77. Savannah
SEVENTY-SEVEN
SAVANNAH
Arcane and I moved in silence. I could feel his shield hovering around me, which I was thankful for since I still didn’t have a mask.
The humans had to live. Seeing them kill themselves… It was ingrained in my head. I couldn’t stomach it. I was barely keeping myself together.
All I kept seeing was my own dad die over and over again. I couldn’t let that be anyone else. I couldn’t let any more of them die. How many fathers were in the courtyard? How many human children were going to be left without parents because of Advenian greed?
Athler needed to die. And I needed to concentrate enough to do it. But all I kept thinking about was how I was going to face Wells after this. How was I going to tell my little brother our dad died because I was reckless and didn’t listen to him…
We made it to Arcane’s room, and I whistled as I took it in. It was the only part of the castle I’d seen so far that wasn’t ruined by death and blood. I’d never been to Lux before. I was envious when I found out that Arcane had brought Wells in the past and not me .
I’d always wanted to know what the Advenian Kingdoms looked like. I heard countless stories from my friends, but seeing it in person was something else. It was eerily similar to the mortal world—well, Lux was. Tennebris seemed more like a fancier version of the Middle Ages. But for the most part, everything was the same. The same but different. You couldn’t distinguish between the Advenian electric user’s lights versus ours. The buildings were similar. The furniture looked identical.
And Arcane’s room—I felt like I was walking into the most luxurious hotel I’d ever seen. He had floor-to-ceiling windows encompassing the entire back wall overlooking the ocean. And his bed was so tempting, I wanted to surrender to it. I wanted to forget everything that happened today.
I should be dead, not my father…
“This is it,” Arcane said as he grabbed a black swirling liquid off a test tube rack. Leave it to my brother’s ex lover to have a mini lab set up in the corner of his room.
“It’s liquid,” I said, stating the obvious.
Arcane looked at me. “What did you expect?”
“I assumed it would be another vapor or something.”
“Vapors are unpredictable and unstable. This is safer.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, walking over to him and inspecting it myself. “So what do we need to do? Get him to drink this?”
I didn’t see how this was going to work if that was the case. It wasn’t like we could ask this Athler person to have a drink with us, and I highly doubted either of us were going to get close enough to shove it down his throat.
“No,” he scoffed. “It’s transdermal. We just need it to touch his skin.” He then poured the black liquid into another, larger vial that had a grayish tint to it.
“What are you doing?”
“Mixing it with Alluse,” he said, not looking at me and concentrating on what he was doing. “We need to take him out. I came up with this a while ago. I figured we’d need a way to get rid of his powers. I originally planned to use it on my father…” His voice grew softer as he focused on the task.
The only word I heard was father…
It kept repeating over and over again in my head.
Father. Father. Father.
My father was only fighting because he found out I snuck into Lux. He wasn’t even supposed to be here—
Arcane finished mixing the liquids and pocketed the vial. “Do you still keep those sedatives on you?”
I pulled out one of my needles, already filled with a dose heavy enough to knock out ten people. “You mean this?”
“Yes. Think you can stab him with it if I make you invisible?”
I grinned. “I could probably do it even if I wasn’t invisible.”