Chapter 19 #2
If I hadn’t felt Veyyr drawing close, I wouldn’t have known he approached me, quiet as he was, the wind blowing to him. I folded the paper and tucked it away into my pouch.
“What is that?”
“A love note from one of my many admirers.” I took a step toward the mineshaft and stared down into the darkness. Not a lot different from the tunnel we’d left behind which didn’t leave me feeling warm and fuzzy.
Or the Rift I’d crawled out of. What was it with me and holes in the ground?
A whoosh of wings and Sorrow dropped to the edge of the mineshaft, gripping it tight then butting his tiny horn against the edge. I pointed at the darkness. “Any snakes this time?”
“No snakes. Dead things.”
Dead things I could handle.
“We’ll go at first light,” Veyyr said.
There was a tug on me and I turned to Rana. She’d been awake longer each time, though she was still very quiet and by very quiet I meant she hadn’t spoken. Not even through her touch.
“Hey Sleepy.” I smiled and took her hand. “You hungry?”
She shook her head, her eyes distant. But she was alive, that was all that mattered. I squeezed her fingers and she shook me off and took a step not toward the fire, but toward the mineshaft.
“Rana.” I reached for her, not thinking she would actually fall.
She jerked away from me and tumbled forward, faster than Veyyr or I could react.
“RANA!” I screamed her name and lurched after her. This was not happening, this was not happening!
“No!” Veyyr caught me, and kept me from falling, but it was like his power wouldn’t go down the mineshaft after her.
Stomach rolling, I clamped my hands over my mouth, kneeling by the mineshaft, certain I would hear the thud of her body hitting the bottom of the shaft.
Would she even feel it? Would she know? Would she…gods, how could I have let this happen? She’d trusted me and I failed her.
I closed my eyes, tears trickling down my cheeks, my knuckles tight as I gripped the edge of the shaft, metal biting into my palms, my heart shattering.
Sheer panic threatened to overwhelm me, and it took all I had to fight it back and cling to whatever training I had in me.
I hadn’t heard her hit the bottom, maybe…maybe there was a chance she’d caught herself on a ledge? Hope was not something I should have reached for, but I did anyway.
Analyze, calculate how much time you have, tools you need, chances that she would have survived. My mother’s voice was there, steadying me.
“Veyyr, how deep is it?” I stood and checked my weapons to make sure they were attached firmly. I’d leave the siphon spear with Harrison, but the rest I would take.
“Hundred and fifty if Doran was correct. My connection to the storm won’t work down there.” He shrugged out of his long coat, throwing it to the ground. “LUCKY! Bring the ropes, now!”
In my heart, I didn’t believe she’d be alive, but whatever the chance was that she’d fallen only a short distance, I would take. We were going in now. We’d fought too hard to keep her alive to just throw our hands up. Turning from my fear, I latched onto the nearest adjacent emotion.
“What the fuck did the witch do to her? She hasn’t spoken, she’s not even connecting to me with her telepathy, and she just fucking threw herself over the ledge!”
Veyyr didn’t answer only stood there, the air chilling around us as his anger seemed to turn to ice, but he didn’t say anything.
Because I wasn’t angry at him, I was angry at what had happened. Angry at myself for letting it happen.
Harrison and Lucky brought the ropes and the harness, bewilderment on both of their faces.
Harrison handed me the smaller harness. “I thought you were going in tomorrow?”
“Rana fell in,” Veyyr said as he slid into his harness. Harrison ran to the edge of the mineshaft.
“RANA!”
His shout echoed down but there was no answering reply.
Lucky cursed and I couldn’t agree more with the series of fuck this, fuck that, fucking witch…“Gods be damned, not our little flower!”
“Sorrow, you coming?” I tipped my head at the sorrowbird.
The bird launched upward, spun and dove straight down the shaft in answer.
I slid into the harness, tightened the straps and checked the connections. I was no good to her if I fell. I didn’t like the way my heart pounded in triple time as if it knew something I didn’t.
While Harrison and Lucky tied off the ends of the ropes, I set my feet on the edge of the mineshaft and leaned back over the opening.
Veyyr handed me a lantern and snapped his fingers in front of it.
A glowing blue orb settled within the glass, illuminating the space around me almost as well as the mid-day sun.
Without another word I pushed off and dropped into the shaft. The lantern lit the space up well, which meant every hop I took I got a good look at the walls.
At the scrawling images, the ledges that looked a hell of a lot like those that I’d climbed out of just a few short days ago, at the smears of rusty brown and black that my sensitive nose told me were indeed old blood.
We were not the first to slide down here since the breaking of the world.
But no matter how far I went, Rana was not on any ledge. She wasn’t waiting for us broken and bleeding out at the bottom either.
As my feet touched the dusty bottom of the shaft, I stared around me. “Rana?”
My voice echoed in three directions.
Veyyr dropped to the ground beside me and undid his rope, but we both left the harnesses on. “She’s not here?”
I held up my lantern and saw the small footprints leading to the left. Impossible and yet there they were. “This way.”
I want to say that I was relieved that Rana had survived the fall, but I also knew that she’d been with Thorn. And Thorn wanted me dead. Could she have done something to make Rana into a weapon? Or broken her mind, even while she healed her body?
“This could be a trap,” I said.
“I doubt it.” Veyyr held the lantern higher, pausing at an intersection. “The hydra bones are this way.”
I looked down at the footprints and sent out a single thread to Track Rana. “She’s the opposite direction.”
Veyyr’s jaw ticked. “If Thorn has done something to her, a trap as you just suggested, we are better off leaving her. We get the hydra bones and we go.”
Shock hit me in the jaw like a sucker punch. “You can fuck right off and keep fucking off. We aren’t leaving her.”
He lowered his lantern. “You bound yourself to me, willingly to help with my quest. Not to run after children potentially possessed by a witch.”
His blue eyes were icy, no hint of giving a shit about Rana. “Why take her then? Why heal her if you knew—”
“I didn’t know Thorn would do this!” His voice was hard and full of anger. “If I had, I would have let the girl die. But I thought it worth trying to save her. She could have been useful.”
Useful. Like me.
“What the fuck, Veyyr? She’s just a kid! Why can't we help her—”
He turned away. “We are going this way.”
Obviously unwilling to answer the question.
“Sorrow, go to Rana. I’ll be right there.” I pointed to the left and the sorrowbird let out a caw, grabbing at Veyyr’s long braid closest to him and giving it a jerk as he went by. “Turd man.”
“We don’t have time for this.” He growled, and then he tugged on the bond between us, like it was a leash. And my feet stumbled after him.
Horror set into me like nothing I’d ever felt. He had me on a leash, like an animal and the minute I tried to do something he didn’t like he would just give it a yank. Well, fuck him, leashes worked both ways.
I reached for the bond, and pulled back, mentally and figuratively putting my heels in, which brought Veyyr to a strained stop.
He looked over his shoulder. “Do not do this, Mallory.”
A warning, it was always a warning when he used my full name. “We get the girl first.”
I felt the shift in him and braced for the bond being manipulated, but I wasn’t expecting the strength of it on his end. “I created the bond, so no matter that you can fight it, you can’t stop it. I’d rather not, but seeing as you are putting me into this position…”
He crooked a finger at me.
My feet started moving, step by horrifying step no matter how hard I tried to lock my knees. “You fucking bastard!”
“Don’t start with endearments already.” He turned his back to me, and I had no choice but to follow. I fought him every step of the way through the mineshaft, stumbling over everything no matter how small because I refused to make this easy.
The fourth time I hit the dirt, I split my lip on a rock and just lay there.
“Stubborn. That hasn’t changed.”
I looked up at him, the offhand comment reminding me again that he knew me. Which only further enraged me, that still he did nothing to help me figure out my past. Did it matter that I wouldn’t be able to hear some of it? No, what mattered was that he wouldn’t even try.
Just like he wouldn’t even try to save Rana.
He bent and picked me up, throwing me over his shoulder and I couldn’t even fight him. The bond kept me from doing anything against him.
I wanted to elbow him in the back of the head and drive my knee into his chest.
“You’re a fucking liar! Three years, three years not three months!”
His eyes meet mine, and for just a moment there is something resembling regret. It’s gone before I can be sure of what I saw.
“I cannot help it if you don’t read your contracts before signing them.”
Rage lit me up and I screamed like a banshee, the shriek echoing off the walls and rebounding around us. If there was an animal down here it was going to come running and I was going to let it kill him.
The bond would be severed, and I’d find Rana and that would be that—it wouldn’t matter what knowledge his death took with him, I didn’t fucking care.
But Veyyr? He fucking swatted my ass. “Quiet.”
My mouth clamped shut. Because he gave me an order and I was bound to him which meant he had absolute control over me.
I couldn’t decide if something broke inside me, or if the anger was just so hot I went still, my mind quieting and my body going limp.
The thing he couldn’t stop me from doing was Tracking Rana.
I reached for her, sensing just where she was in relation to the direction Veyyr packed me.
The girl was getting closer to us now, as if the bottom of the mineshaft was a huge circle.
Sorrow was with her, a quick reach for his threads told me that.
I would find them both as soon as I was done with this bastard.
Veyyr held me easily with his one arm. “The last ingredient after this will be the hardest.”
I kept my mouth clamped; he did after all tell me to be quiet.
The two lights bobbed along beside us, and only then did I realize he held them aloft with his connection to air, an element of great chaos and power.
Sylph, that was what Stheno had called him.
Which meant he was part air elemental—not a mage as I’d thought—which also explained the silver hair and the sheer power in his skills.
But how much elemental? Because there was something else in him, something that felt more like a mage than an elemental power.
Human and elementals were known to cross breed. But it was rare an elemental would give children to anyone outside their own species or a human.
“I would like to work with you on this, Tracker.” Veyyr’s voice had softened some sounding more tired than angry. “If you will hear me out.”
He set me down and I turned to face him but still said nothing because I had no choice, of that much he was showing me.
“I needed to speak to you without Harrison around and I’d planned to have this chat prior, but the situation with Stheno…
complicated things. So here we are. He cannot know what is coming,” he ran his hands over his face, a show of vulnerability that caught me completely off guard.
“I will not make it through the last journey alive to gather the final ingredient. It has been foreseen by three different seers, and even Doran. That is why I needed you to promise me you would see this through. Harrison will need your strength, and your Tracking abilities to finish this.”
I stared at him, still pissed about Rana, and wondering if this ‘chat’ was a distraction.
I tested out my voice. “First of all, you haven’t told me what “this” is.
I am guessing at this point you still refer to the resurrection spell?
Second, now you want me to believe that you think you’re going to die?
And that’s why you’re a fucking bastard all the time? ”
His lips twitched. “I am going to die. And I am a bastard.”
I shoved a finger into his chest, not liking the tightness in my own. “We all are, you idiot!”
Veyyr closed his eyes, fatigue washing over his face as if the weight of this was just too much.
Or maybe I was reading into it too much.
Maybe both. “You will need Rana. She is a witch’s initiate now, I could have healed her, but I needed Thorn to open her to all her abilities, without realizing what she was doing.
That’s why Rana is spaced out—this fog of hers will pass, but it also protects her for the next few days, softening any injuries as she finds her way through the initiation.
We’ll grab her on our way back out after we take the hydra’s bones. ”
I stared at him, feeling my jaw unhinge. “You knew Rana would be okay when she jumped down the well?”
He rolled one shoulder and winced. “Not for certain, but fairly.”
Fairly. I shot a fist out and punched him in the shoulder. “You’re an asshole!”
He took the blow without so much as a shove back at me. “Yes. I’m aware. Idiot. Asshole. Bastard. Want to add any other titles?”
I blinked. He was being open, and not defensive, speaking to me, answering questions as best he could. It was weird. “Why are you being…different?”
He motioned for me to follow him. I felt the strength of his spell in my feet, but it was more of an invite to go with him than control this time.
“I need you to stay with Harrison. The bond between you and I will sever when I die, but your promise was to see this quest through—you will hold to that.” He stared straight ahead.
“You don’t know that.”
He looked back at me then. “Oh, but I do. Because no matter that you are different now than you were, there is one thing the same. You will hold to your word. You always have.”
There it was again, that glimmer of acknowledgment that he knew me from before I lost my memory. That I was different now.