Chapter 11 #2
“What are you talking about? There’s nothing there,” Betty said, and goose bumps rose all over my arms instantly.
“There is light there—really bright light.” I went a little closer, too, until the tips of my sneakers touched the thick metal of the railway. It was there—I could see it flowing both ways.
“That’s impossible,” Arez said, and she wasn’t smiling right now.
In fact, she looked downright panicked.
“Nothing’s impossible,” I said a bit too loudly, but my nerves were getting the best of me, too. “I swear, I see the light.”
The golem shook her head, took a step back. “No, no, no…” Her voice trailed off, and my panic climbed.
“What do you mean, no?” And why the hell was she looking at me like that?!
“Because only werewolves can see ley lines—not golems and not fae, and definitely not humans.”
Oh.
The panic settled almost instantly as relief settled in. I closed my eyes, breathed in deeply. I am not imagining it. I’m not crazy.
Then I told Arez, “I’m actually moonmarked.”
She smiled. Then she frowned. Then she flinched and she laughed and she shook her head—it was a whole thing watching her go through this visual denial as she stood there, and it took her a couple minutes.
Finally, she said, “You’ve got to be shitting me.”
“She doesn’t actually turn to a wolf, though. She just got scratched by an alpha,” Betty said, still trying to see into the hole. “You sure there’s light there? Because I don’t see shit for real.”
Meanwhile, the golem continued to stare at me with a brand new light now, with fear in her deep moss-green eyes. She casually took yet another step back before she whispered. “What are you?”
My favoritest question in all the worlds.
“Human,” I muttered because I wasn’t about to dump more information that would likely make no sense to her right now. “I’m human, Arez, just…just tell me how to access this thing and what it can do. Can we try?”
The golem didn’t like it. She rubbed her face raw, and with all that light around us now, her skin looked even more grey than before. Like her insides were really made out of stone.
“Right,” she said and cleared her throat. “Right. Let’s give it a try.”
“I’m just gonna sit over here and watch,” Betty said with her mouth half full of chips, moving back toward that mattress again. “You got this, babe. Kick some ass.” And she shamelessly lay back, crossed her legs, and got comfortable like she did when we were about to watch a movie.
I flipped her off, but she ignored me. “Listen to Pink—listen to her and you’ll be fine,” she said instead.
“It’s pretty straightforward. Erm…” Arez had her hands on her hips and she looked down at the hole beneath the railway. “I don’t actually see the ley line, but I’ve tried to connect with it before. Problem is my magic is…tiny in comparison, so I haven’t had much success.”
“Yes, but how would I go about making it into a portal? How do we know that it will take us to Verenthia if I do manage to connect to it?”
My heart beat like a drum in my chest even though I was trying to play it cool because that light was the most unusual thing I’d ever seen.
Maera had told me the story of the gates herself, and fuck, I wanted to believe that this really was a ley line, a river of magical power, a portal to take me back to Rune. I really wanted to believe it.
“You tell it what you want. It’s magic—you’ve gotta show it your destination. You’ve been to Verenthia. You know where you want to go.”
The throne room of the Midnight Palace, if I had a say in it—but really, anywhere on the continent would be perfectly fine. I wasn’t afraid anymore—not of mermaids or sorcerers, not even fae.
I was too terrified of the truth of what awaited me there to care about anything else.
“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 technically permitted to 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. It looks scary, 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’s fine,” 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 I understood it.
The golem hadn’t lied. This was everything. 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 clung to 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.
“Meaning it recognizes you, which is no surprise. You do have a lot of magic. And it could, technically, be shaped by you, but…” She shook her head, sighed, popped the lollipop in her mouth again.
“It’s the mark that’s stopping you, but I feel like we could break the barrier if we only had more power. ”