Chapter 43
Forty-Three
My lips keep forming Falcen’s name. Cold burns against my back from lying so still against the stone slab, no longer sitting up or even fighting.
If I keep my eyes closed, I can almost pretend I’m not alone, that Falcen is growling in my ear for me to behave before his mouth descends, making good on his threat.
But memories are poor substitutes for the real thing.
The low rumble of voices and footsteps continues.
People don’t gather unless there’s a clear purpose. A growing crowd marks ceremonies, executions, or the appearance of Veil tears.
I push myself up, fighting against the heavy weight of depression and exhaustion pulling me under.
“Where are they taking him?” I ask, my hoarse voice carrying through the ward bars and into the corridor to anyone who might still be there.
No answer comes.
I mash my wrists against the edge of the stone slab until the numbness becomes pain and the pain becomes anger, but the soul-glyphs stay unblemished.
The skin underneath them is pink and black, exposing the purplish-blue of my veins under the cursework.
They flash whenever I flex too hard in a heatless warning.
Nothing makes me feel smaller than fighting myself and losing.
“I know someone’s there.” My voice rings out like a cracked bell, sharper than I intend. “The Master Keeper wouldn’t leave such an unpredictable initiate by herself to destroy the dungeon.”
No one responds. Only Ember’s voice slips between my ears, along with bright pain.
Stop calling for him. He can’t get you out of this. But you can.
“I cannot,” I mutter, shifting against the slab until stone grinds through my skin and against bone, as if I can scratch off the spelled runes on my wrists.
The slab beneath me is cold and pitted, probably the remnants of a thousand other failed initiates.
“If I could, I wouldn’t still be stuck on this damned stone slab awaiting dissection while Falcen is enduring gods knows what at the hands of demented Soulrens. ”
You opened the bone door.
Ember is less voice than migraine, a heat that fills my skull and ripples out to the rest of me. But even now, under the Master Keeper’s spell, she’s teaching me. Ember provides more pressure, her presence seeming to thicken under my skin despite the agony she now brings.
Do you think that was luck? Your blood carries a pattern. Let it write.
The idea of my blood writing anything is revolting, but the alternative is wearing these soul-forged shackles until the Master Keeper comes.
“Falcen—” I say, but Ember cuts me off.
He’s pulled on a leash while you lie here practicing grief. If you love him, MOVE.
I dig my nails into my palms, searching for a reply that won’t bring nausea along with the pain of keeping in communication with her. “Where are they taking him?”
My skull feels like it’s being pried open, and I gag.
Likely somewhere public.
The arena.
That wide, circular pit at the academy’s center.
A place where we fought the Void widows, where Falcen commanded us, confident and skilled.
Where he slayed Heathan. There’s an overhang where Keepers can congregate and a sweeping curve of seats, empty during our training, but no doubt filled to the last bench by students when the academy wants to make a point.
“You could be right,” I say to Ember between clenched teeth. “But you always are, aren’t you?”
Could it be true? Could my blood unlock these chains and get me through the ward bars?
Maybe it would. I want to try. But the moment I move, a shiver of distrust makes me hesitate. I could bleed out and die on this slab, with only Ember for company.
“Why do you want me to get to Falcen now? You’ve never approved of my feelings for him.”
Falcen doesn’t need your pity. He needs your spine.
I lift my head as much as the migraine from our shared connection allows and stare at my hands. My nails are cracked, pink, and torn, my fingers and thumbs caked with dust and dirt.
I put my thumb in my mouth, bite until I taste blood, a hot copper tang. The flavor fills my mouth, fresh and human. A drop patters onto my soul-inked cuff.
Nothing happens.
My skin underneath stings, but the cursework is indifferent.
Not deep enough.
Nox’s balls, she’s right. I’m not brave enough.
That thought disgusts me. Falcen is somewhere out there, bracing for death, and I can’t even tear open my own skin?
Bite the inside of your wrist. Blood pulses there.
Adrenaline from the idea of cutting myself has made the pain from talking with Ember more bearable. I turn my wrist so the tender, magick-inked skin faces my mouth, then hesitate.
The academy has braced me for all kinds of violence, so much so that I don’t feel the urge to vomit anymore. But to mutilate myself, to sink my teeth into my own arm and create a wound big enough to overflow with blood…
Another slash of pain comes, and I clutch my head as Ember speaks.
You have no choice, child. If reminding you of an Elite who will likely die before ever embracing you again is what spurs you to escape this prison before the Master Keeper comes, then so be it. Do it for him.
Falcen.
I can’t leave him to suffer. If he must die, then he will rise to Lux in my gods-damned arms and not at the hands of Malakai.
After one single, slow exhale. I bite down hard.
The first bite doesn’t even hurt. The second is worse. I bear down, canine teeth grinding until a line of skin gives way with a spongy pop. Blood wells up, fast and hot, and it runs down my arm to drip from the curve of my elbow.
The taste is stronger now, less metallic and more like hot meat. That tells me I’ve hit an artery, or close enough for the purpose. I let it pool for a second, then tilt my hand and let it flow directly onto the tattooed manacles.
The moment it hits, the cursed glyphs light up, tracing lines from rune to rune like a lit fuse.
Sudden, indescribable pain detonates.
It isn’t hot nor cold. It’s a rasp pulled through my bones, a thousand whips dragging across my nerves. My back bows. I try to scream, and nothing comes out. Every muscle in my arm turns into a vat of poison.
I fall back against the slab as if struck by lightning. Muscles in my arm spasm, and my entire body locks up.
Breathe. These glyphs are strong, containing a dark magick, but you are stronger.
I try. My lungs refuse air. Light bursts behind my eyes and goes white.
Do not leave me, Verily.
Every nerve in my hand is screaming. I can’t even tell if I’m breathing.
Ember hits my sternum like an open palm. She clamps hard around my spine. She chokes the nerves at my elbow and shoulder, and someone dampens the signal of spreading vitriol.
“Thank you,” I choke out with a sob, and press my wrists together.
More blood runs. The rune-line races from the manacle into the shackle’s anchoring post. A hiss rises, like meat hitting a griddle. I smell my own skin.
My vision swims, but I can see the glow of the glyphs intensify, the line of blood boiling where it touches the sigils. The symbols blister, then split as they try to figure out a way to go around my blood and close around my wrists.
I scream again, but no sound comes out. My teeth chatter and my head slams against the slab, hard enough that I see sparks. For a second, I almost black out, but Ember grips me at my nape and shakes me awake.
“I can do this,” I gasp before I can stop myself, because positivity helps when I’m imploding from the inside out.
I grit my teeth. I taste blood and deeper flavor, one of death and fire.
Gouging at the sleeves of my tunic, I push the fabric up while the runes on my skin shift and rewrite themselves, a hundred lines of soul-cursework fighting against the simple pattern of my blood.
At last, the glyphs on one wrist sputter, ugly and sudden. My arm relaxes.
One free.
Just. Fucking. One.
“Help me,” I croak, not sure if I mean Ember, Falcen, or the gods.
You have everything you need.
I slam my other wrist against the stone and drag it, grinding until my bones grate, bleeding more. The glyphs there flash blue, then black, then gold. Pain explodes into my shoulder.
The cursework races up my arm, away from my blood.
I sit up, breath hitching, smearing warm blood up my arms. I swallow bile as it sears.
The agony climbs my shoulder and takes my collarbone with it. I lose my grip on language. Breathing becomes a task, counting becomes begging.
One. Two. Oh, please, gods, three.
My vision spots.
Sleep and you will never wake up, Ember warns.
Heat slips from her into my arms, not to burn, but to numb. The cursework fades but doesn’t vanish.
“I’m—I’m losing a lot of blood, Ember.”
We’re so close. Keep holding on.
“Stop that.”
The presence of an unfamiliar voice should halt me. Under normal circumstances, it would, but I am too far gone, so in the trenches of agony that I can think of nothing but escaping it.
I twist my body, straining to fight the last of the soul-ink with my bleeding wrist before it clots.
“You need to stop this madness immediately,” the voice warns again.
Ember burns hotter inside me, stronger now that there are fewer bindings to fight against. She’s a fire spreading from my center to my limbs. Push harder. We are almost free.
At the last second, I raise my head, vision swimming, then frown when I see who stands just beyond the ward bars.
Callie?
She’s not even close to the wretched, hollow-eyed prisoner I first met after we escaped the catacombs, but I noticed that in the women’s bathhouse.
Here, she appears even more radiant than when I last saw her.
Her ivory hair falls in clean waves around her face.
Her amber eyes are as bright as gemstones.
Scarlet robes hang from her shoulders, tattered, but deliberately so, like she’s torn them to suit her preferences rather than from neglect.
“Callie?” I croak, one side of my face pressed into the slab.
“Stop,” she commands again, her voice cool. “You’re making such a mess.”