Chapter 19
19
“We’ve secured the person responsible, Your Highness, so I’m pleased to let you know it is now safe for us to release you and let Sir Lucas off his post.”
Lucas and I looked at each other.
“May I ask who it is, Commander?” I said.
“We’ve arrested the healer.” She looked quite proud about it, too. “She was apprehended attempting to escape the premises.”
No! They’ve arrested the wrong person. Althea is a kind soul. This is nothing but a trumped-up charge. I had to put a stop to this. “Are you sure? I don’t think—”
Lucas interrupted me. “Thank you, Commander.” He turned to me. “Don’t worry, Your Highness. The threat is contained.” He shook the commander’s hand. “Thanks for your work.”
The commander bowed again. “If that’s all, we have more to attend to.”
“Yes, thank you,” Lucas said, directing the guards toward the door. Once they were out, he shut it behind them.
“Why did you do that?” I asked him.
“Because if you convince them to let Althea go, then they’ll lock us up in here again while they search for someone else. If you actually want to help her, the best thing we can do is go investigate ourselves.”
I hated how much sense he was making. I sighed. “Fine.”
Lucas stuck his head out the door, then shut it again. “They’re gone. Let’s go.”
We walked out as casually as possible. As we passed the guards, Lucas said loudly, “Wow, I’m famished. What do you say we grab something before we go into town?”
“Sounds good,” I said, a bit too cheerfully. I cringed at how fake I sounded. But the guards didn’t even look in our direction.
Once we were out of their sight, we relaxed and began walking faster. “How far is it?” I asked him. I assumed we needed to go into town or at least close.
“One floor beneath the cellar,” he said.
I stopped walking. “What? Like, in the palace?”
He turned around. “Yes—where did you think it was?”
“I don’t know, somewhere else? Not here!” Sneaking into a dungeon morgue in the darkness while a killer was on the loose was absolutely not my idea of a good time. “I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Sure you can. Come on.” Lucas took my hand and pulled me along. At first, I was going to pull away, outraged that he’d grabbed it. Except I didn’t mind as much as I thought I should. It did make me feel safer. Besides, there was no point to my objection. It wasn’t like there was another option available to us.
We descended the stairs to the cellar. It was cold down there, the coldest I’d experienced in Biringan so far. There were rows and rows of jarred fruits and vegetables lining the walls. I shivered. “Should have warned me. I would’ve changed into something warmer.”
“You’ll get used to it.” Lucas led me farther into the darkness, past the stored food and then stacks of wooden crates. It got so dark that I started knocking into things.
“Careful,” he whispered.
“I’m trying,” I replied. There could be anything lurking in the darkness. Despite how I felt about Lucas, I grabbed on and stuck as close to him as I possibly could. I held his hand tighter, and he squeezed back. It gave me butterflies, and I wondered if he felt them, too.
Lucas stopped. I heard a door open, then saw dim light on the other side. He walked ahead. “Watch where you’re going,” he warned me. We walked down a few shaky wooden steps.
The light came from sconces lit on the stone walls. “Where are we?” Wherever it was, it was even more ancient than the other parts of the palace, I could tell. It looked like we were in a cave, almost.
“The catacombs beneath the palace,” he said. “That’s an old access door. No one uses it anymore. The main door is that way”—he pointed to the right—“but is heavily guarded.”
“How did you know about that door?”
“I do my homework” was all he said. He started to the left. The passage dipped down as we went. We were heading deeper into the ground.
We were approaching a door. It looked like it was about a thousand years old, made from wide planks of splintering wood held together with iron straps. I yanked back and wrapped my arms around myself. “I don’t think I can go in there. Do we both need to go? I could stay here and keep watch.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“What if we get caught?”
“We won’t; I promise. No one is coming down here at this hour.”
“Unless they’re up to no good.”
“In which case, I’ll take care of it.” His jaw clenched, and the glint in his eyes made him look sexy and dangerous. I felt a thrill at that, to know how strong he was, how capable and how fearless.
“I’m not really scared,” I said, trying to believe that was true. I was frightened—I never liked dark places or things that went bump in the night—but I didn’t want to be a coward.
“Let’s go, then,” he said. He had his hand on the door. I fought the urge to yell, “Stop!” or to run back the way we came. Before I even had a chance, he’d already opened it and slipped into the room. I gathered my strength, held my breath—because didn’t bodies stink?—and followed him.
Unlike what I’d seen on TV, there weren’t any corpses lying around in the open. I exhaled. That was a relief. “Oh, so this is it?” I asked.
Lucas laughed. “No, not yet.” He pushed open another door and waved for me to follow him back into the darkness.
“ These are the ancient catacombs,” he explained. “The deeper we go into the mountain, the older the tombs. They say if you make it through the entire maze, you’ll reach the final resting place of the very first Biringan monarch, Queen Felicidad, who ruled over all four kingdoms, long before they were divided in the Endless Wars.”
“The first ruler was a queen?”
“Yes, and she was a great warrior, too. She unified the Biringan kingdoms after the split from the human realm.”
“Huh. Cool. Have you ever seen her tomb?”
“No one has. Anyone who’s tried either gave up and came back or was never seen again.”
I gulped. That meant, somewhere deep in the mountain catacombs, there were other dead bodies of those who had gotten lost underground... I shook off the thought; it was too morbid.
“Doesn’t mean we didn’t try. It’s a common game growing up here—dare your friends to find the first queen.”
So that was actually how he knew about this place.
While we were talking, Lucas had been shining his light into the holes in the walls.
“No one’s buried here anymore, but the rituals are still performed in the sacred space. The mages purify the burial ground before the funeral.”
“Wow. I feel like I don’t know anything.”
“Well, how could you? You grew up over there.” The way he said “over there” suggested he didn’t think much of the human realm. Before I got defensive, he added, “I can lend you some books if you’d like. They’re the kind of thing children read when they are starting to learn our history, but perhaps...”
“Yes,” I said gratefully. I wish I’d thought of that before. “That would be great, actually.”
“I think I found her,” he said. He stuck his head a little farther into an opening in the wall, then pulled back quickly. “That’s definitely the page girl.” His hands were trembling, but he tried to hide whatever had spooked him by laughing about it. “Guess I wasn’t prepared for that.”
“What is it?”
He put up a hand to stop me, looking very serious all of a sudden. “Wait.” He bent over with his hands on his knees and took some deep breaths.
“Oh my god, will you just tell me?” I began walking to the spot, and I was about to look when he held his arm out in front of me. He held his light right at the opening.
“Don’t get too close,” he warned.
I crept toward the light. There wasn’t anything to see. I shook my head. “I can’t...”
“Here. But I’m not going any closer to the body.” He held the light deeper in the crevice. I leaned in. And then I saw it: her feet and legs, then the rest of her body and her face, partially veiled by the darkness, and something moving. My throat constricted because, at first, I thought her lips were moving, and then I realized that wasn’t it at all—it was a beetle. So many of them. Crawling out of her nose. Of her ears. Of her mouth. They were everywhere.
I screamed and jumped back, nearly knocking Lucas over. I put my hand over my mouth, eyes wide with fear. “She was cursed!”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s a curse, all right. We should leave now.” The fact that Lucas was freaked out freaked me out even more.
“I agree,” I said. Now I was the one shaking. “So it was a mambabarang. Who can it be?” I murmured, more to myself than anything.
“We can talk about it later. Right now, we need to leave.”
We hurried back through the corridors that had brought us there. All the way, I felt like something was right behind me, about to grab me or crawl on me. I clung to Lucas the way I once held on to my mother the first and only time she ever took me to a haunted house.
Just as we were about to burst through the door back into the palace, Lucas stopped. “Wait,” he whispered.
“What is it?”
He put his finger to his lips. My heart was pounding in my ears. Then I heard it, too; someone was in the other room. Multiple people. Their heavy footsteps were echoing against the walls. I heard the slight clang of metal. I wanted to ask Lucas: guards or insurgents? But I was afraid to speak and give us away.
“No one here,” a voice in the room said.
“They were here,” said another.
“Where’d they go, then?” the first asked.
There was a moment of silence. The first voice spoke again. “You think? I don’t know why they would go in there. I don’t even want to go in there.” Quiet again. Then boots against the floor, this time softer. They were trying to sneak up on us.
We moved back into the corridor more. Lucas put his light out. “They’re going to open the door,” I whispered.
“Yes, I’m quite aware,” Lucas hissed.
This was where my high school experiences were finally helpful. Three schools ago, couples were getting busted in an old storage closet behind the driver’s ed classrooms on a daily basis. “If they come in here, you’re going to kiss me,” I said.
Lucas whipped his head around to look at me. “What?”
“Trust me. They’ll think we just came in here for some alone time.”
“I can’t, Princess. You don’t understand. I have my honor to uphold.”
“Don’t worry about your honor right now,” I told him. “This is just to save our behinds.” The strangers were right on the other side of the door, mere feet away. We could hide in the darkness, but that would only work if they didn’t shine a light inside or start searching the catacombs. We couldn’t run, either, because they’d hear us.
The door began to open. Without another thought, I leaned back against the wall and pulled Lucas close to me, smashing my mouth against his. At first, it was just that—a phony, stage-type kiss. Then something changed, and I felt him relax into the real thing. I opened my mouth tentatively, and he breathed into me, and soon all I could think about was how close we were. I could feel his heart pounding against mine. He drew me in closer, and then he was kissing my chin and my neck, soft, sweet kisses that turned urgent and made my head spin. His whole body was wrapped around mine, and I ran my hands through his hair, marveling at its softness. While the rest of him was so hot... and hard. Somehow, he’d pinned me against the wall, and it was all I could do not to swoon.
Before I could process what was happening, the light from the other room revealed the two of us locked in a heated embrace.
I looked up as two Royal Guards stepped back. “Your Highness,” they said in unison, bowing. One was older, and the other must’ve been around my age. “Sir Lucas.” They bowed.
We immediately released each other. I pretended to be mortified. Lucas, on the other hand, appeared very genuinely flustered. His cheeks were bright crimson, and he looked like he was about to break out in a sweat, and he kept his hands in front of him, standing in that formal way soldiers are taught to stand.
“We were just discussing some schoolwork,” I said, forcing a nervous laugh. “It’s about, um...” I turned and looked around me. “Ancient Biringan architecture. And Lucas offered to show me the best example, right here underneath my own palace.” I added that last bit on purpose, to remind them who they were talking to.
Lucas cleared his throat. “Yes, all is well. You are dismissed.”
“Yes, sir,” the older guard said. He nudged the other one. “We’re going.” They began to leave, but then he turned back. “Not to be rude, Your Highness, but it’s probably best to return upstairs.”
“Oh yes, of course,” I said quickly. “We’re right behind you.” If I stayed in his good graces, maybe he wouldn’t mention this to anyone. “If it’s all right, um, I’m sorry, I haven’t memorized everyone’s names yet.”
“It’s Briel, Your Highness.”
“Briel, I hope you don’t mind me saying, but I’m very pleased with the good work you and all the other Court of Sirena sentries are doing.”
Briel’s face glowed; there was even a flush to his cheeks. “It’s our pleasure, Your Highness.”
I glanced over at Lucas. He was staring at me, smiling like he’d found new respect for me. He nodded and mouthed, “Nice.”
I shrugged, as if to say, No big deal , then I thought of how much I’d enjoyed our ruse and the way I’d pulled him right up to me, and I looked away, hurrying to catch up to the guards.