Page 70 of Stars Above the Never Sea (The Last Faeyte #1)

Chapter forty-four

Selene

T he shadows lead us out into the hall, toward the stairs. I’m grateful that we don’t meet anyone on the way. The others stay close, Callan’s arm hovering in case I stumble.

But my feet strengthen, moving faster.

We head down the stairs, past the hallway that leads toward the great hall and down, into the lower levels of the temple.

I barely set foot in here as a child, only to visit the springs.

We pass the entrance to those too, our feet almost silent against the stone that gives way to packed, mud-flattened floors.

Callan’s warmth heats my back as he stays close. Our fingers brush. The others bring up the rear, all of us silent.

As we move deeper, losing the light, my legs begin to tremble. Faeytes were not made for being underground. Callan takes my hand. “We can stop.”

I shake my head. Something pushes me on, pushes me to follow. To see . My heartbeats sound louder, echoing in my ears as the darkness encloses us.

We look ahead. The winding spiral path at the very bottom of the stairs, where there are no more to descend, gives way to a hallway I’ve never seen. But there are lanterns hanging from hooks in the wall every few feet, fresh candles flickering.

It smells strange. Metallic, almost. As though the scent of iron hangs in the air, iron and salt and something rotten that fills my nose, my lungs.

Something wrong.

The others draw their weapons. Callan too, keeping his sword in one hand even as he holds my fingers with the other, keeping me tethered as I fight not to panic against that encroaching, crushing feeling.

Callan tugs on my hand, slowing us as he murmurs over his shoulder. “If things go badly—you know where to go.”

Silence. And then Esme swears. “I can’t remember.”

“Stay close to me,” Rio mutters. “I’m not going anywhere without you anyway.”

Matthias says nothing.

Ahead of us, the shadows linger outside a doorway. “That’s it.”

I feel the pull again. A tugging sensation, even as dread crawls over my skin, prickles at the back of my neck. “Whatever is in there, I don’t think it’s anything good.”

My voice is hoarse. As desperate as I was to come down here, I now find myself more desperate to turn back around. To go back upstairs, out of the temple and into town. But my feet do not move.

Callan steps in front of me, looking back over his shoulder. His eyes glimmer. “I’m going in first.”

There’s a quiet scuffle behind me. Esme steps up to my side. When her hand replaces Callan’s, squeezing my fingers, I can’t help but squeeze back.

I can’t breathe. I don’t want to go in there. But I’m equally—no. More certain that I don’t want Callan to go inside that room. “I should go first.”

He looks back at me. “Because you need to, or because you’re worried?”

My silence is enough. His fingers brush my chin. “Stay close. But I’m going in first.”

“Maybe it’s locked,” Rio says hopefully. “Best option, I think we can all agree.”

“More noise when Callan kicks it down, though,” Matthias mutters. He shifts to my other side, leaving Rio to bring up the rear as Callan approaches the door. My palms sweat, but he grips my hand anyway. “It will be alright.”

The silence is stifling. Such a deep blanket of thick silence that our voices sound strange. Muted.

Callan listens at the door before he reaches for it. I catch a glimpse of light as it swings open easily enough, all of us tensing.

He holds his sword out as he steps into the doorway.

His body stills.

And I know, with a sudden, terrible clarity. I know—

I push past the others. Callan turns, his face ashen as he tries to stop me. “You can’t see this, Selene. Stop—”

My shadows slam into him. They push him aside, pinning him to the wall as I dart past.

It is not grief that fills my throat as I see them.

It’s rage. Such a terrible, awful rage that the scream ripping through the air is unrecognizable, as if an animal has made it.

The two figures on the tables should be unrecognizable. Yet they are not.

I stumble, and fall. My knees crash into the floor.

I scream again. It bounces off the walls as I slam my hands into the ground.

Again and again, I roar, around the pain and the agony.

They desecrated them.

They took my sisters.

They took my Nyx, and my Celeste, and they buried them beneath the ground, far away from the light of the moon and any hope at all, and they hurt them.

Over and over again. The brutal, deep, jagged marks crisscross their bodies in so many vicious patterns, carved and burned into their skin that I hear someone behind me violently lose the contents of their stomach.

And their wings. I choke on a sob, something shredding inside me.

Their beautiful, glorious, inky-black wings are gone. Nowhere to be seen. Cut off, or torn away. The careless, gaping stitches across their skin as they lay on their backs, barely held together tells me exactly what I will find beneath.

I left them here. They pushed me through that door and used their bodies to block the way, and this was their reward for their sacrifice.

There are hands on me, and I push them away with another enraged scream.

I will end them for this.

I will end them all.

The thought catches, holds. More shadows spread from my palms.

“Selene.” Hands land on my face, and I hiss at them. “Gods, Selene.”

Callan. It’s Callan—

All of them. Him, and the rest. They did this.

I push him aside. The shadows whip out, slamming against him, pinning him down as he reaches for me with lying bronze eyes.

My words are guttural. “ Get your hands off them .”

The male touching them feels familiar. But the thought is rapidly buried beneath that rising rage, and my voice rises to a scream. “ Get away !”

He doesn’t move. His hands shake as he touches Nyx. My shadows wrap around his throat, tightening, but he does not move . “They’re alive, Selene. Gods—they’re still alive .”

I stop. Everything stops.

“We can get them out.” He turns to me, the shadows still tight around his neck. Steady, although the words tremble and gasp. “We can get them out of here, to somewhere safe. But we need to go now. Do you understand?”

I waver. Some of that rage shifts, the shadows flickering. Enough that the male who touched me approaches, freed from the constraints I placed on him. “Look at me.”

When my head turns, he inhales. “Selene. Are you Selene?”

Maybe.

My head jerks, even though I’m no longer sure who I am.

“They’re alive.” I say it once, testing the words. “Still alive.”

“Yes.” Callan— Callan —moves closer. “Let me touch you. Please.”

I don’t move as his hands brush my cheek. My face is wet with tears. “They hurt them.”

“Yes.” There’s anger there. “But we’re getting them out, right now. Rio.”

Another male shifts past. I turn my eyes to him, and he pales at what he sees. “May I pick them up?”

Both of the males wait. I nod, barely.

A hand touches my back. The words sound closer to a sob. “I’m so sorry.”

Esme.

I suck in a shuddering breath. The shadows fall from Matthias’s throat. He blows out a breath. “Rio—you’re going to take…”

“Celeste,” I whisper. “That’s Celeste.”

“All right.” The words are gentle. “Rio will carry Celeste. And I’ll take—who is this?”

“Nyx.” I almost choke on her name.

All this time, they were here. Alive, and suffering something beyond imagining in this chamber that smells of blood and grief.

“Why would someone do this?” My throat is raw. “What was their intention?”

Pain , is all I can think as I stare at them. They stripped them, laid them out and tortured them. Not just once, but endlessly.

Ten years , it took me to get back. They told me to come back for them. They had known what was coming.

Callan is looking behind me.

I don’t turn around. But I hear it. A creaking, screeching noise.

Esme has her swords out, angled in front of her. Rio curses. “Smee. My hands are full—I can’t.”

“I have it,” she snaps. “Keep hold of Celeste. Matthias?”

“I have Nyx.” He sounds grim. “But we need to go.”

It’s strange, hearing my sister’s names on their lips. As though I’m dreaming. Let this be a nightmare. Hala, please.

Callan steps around me. “Stay close to me. We’ll move as soon as we can.”

My voice sounds dull. “Where?”

None of them answer. I follow, almost numb as Callan and Esme move for the doorway.

The creature enters before they can move.

The numb sensation in my chest morphs into something else. A cross between fear, shock, and painful understanding.

It is not human . Not anymore. It whirrs, and clicks, and tilts its head. Where there once might have been eyes are… gold cogs, or something like it. They shift and move in a hideous mockery of Caelumnai maegis.

“What in Ellas is that ?” I hear Matthias’s horrified whisper.

Rio sounds as though he’s about to be sick. “ Tomos . From the guard unit. He was—”

“Conscripted,” Callan says grimly. “Tier three peristi. I remember him.”

The silence . That strange, blanketed silence from Petyr’s military compound, behind those gray walls.

Nausea surges. I twist to the side, emptying what little is in my stomach.

Callan edges closer. The thing that used to be Tomos doesn’t move. I glance down at its arms. “Be careful.”

There are weapons attached to him. Jagged blades attached to Caelumnai hands that don’t move as they should.

“I see them. Es, I’m going to draw him in—distract him. You’ll go around. The rest of you follow.”

“Wait.”

But Callan takes another step forward.

Tomos lurches into a surprisingly swift movement. His arm sweeps out, the blades slicing barely an inch from Callan’s throat.

I wrest my maegis free once again, and direct it at him, my hands out. Hold him.

They don’t want to. They don’t want to go near him. Unnatural.

But I force them forward, until they wrap around him in unbreakable threads. He shifts in jerked, frantic movements, banging into the wall. “Go now!”

“Move!” Callan pushes me forward, but I wait until Rio and Matthias race past with my sisters in their arms before I follow.

I almost run into their backs.