth and shoving it into my front pocket. “Those are his bones in there.”

She looked over her shoulder at the long-dead corpse. “Yeah. We need to take him out of here when we can. He deserves a proper burial.”

“Then we’ll do it. But let’s finish this.” Things other than blood clogged my throat as I offered her my hand and I had to clear it twice before I managed to speak. “Kit…I think we’re going to find something in here that neither of us are going to like.”

“I don’t like it already.”

“Yeah, but this is going to be…different.” I didn’t know how to tell her what I’d already scented. I wanted to be wrong.

Her gaze came to mine and the fading remnants of pain disappeared abruptly, replaced by a sharp and clear understanding. Her jaw went tight and her shoulders straightened.

Her hand tightened around mine, the callouses from a lifetime of sword-work rasping over my skin.

“We face it together, Damon,” she said.

“Yeah. Together.”