Page 38 of Boundless

“You can do it,” Arez suddenly said. “I saw your magic—I think you can do it. And you being moonmarked might help, too. Werewolves are technicallypermittedto use ley lines.” A flinch. “I think.”

But did it matter if she was right or not?

“What are the chances of this railway coming apart and collapsing underneath me?” I asked because I wanted to get as close to that hole on the ground as I could. The metal of the railway was thick, but it was rusted, and there was too much rubble on either side of it to know how far it extended, how big it really was.

“That’s not going to happen. Itlooksscary, but the floor will hold. Remember, I collapsed the entire roof over there by myself, and the floor didn’t budge. It will hold you,” Arez said, a bit too eagerly, pointing to the pile of concrete and metal and dirt on the left side of the room. It wasn’t any different from the right.

Doesn’t matter,I reminded myself. Whether this golem was who she said she was or not didn’t matter. There was magic here, true magic, and I saw it. Felt it. If there was a chance that it could get me to Rune, I was going to try one way or the other.

“Wait, wait, hold on a minute,” said Betty when I went over the railway and stepped onto a thick, metal crosstie. The hole was right in front of me, and it was just slightly longer than two crossties, as wide as the rails. The light moving underneath was deeper than I first realized, and there was only dirt around it, nothing more. Like the light was moving right through the earth.

“You sure that’s safe?” Betty asked.

“Yes, yes, she’s safe. She’sfine,” Arez said—again, far too eagerly.

Either way, I closed my eyes and raised my hands in front of me. Fuck, I was already sweating, my shirt sticking to my back uncomfortably, my hair sticking to my forehead.

“Just try to focus. Try to get it to open itself up. Think of Verenthia—you will be okay,” the golem continued, and she looked like she planned to continue.

So, I said, “I’d really appreciate a second of silence.” Because the only way I still knew how to call forth the frostfire bit of magic inside me was to lock out all my senses. To pretend I was in the Ice Palace again, that the music from the music box was in my ears, the Ice Queen’s gloves were on my hands, the taste of those berries exploding on my tongue, a blindfold covering my eyes…

Like that, it was easy.

You’ve done it before,Vair said in my own voice, whispered in my ear. And I had. A few times now, so it was easy. More than that—it was more powerful because it wasn’t an outbreak. I was deliberately calling for the magic to merge with the one underneath me.

Such beautiful colors. I saw them in the darkness of my mind, and the more my own came out of my hands and merged with it, the more I felt it. The more Iunderstoodit.

The golem hadn’t lied. This waseverything.It was raw power. It was magic at its purest form, just waiting to be tapped. Waiting to be used. Waiting to serve.

My heart slammed against my ribcage as I conjured up as much as my frostfire could carry, and in my mind I held the image of the Aetherway. Nothing but warmth and shimmer and pure energy, a gateway that was going to take me to Verenthia. To the Midnight Court. To Rune.

I imagined my frostfire like a hand closing around the light, securing it in its fist.

Then, I pulled.

The pain that set my right arm on fire came suddenly, and all at once. There was no time to scream, no time to try to pull back, to hold on or to let go.

All my lights turned off at once. I shut down completely with only the echo of a thought in my head:I’m not going anywhere any time soon.

The shadows clungto my skin like I was born with them. Like they’d always been there from the very beginning. It had only been four days since I was banished, but it felt like I’d never seen my own arm without those marks before. Without that magic.

This wasn’t like what the life-bond gave me, not like the warmth that sometimes enabled me to raise things in the air. This was different. This was embedded in my bones.

In Arez’s words, it could have been programmed into me since the get-go. Or just since I was five years old and Lyall deliberately bonded himself to me while he pretended to be the good guy and heal me.

The golem was on her laptops all the time, typing away, searching—always searching for something. Said that was the only way she knew how to keep sane, and I believed her. One needed a distraction here after Verenthia. Or after being banished from it and forced to stay away.

Four days.

It had been four days, and I still wasn’t anywhere close to going back to Rune. The Aetherway still refused to let me through, and I hadn’t been able to get the ley line to cooperate, either. I’d come back three times a day ever since Arez found us in the forest, and no luck. I kept trying, and even though the pain no longer knocked me out when I connected to those iridescent ribbons of light, it was just because I knew when to move back. I knew when to let go.

My arm was continuously numb now no matter what I did. All that pain—it felt like my insides were on fire, yet somehow visually it looked perfectly intact. The shadows weren’t going anywhere, and I was stuck here with them. The Aetherway and the ley lines didn’t care about my stubbornness or my frostfire or my desperation.

And Rune hadn’t come for me, either.

“It does change in frequency when your magic attaches to it,” Arez said, tapping the screen of her laptop with the bottom of her lollipop stick. She always seemed to have those around—the same pink ones every time.

“Meaning?” I asked, massaging my arm to try to bring some feeling back into it, but it wasn’t working.