Chapter 17
The moment the triplets' magic connected with every trapped soul in Lyra's chamber, I got hit hard. It was the emotional equivalent of a freight train carrying broken dreams and decades of torture. "Oh, fuck me sideways," I breathed.
My knees buckled as wave after wave of anguish crashed through the babies' network. I threw up a shield faster than a mom protecting her kids from a horror movie. No way were my triplets experiencing this nightmare.
That didn't stop each prisoner's story from unfolding in my mind with brutal clarity.
These people were walking ghosts. If Lyra got her way, soon I'd be joining their chorus of the damned.
Not that I was going down without a fight.
But until I found a way to escape, I'd be their witness. Someone had to remember their stories.
Sarah had lost her spark around her third year here.
I watched as she stopped fighting and stopped screaming when Lyra came for her daily 'snack’.
Now she hummed lullabies and braided invisible hair.
She would sometimes smile at memories I had no desire to reach.
She'd been living like that for fifteen long years. I wasn’t sure she was sane any longer.
Watching dragon shifter Kieran break had been the worst. Dragons weren't meant for cages.
They were fierce creatures. Their claws could shred aircraft carriers.
They were also social beings. Their clan bonds ran soul deep.
Lyra had captured him after taking his mate and children when they were sick.
Watching Lyra kill them had broken him completely.
Now he carved tally marks into the wall, counting what he considered his failures while plotting his revenge.
The memories didn't give me time to process the emotions coming at me before moving on to Moira.
Lyra's special torture for her was forcing her to watch her daughter Elspeth live an entire life while she remained caged.
Sixty-three years of birthdays and heartbreaks she could only witness.
When Elspeth finally had a heart attack and died, she was still wondering what had happened to her mother, Moira screamed for three straight days.
I wanted to learn their stories. It was important to me that I know every devastating detail. Someone had to carry their suffering forward. They deserved to be remembered as people who'd fought until they couldn't anymore. But when the memories began looping again, I couldn't take it.
"Stop," I whispered, pressing my palms against my temples and praying the emotional overflow didn't crack my sanity. I had to stop this, so I could find a way to get us all out of there.
"Now you understand," a voice rumbled through the network. It was Kieran's voice. It was ancient and terrible in its fury. "This is what she has done. This is what she must answer for."
"I understand," I said through gritted teeth, forcing myself to stand despite the weight of the trauma pressing down on my shoulders. "And I'm going to do something about it. Right fucking now."
The babies' magic pulsed in agreement. Their combined power hummed through my veins with renewed purpose. They'd shown me the horror of this place not to break me, but to motivate me. Smart kids. They knew their mama wouldn’t stand for this kind of shit.
I studied the chamber with new eyes. Looking past the obvious horrors wasn’t easy.
But I had to search for the structural weaknesses.
The triplets were highlighting some of them.
The life-support systems feeding each jar operated on a closed magical loop that fed into Lyra.
By having so many, she could prolong their torture and feed herself a veritable smorgasbord of power.
Break one connection and the whole thing would cascade.
But I needed to be careful. These people had been suspended for decades.
Dropping them wrong could kill them just as effectively as leaving them there.
"Sarah," I called softly to the woman in the nearest container. Her eyes found mine through the preservation fluid. She was alert despite her physical state. "I'm going to get you out of there, but once I do, I need you to help me with the others. Can you do that?"
Her mouth moved, yet no sound escaped through the fluid.
I felt her response through the magical network.
Or maybe she spoke into my mind. I couldn’t be sure because while Lyra was draining me, I was being boosted by being close to the Pleiades relics she had in her possession.
I doubt that was something Lyra anticipated.
Because she could only dream of being a Pleiades, she would never understand the reality of what it was like.
“Yes. Please. Help us,” Sarah begged.
“I won't leave without you,” I promised.
I pressed my palms against the cool surface of her containment unit as the familiar hum of my power built beneath my skin.
The Pleiades magic didn't rage through me like it usually did.
Instead, it moved with the careful precision of a surgeon's blade.
It was responding to my desperate need for control.
I couldn't afford to mess this up. Not with so many lives hanging in the balance.
The preservation spells wrapped around the container like ghostly chains.
They were intricate and deadly beautiful.
Any ham-fisted attempt to break them would've killed Sarah instantly.
The Pleiades power was more than brute force.
It had taught me to understand the very fabric of magic itself.
I let it flow through the spell work. It unraveled each thread with meticulous care.
The toxic fluid that had kept Sarah suspended between life and death shimmered and changed. Its green glow faded to crystal clear. My magic transformed the poison into something as harmless as spring water. It felt good to neutralize fifteen years of torment in mere seconds.
The container opened with a soft, almost reverent hiss and Sarah tumbled into my arms like a broken bird.
Her skin was pale as moonlight and marked with the faint tracery of veins turned purple from whatever hell Lyra had put her through.
She gasped and retched. Her body convulsed as it remembered how to process clean air instead of that vile suspension fluid.
But she was alive. Gloriously, impossibly, beautifully alive.
The moment Sarah's bare feet touched the frigid stone floor, the entire chamber seemed to inhale.
Her dark eyes found mine through the tangle of her matted hair. "You did it," she whispered in a voice like sandpaper and smoke.
"It wasn’t easy," I managed before my throat tightened with emotions I couldn't afford to feel. Not yet.
"WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?" Lyra's shriek of rage erupted from everywhere at once.
It was a sonic boom crafted from pure fury and the sound of dreams dying.
It was loud, and there was a physical force to it that rattled everything.
My gaze skipped around, searching for where she was located.
She was nowhere to be seen, yet her voice surrounded us.
Hell, the rock still vibrated with the force of her outrage.
Dust was raining down like ash. This was beyond anger.
It was the sound of a goddess having a tantrum.
"SHE WAS MINE! FIFTEEN YEARS OF CONDITIONING, FIFTEEN YEARS OF PERFECT PREPARATION, AND YOU'VE RUINED IT ALL!"
The words themselves hit me like physical blows. I'd destroyed something she believed was hers. She'd poured her twisted love and obsession into these people. In her mind, I hadn't freed Sarah. I'd stolen her.
The temperature in the chamber plummeted, and our breath turned to mist in seconds.
Sarah shivered violently against me as ice spread across the walls in jagged chunks that looked like frozen screams. The other containers groaned under thermal shock.
Hairline cracks spider-webbed across their surfaces.
"Put her back." Lyra's voice turned dangerously quiet, which was somehow more terrifying than her screaming. "Put her back in the container, and I might let you birth your children before I drain them dry."
"Go fuck yourself," I snarled at the ceiling. "With something sharp and uncomfortable."
Sarah tested her legs. She was wobbling but determined. "I can do whatever needs to be done. That bitch kept me in that thing for fifteen years. I'm not dying now. Not when I can help free the others."
The stone floor began shifting beneath us. Cracks appeared in violent zigzags to isolate us in the chamber's center. The walls started moving inward like massive stone jaws while torches guttered out. It plunged sections into darkness where things rustled just beyond our vision.
I shuddered to think about what Sarah had been through. She didn’t even give the sections a second glance, where they made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. It was more sad proof of Lyra’s machinations.
Refocusing on what needed to be done, I put my hand on her back and prodded her forward. "Help me with Kieran," I said urgently as we moved toward the dragon shifter's container. I hoped we made it before the floor fractured completely.
Even in human form, Kieran was intimidating. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and had intricate clan tattoos covering his arms. His eyes tracked our movement as we approached. He was filled with decades of banked rage over his mate and child.
"Kieran," I began, "I'm Phoebe. How about we get you out of there? I know you’ve been here a long time.”
He puffed out his chest and nodded in agreement. His amber eyes tracked to Sarah and softened. Freeing her first was a good call. It proved to the ones who were powerful enough to turn me into barbecue that I was there to help.
“YOU CANNOT FREE HIM!” Lyra screeched before she began cursing.