Page 25

Kit

D eath— Volund had subsided into silence. I think we’d surprised him when Damon and I both agreed his remains needed to be taken off this island and buried, affording him the funeral he’d been denied in life.

But he was still there at the back of my head, looking out from behind my eyes.

My head felt damn crowded these days—the memories Lemeraties had shared with me, all the trauma I carried around, and now memories of a long-dead wizarding warlord smith tangled up in the mix.

I pushed all of it to the side as we moved deeper into the tunnel, the only light coming from the beam of my cellphone. It was a harsh, unforgiving light and we moved slowly so I could sweep it from one side to the other. Only a couple of the cells were completely empty. Most held old, decrepit carcasses so decayed only mummified corpses remained. The cold, damp conditions of the caverns had served to preserve the bodies surprisingly well—the scent of decay was strong, but not the way I would have expected considering how long some of these bodies had been down here.

And some had been trapped for centuries.

I could track the time period by the make of the weapons.

The cell closest to Volund’s held a warrior who still gripped an angon, a javelin used by the Franks in the Early Middle Ages.

Another showed somebody in rusted, ancient chainmail and the sort of sword that would have been used by the Normans when they invaded England in 1066.

Several cells held the rotted remains of aneira and the sight of them made my skin crawl. Their weapons whispered to me as I walked by, plaintive cries for peace or angry demands for blood.

Each successive cell held a more recent body.

It was bad—I’d known it would be.

But as we rounded a corner, the sound-muffling presence of the rock around us fell away and I picked up on something I hadn’t noticed earlier.

The ragged, erratic cadence of somebody breathing.

Startled, I sucked in air. “Damon—”

Damon reached out to grab my arm.

I swayed out of reach, a nagging sense of urgency pushing at me. How could somebody be alive down here? And who was it?

Running now as that urgency grew and grew, I dodged another swipe from Damon and shot him a look that was probably close to feral. “Don’t. Can’t you hear her?”

Her —

Icy fear spread through me.

My instincts had picked up on something that my conscious brain hadn’t yet processed and it had everything in me screaming. I rounded another bend in the corridor and came to a halt so swiftly, Damon crashed into me. Only his reflexes kept me from flying forward from the impact.

“ Damn it, Kit!”

I wrenched away from his hands and eased forward, my heart hammering in my ears. I smelled the foul stench of human waste and old blood. It turned my gut.

Tears burned my eyes and I impatiently dashed at them because I’d finally picked up on the cues my instincts had interpreted.

I hadn’t heard from her in weeks .

She’d left to spread Malcolm’s ashes and since then, nothing .

She never would have stayed gone so long, not if she knew Reshi was in the city. If Reshi had seen Doyle, the loathsome creature would have recognized him and she wouldn’t have risked that.

She wouldn’t have stayed away with Reshi coming for me . She’d planned to return after she scattered Malcolm’s ashes in the ocean, the only way we’d been assured he wouldn’t regenerate. And that wouldn’t have taken her long.

She wouldn’t have stayed away unless something kept her away.

I overplayed my hand, niece.

Thin light illuminated the cell, dripping down on her from a gas-fueled torch that looked like it had been rigged up sometime recently, if the fresh scrapes in the stone were anything to go by.

The light wasn’t very bright but that was probably a mercy because looking at her hurt .

Her long, muscled form had wasted away until she was skin stretched over bone.

Something about her silhouette was wrong and I moved closer, craning my head to study her when my mind suddenly supplied the data I’d missed in my horror.

She was missing an arm—her left arm. Her dominant arm, from a few inches above the elbow. The stump was poorly bandaged and as I gasped in horror, I caught the reek of gangrenous flesh.

Infection.

And it was probably killing her.

I stumbled backward and crashed into Damon.

He caught me, both hands gripping my biceps, steadying me and offering comfort at the same time.

My foot hit a small pebble and sent it skittering.

That small sound had Rana looking up, lashes lifting laboriously, as though even that took more energy than she had. And maybe it did. Her skin was sallow, cheeks sunken. She wasn’t even a shadow of herself, was less than a ghost.

But her eyes lit with faint, sardonic humor when she saw me.

“I knew you’d come,” she said, voice rasping. She licked cracked lips. “Just as I know you’re already working on a plan to get the people off the island.”

“The children have already been evacuated,” I said, holding back tears through sheer will alone. “We’ll get you out of there.”

“No.” Rana shook her head and heaved out a weak sigh. “I cannot fight. I will only slow you down. And she’ll know you’re here, Kitasa. She has spies among the people, even now. Leave me. I’m dying anyway.”

I looked at Damon but he was studying the cage door. “Back away from the bars, kitten.”

Rana swore. “Listen to me—”

There was a screech of metal as the bars protested.

Then the doorway gaped open. Rushing in, I sank to my knees next to her.

“Don’t argue with me,” I snapped as I pulled my canteen off my belt and lifted it to her lips.

Her eyes flashed fire—the sign of will almost made me laugh with giddy relief—and she took a sip of water.

Her gaze fell away almost immediately. “You should leave. Go back the way you came. There’s nothing here but me and dusty old bones.”

“Shut up,” Damon said, although there was no rancor in his voice. He crouched down next to us and eyed the badly done tourniquet. “Think you got a couple hours left in you?”

“Leave me,” she said again wearily. “You, Kit, the boy…you’re all that matters.”

A weight, leaden and foul, crashed into me as I swept my gaze up to meet Damon’s.

A muscle pulsed in his jaw but he averted his gaze.

She didn’t know .

My aunt didn’t know about Doyle or her mother—she didn’t know her son was in danger.

My stomach revolted and I swallowed, hard and fast, ducking my head so she couldn’t realize just how much I was hiding from her.

But I should have known better.

This was my aunt.

As the people here couldn’t hide their deep secrets from me, I couldn’t hide mine from them.

Her hand shot out and clamped onto my wrist.

“Kitasa,” she rasped.

A hundred questions lay in the back of her eyes.

And I didn’t know how to answer even the very first one.

Slowly, I covered her hand with mine. “Rana…please. We need you.”

“Let’s get her to the shore. The ship will be here soon and maybe Frankie can stabilize her,” Damon said, his voice gentle. He was just as gentle as he scooped her into his arms, her amputated arm facing outward from his body.

She let me go and grabbed onto his shirt, mouth tightening with pain.

“Scream if you want,” he said.

A sliver of her cool reserve reappeared and she sniffed. “Not likely, cat.”

“Where does the tunnel lead?” I asked.

“Go back the way you came,” she said, staring straight ahead.

“It will be quicker to go this way,” Damon told her. “I smell fresh air. How much longer until we hit the entrance?”

He didn’t wait for an answer, just started walking.

“Damn it, you stubborn fool, go back !” She all but shouted it and I heard the fear in her voice this time.

What was down here that she didn’t want us seeing?

I had to jog to catch up to Damon, because he’d started walking fast, like fire nipped at his heels. His eyes were far more suited to the dark than mine and he moved with unerring swiftness, disappearing around another natural curve in the tunnel before I reached him.

Sprinting to catch up, I nearly hit his back.

He’d stopped in the middle of the corridor, just as I’d done earlier.

“I told you to go back,” Rana said, her voice weary now. “Stubborn fool.”

We’d walked a fair distance and even I could smell the fresher air now. My gut told me we were heading east toward the mountains where the Lemera had lived. We couldn’t be far from the entrance.

But Damon wasn’t moving.

He stood motionless, Rana still cradled in his arms as he stared through the busted door of an empty cell. From the looks of it, it had been torn off its hinges.

The bars here were newer, made of something other than the rusty iron had that been used for the older cells. He eased Rana to the ground, then straightened and reached out, wrapping a brawny hand around one bar.

Smoke hissed up as his flesh met the surface. He didn’t pull away, even the air went acrid with the scent of his skin charring, the reaction caused as his body came in contact with the toxic silver.

“A shifter was in there,” I said, swallowing the grit in my throat.

When he didn’t answer, I tried to pull his hand from the bar. At first, he resisted and I wrenched at him with all my might, hard enough to rattle my own teeth.

“Let it go ,” I ordered.

His eyes were burning gold as he continued to stare through the bars, looking at something only he could see. But he let go.

“Damon?”

Slowly, almost mechanically, he turned his head and met my gaze.

“ I was in there,” he said woodenly.

“You…” I sucked in a breath and squeezed my eyes closed. “You were held here. Here ?”

Unable to stop myself, I shot Rana a furious glare.

Her eyes met mine. “I didn’t know. Not until he’d already broken free. They knew how I felt about people being held in these cells. I was off the island for six to eight months of the year during that time. Training with allies, what few we still had.”

“Rana never came down here,” Damon said in a distant voice. “I only ever saw a couple of people. Reshi was one of them—she made my skin crawl the first time I saw her. Some part of me recognized her even with this fucking wall…” He passed a hand over his scalp without touching it.

“You’ve remembered more?”

With a terse nod, he finally met my gaze.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

A muscle pulsed in his cheek and he averted his gaze.

Not knowing what else to say, I took his wrist and turned his palm upward so I could see the ugly wound there.

“It’s fine.” But his voice was so flat, so…empty.

It chilled me to the bone.

“Damon.” I touched his cheek with my free hand. “Stay with me.”

“Always.” A ghost of a smile danced around his lips but he wasn’t looking at me. He was still staring into the cell. “I remember sitting in there. She’d talk and talk and talk …” His lips peeled back from his teeth. “I don’t even remember the words, just her voice.”

A shudder wracked his entire body and he looked at me, some semblance of self returning to his vacant gaze. “The first time I heard her speak when she walked in on the Tribunal—I wanted to peel her skin from her bones. Everything about her presence scraped on my nerves—I wanted to make her suffer, Kit. I couldn’t explain it.”

Lifting his burned hand, I pressed a kiss to the base of his palm where the flesh was unmarked.

“And then the other woman…Fanis. Or Arsay, wearing Fanis’s skin.” His eyes went flat. “She didn’t come in often. Only every now and then to make sure I was still breathing.”

“Why did they take you?”

He bared his teeth at me. “At first, I thought it was to get to Chang. But…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. They…” He looked away, gaze flicking over my shoulder, then away before shooting back to lock on something directly behind me.

Muscles rippled on his frame. The bones on his face broke and reformed, then melted like water to reform his human face, all happening so fast, it was like looking in a bizarre funhouse mirror.

He bared his teeth and they were the long, terrifying fangs of the leopard he shared his skin with, looking so alien in his human face.

Under my hands, his body had gone tight, muscles preparing for battle.

“Damon!”

He didn’t hear me.

I clasped his face in my hands and rose onto my toes, pulling until I managed to get him to look at me.

“ Damon !”

He shuddered again but this time, he tried to speak.

All that came out was a growl.

“Breathe,” I told him.

The fury inside him was unreal. It beat against my skin, calling to an answering rage inside me and I had to fight to breathe past it. I managed, barely, and grabbed onto his shoulders, shaking him a little.

“ Breathe ,” I said again. “For me.”

He sucked in a ragged breath.

“What is it?”

“ Nene .”

That name.

It hit me just as hard as it had the first time, but in a different way.

There was nothing living down here but us.

We were surrounded by pain, death and agony—the agony so deep it seared the earth even now.

I made myself turn and look.

And what I saw cut deep into my soul.

“Dear God.”

Behind me, Rana whispered, “I so wish you would have turned back. Both of you.”