4. To Be Anywhere but Here, Absolutely Anywhere
4. TO BE ANYWHERE BUT HERE, ABSOLUTELY ANYWHERE
RUSH
Twisted, thorny vines of glowing silver raced along the back of my hand as I pressed it against the wall at the back of the fae dungeon. It was entirely too impenetrable. Any reasonable man would have known the wall, enchanted by the queen’s alchemist to admit only those approved by her, wouldn’t open despite the inexplicable sensation—intuition, perhaps—that urged me forward as if I were somehow on the right path.
“Dammit, Ry,” I muttered under my breath, even though it was by no means my friend’s fault he hadn’t adapted his illusion magic to allow my future passage.
As a first-born child, and a male at that, my parents had groomed me for the leadership role of a drake for as long as I could remember. I’d learned warfare tactics along with my letters. No one would have anticipated that my grand escape scheme would lead Larissa and me farther into the palace, deeper underground, when anyone with enough sense to flee the queen would know any chance at survival lay above ground, where the doors actually opened to a possible path beyond the palace.
“Rush?” Larissa questioned, glancing behind us.
The commotion in the stairwell had grown loud enough that I worried it might trigger some sort of alarm. The queen was purposefully secretive about the security measures she had in place in her dungeons.
The pygmy ogres were grunting and bellowing, their rage so potent, their devotion to their queenie so complete, that I feared none of the guards would survive—and Arno had a wife and children, the youngest of whom still sported pink, cherubic cheeks and sprightly pigtails.
A pygmy ogre wailed, conjuring bitter memories of our devastating fight with them in the throne room, the day I’d seen no alternative but to stab my mate through the heart.
“That sounds bad,” Larissa said. “What are we doing?”
If Larissa hadn’t been here too, and it had been only my life I was risking, my hand wouldn’t have shaken as I hastily wiped Gadiel’s crusted blood from my blade and tucked it into my waistband, the steel cold against my thigh. My weapons belt had been confiscated by the queen until the ruse of her Nuptialis Probatio was over. The throwing knives I’d stashed against the small of my back were little reassurance when at any moment the guards might convince the pygmy ogres they were supposed to be working as part of the same team—and against Larissa and me.
After a quick look of my own, I wiped my hands along my breeches and slapped both to the wall. Surprise: it still felt as solid as it looked.
Larissa groaned. “Please tell me this isn’t our only way out.”
I ignored the thumps, slices, and cries of pain reaching us from the other side of the prison, at most a hundred and fifty feet away. “I thought there was a good chance Ry’s magic would still hold and it’d let us through.” My explanation sounded pitiful even to my own ears. I’d gambled my sister’s life on a feeling ? A near impossible hope?
Larissa had both fists akimbo, staring down the wall like it was a person she might force into doing her will. My baby sister had always seemed so delicate, ethereal even, too precious for the hardness of this world. Now, with her rose hair free from its usual queen-imposed updo, cresting in savage waves around her face and shoulders, dressed in tablecloths for fuck’s sake, her eyes blazing with intent, I was realizing how little I really knew my sister. With the queen ordering me to do her occasional bidding even before she’d summoned me permanently to her court, I’d spent more of my recent years away from the family estate than there in Larissa’s company.
I sucked in an unsteady inhale. “Can you transform the wall the way you did the door upstairs?” If not for her unexpected ability to seal the entrance to the tunnel, the queen’s guards would have been upon us long before we reached the dungeon.
“Don’t know,” Larissa answered, keeping her glare pinned on the wall. “I’ve never done anything like this before. Nothing spelled. And Braque’s magic is strong.” With a regretful grimace, she flicked a look at me. “He’s been keeping me alive all this time, after all.”
Aye, he had. It was another unpleasant reminder of all I was risking by choosing this path. Should I have sucked it up and remained behind to perform for the queen as she’d demanded? Then at least my sister’s treatments would have been guaranteed.
“No, Rush,” Larissa scolded, whipping her attention back ahead. “I know what you’re thinking, and no . We shouldn’t have stayed. What the queen wanted … just, no.”
I didn’t have the heart to confess that the queen had already taken my dignity and my sacredness and incinerated them to ashes between her legs.
A great, thundering crash snapped my attention back to the stairwell. Something large rolled down, hitting step after step with loud thumps, before knocking against the stone wall. A few seconds later, a pygmy ogre—the one whom I’d mind-manipulated, I thought—tumbled from the opening and landed with a heavy plop . Though distance obscured the finer details, I could make out one of his massive, meaty legs hanging from exposed bone at the wrong angle. Three of his fingers were sliced off. And a pair of dents the size of my forearm distorted his skull into an even more misshapen lump than usual.
The ogre wasn’t likely to be getting to his feet ever again.
A keening, enraged roar made my thigh muscles twitch, like I should either be running away from the sound or toward it, sword pointed at the surviving pygmy ogre. From the screams of men, he was attacking with renewed ferocity.
I spun back toward my sister. “We don’t have much time.” Perhaps we should hide among the prisoners until I devise something better to do…
She didn’t look at me. “Hold on to me until we’re through. Whatever you do, don’t let go. I’m not sure this will work.”
Nudging aside the knot of the tablecloth to make contact with her in case that might increase our connection for her magic, I lowered my hands to her shoulders?—
A low, menacing snarl shuddered along my spine. Slowly—so slowly that an animal might not spook—I twisted around.
Not an animal, but a changeling. Just as bad. Probably worse.
The feethle’s eyes glowed red as it pinned them on my unprotected torso. With a louder, more vicious snarl, it bared blackened gums and sharp, spindly teeth, coated in pink—blood, surely, since the queen had fostered a taste for the ichor in her pets. This particular pet of hers had thick, ash-blond fur, and was being extremely mindful not to meet my waiting stare.
“Hello, Millicent,” I said with a disgusted gnarl of my own.
Before Larissa could turn to face this new threat, I squeezed her shoulders in silent reassurance. If she didn’t get us to the other side of the wall, Millicent’s petty vengeance and desperation to please the queen would be the least of our troubles.
The stairwell emitted a shrieking whine, and then a handful of other feethles bounded over the pygmy ogre’s felled body, spotted Larissa and me, and charged toward us. In the low light like twilight, it was easy to see their eyes glowed red too. Whoever these changelings were in their person forms, one thing was clear: they were all under the queen’s thrall.
If they were here and their mistress wasn’t, then I had to assume Ivar had pulled the queen away—most likely to go after my mate, dammit—or the queen would probably be down here herself.
As feethles sprinted toward us, I ducked my head, keeping both palms touching my sister’s shoulders, and fought to catch Millicent’s eyes. The female had done her best to feed Elowyn and my brothers to the queen.
Look into my eyes, you sniveling bitch. Look at me!
With the first of the second wave of feethles skidding to a stop behind her, Millicent opened her jaws and lunged for me. I kicked out to halt her. My boot cracked against her jaw just as Larissa dragged me forward. Off balance, I stumbled and nearly released my hand to catch myself—nearly. My heart pounded as my fingers clenched to hold on. My last sight was of Millicent jerking her head forward and lurching after us.
Larissa and I slipped through the wall, the sensation like walking through a waterfall, the water pounding against our bodies from all sides but not causing real harm.
I was still staring backward when I noticed a wave of pink wash across the wall. For a few seconds, the stone was fluid, the entire wall undulating like a wave.
Next, the pink began to fade, the stone to harden.
And right as it was in the process of doing so, Millicent dove through, her maw open, teeth glistening with crimson?—
The wall clamped down around her neck as if it had jaws of its own.
On this side of the wall it was ominously dark. Without the pink of Larissa’s magic, my tattoos extinguished at present, I couldn’t make out much until I conjured my lumoon. Its warm yellow light cast deep shadows across Millicent’s feethle head as it gave the impression of being fused to the stones. No blood marred her neck.
Despite the fact that Millicent was currently unable to attack, a familiar unease penetrated every area of my body, imploring me to flee—to absolutely anywhere but here.
“That sensation,” I told Larissa without turning away from the feethle I wasn’t yet convinced wasn’t a threat, “like you can’t stand to be here for a single second longer?”
“Yeah…? Can’t help but feel it,” she said with a shudder. “It’s awful.”
“Yep. Guys and I felt the same last time we were here. Probably a defense.”
“One that would work, too. If I didn’t know what’s waiting for us on the other side, I’d be running back through the wall right now.”
“And I’d be beside you.”
But by holy dragonfire, we’d actually gotten through the wall so that none of our would-be attackers could follow! I scarcely believed it, though it was what I’d been feeling would happen all along. Unless the queen or Braque were to arrive, the feethles, queen’s guards, and pygmy ogres would remain squarely on the opposite side.
Shit, that wasn’t true! The pygmy ogres lived down here, for fuck’s sake. Surely they could pass through the bespelled wall without intervention. We had to hurry.
Even so, at times the queen had kept Millicent close, a preferred, privileged pet. The sycophant might have observed something that could help inform us about the queen and all she’d done recently to transform herself. If the queen had actually gained immortality, we needed to know how if we had any chance at reversing the effect.
The feethle’s features were frozen, eyes unblinking as they appeared to study my knees. Not even a whisker twitched.
“Think she’s dead?” I asked Larissa as I weighed the risks of entering Millicent’s mind. If ever I were to join the mind of someone dead, mine would likely be trapped with theirs, amounting to my own death.
Larissa drew beside me with another shiver. The dread was thick in the air—a billowing, inescapable fog. She canted her head to one side to study the feethle. “Not sure. I didn’t do anything to kill her.”
“So she may still live. If the stones’ substance is affected by magic, it may be that it captured hers within it. The wall might let her go the next time someone goes through it.”
“It’s possible.”
Without warning, Millicent’s head—her very, very severed head, as it turned out—dropped to the floor with a squelching plop before beginning to roll. The neck left a thick streak of blood and gore in its wake.
We stood on a narrow ledge that bordered a sheer drop. An even slimmer stone walkway stretched across a deep, yawning chasm of a pit to the other side. The head rolled across the stone ledge until, after a final wet squish, it bowled off the edge of the cliff, fell, fell, and still fell without a single sound. When it finally hit bottom, it was with a soft, remote thud I might not have registered had I not been listening for it .
“Guess that answers our question,” Larissa eventually said after she’d joined me in peering carefully—extremely carefully—over the edge into the swallowing darkness. “She’s definitely dead.”
Indeed, I’d wager that one couldn’t get much deader—not even in the queen’s palace of horrors.