Page 4

CHAPTER FOUR

J aromir Sintali had been screaming inside his mind on end for days. Every minute of every day, all he remembered was pain and silence and the saints' circle. He couldn’t stop screaming. He let Maia down. He walked into that circle to rescue Vawn because the guilt of it was eating at her soul, but there was a void in his mind between that moment and waking up here, in his beast form.

The scream built to a crescendo that hurt his brain. Az was being harmed. Tortured. And Jaro could do nothing to stop it. He’d been told to sit in the corner and not move, so he hadn’t moved for days. No matter how loudly he screamed inside, how hard he fought the metal around his throat, he couldn’t leap across the stone prison to get to Azrail. He couldn’t sink his teeth into the enforcer's arm and rip it off no matter how badly he craved that violence.

He couldn’t do anything as Samlyn, the Provider, ordered them both to follow him out of the cell. It was a sick, twisted name. The only thing that bastard provided was horror and nightmares.

For the first time, Jaro was outside their cell, and it wasn’t the barren grey prison he’d expected. Out here it smelled of violets and irises, not the slow trickle of blood from Az’s body. Jaro was desperate to turn his head to look at his oldest friend but Samlyn hadn’t ordered him to, so he couldn’t. Instead he kept his head straight forward as they walked down the white marble corridor, the quiet building they moved through as beautiful and gilded as the Delakore Palace. The columns here were angular instead of rounded, the architecture… older. Overrun with flowers and plant-life in cracks along the ground, like it had been left to nature for decades. Centuries. Not quite as elaborate or ornamental as the palace and yet regal. Where the hell were they?

They reached the end of the corridor and a wide square courtyard opened up, staircases crawling the walls, paths disappearing into three tiers of arched doorways. There were so many different passages under the cracked marble dome that Jaro couldn’t count. Maybe this really was a palace. A shaft of bright sunlight slanted through a jagged hole in the domed ceiling, falling onto the tiled floor ahead of Jaro. Chunks of masonry littered the tiles, from the collapsed columns around them, from the pockmarks in the walls. Something had happened here, years and years ago, so disastrous that this palace was now empty except for the four of them—Jaro, Az, the saint, and the torturer.

Where was Maia? Where were Ark and Kheir and Bryon? If he could just remember what had happened at the island, maybe he’d remember the collar being fitted to his throat and he could find a way to get the damn thing off. He’d wanted to ease Maia’s pain by reaching Vawn first, but he led them right into a trap, and now Az was cut and bruised and bleeding and that bastard enforcer had threatened Maia. She was here somewhere, among these crumbled halls.

Jaro’s screams filled his skull, as useless as the paws that carried him down more perfectly straight hallways, past pots full of overgrown flowers. Green and violet and blue burst against dusty marble everywhere he looked, blooms crawling up the entryways of rooms that were eerily empty and silent. Where were the people who had lived here? Were they still in Venhaus, or had the saints taken them elsewhere? He knew of marble palaces in the Aether kingdoms. Was this the seat of power in Aetheon? Were the queens there hosting these dark saints like Ismene hosted… he couldn’t remember. The name was right there, the memory out of his reach. His screams turned to roars of fury inside his head, the emotion choking off his air as he walked, calmly, obediently after the grey saint who glided ahead of him.

Jaro wanted to bare his teeth and snarl. He walked on without so much as a twitch of his lip, through a pale arch suffocated by flowers and vines into—shit.

Samlyn led them into a coliseum.