Chapter 46
CAMERON
I woke with the taste of ash and blood in my mouth, my throat so dry I was instantly coughing.
“Drink this.” A bottle of water was thrust into my hand, and it was only when I’d drained it that my brain came fully online, asking me if it was safe to drink. But Sharniza was patting my back. She’d given me the water, so it had to be safe, and where the fuck were we?
Stone floors and iron bars for walls spoke of a prison cell. Curi was across the corridor in another cell with Levi. He hurried toward the bars but stopped a foot away from them. “You okay, Cameron?”
Was I? “What the fuck happened? Where’s Serath?”
“I don’t know,” Curi said. “We woke up a little while ago. They left water for us.”
“Who?”
“Whoever took us,” Shar said. “The bars are charged with a paralyzing ward. Don’t touch them. Curi spent fifteen minutes crumpled on the ground unable to move.”
I looked back at him, noting the dark smudges beneath his eyes. His skin was streaked with dirt, and so was Levi’s and Shar’s. I doubted I looked any better.
I took in our prison—stone walls, stone floor, no window. Weak light filtered in from somewhere by the corridor. “It has to be graynites. One of the two groups at war with each other.”
“They drugged us,” Curi said. “I didn’t even know it was possible to knock out a goyle.”
“They have my mother and Serath,” Levi added.
Serath had been in my arms when the drug hit. “We have to get out of here and find them.” We needed Derek. “Derek? Derek, can you hear me? I need you.”
“If he could be here, he would be,” Shar said.
“I know. I just…fuck. What are we gonna?—”
The clang of metal on stone froze the words on my lips.
“Someone’s coming,” Curi hissed. “Get back from the bars. Just in case.”
We all complied, pressing our bodies to the stone wall at the back of our cells.
Bootfalls approached, and a figure finally came into view.
“Hello, Cameron,” Ignus said. “It’s so good to see you again.”
“You!” I glared at Ignus, incensed but strangely relieved also.
Ignus looked me up and down. “Yes, me. It seems I’m making a habit of saving your life.”
“ This is Ignus?” Curi raked him over, clearly unimpressed.
Ignus offered him a mock bow. “The one and only. And just in case you missed it, I saved your lives.”
“Doesn’t make you a good guy,” Curi countered.
“No,” Ignus said. “It doesn’t. But where you’re all concerned, I’m the best guy. The guy that is here to lift the veil from your pretty eyes and reveal the truth about what you’ve gotten yourselves into.”
“I’ll settle for you revealing what you’ve done with my mother and Serath,” Levi said.
I took a step forward. “Where are they?”
He held up a hand. “All in due course.”
“If you’ve hurt them…” Levi left the threat hanging, but Ignus’s attention was on me.
“Do you believe I would hurt them, Cameron?”
The first time I’d met him, he’d tried to kidnap me. He’d used an invasive power to try and subdue me, and I’d been terrified, but the next time, he’d saved me and now there was no malice or threat radiating off him. I had to admit that it seemed his motives aligned with keeping me alive.
“I don’t think you’d hurt them, Ignus, but keeping us locked up in cells hardly gives a good impression.”
“It’s a precautionary measure until you’ve learned and accepted the truth.”
“And you’re going to tell us that truth?” Sharniza asked.
“Some of it. The rest will be imparted to you…later.”
“So what can you tell us now?”
“I can tell you that we are not your enemy, and I can tell you that the true enemy is hidden in the gargoyle ranks. They call themselves the faction. I can also tell you that the graynites that attacked you were created by the faction.”
Levi made a soft sound of disbelief, but Curi hushed him.
“What do you mean created ?” he asked.
I answered for Ignus. “He’s saying that this faction of graynites devoured my brother’s soul and turned him into a monster?”
My team knew the truth about how graynites were made. I’d insisted that fact be shared with them as soon as they enlisted for elite.
Ignus rolled his eyes. “The faction isn’t run by graynites, and even if it was, graynites don’t feed on souls.”
That wasn’t what we’d been told. “Then how are graynites made?”
“Graynites were created by a curse,” Ignus said. “They can’t be made . They’re born—either with the curse dormant in their blood, or as halfbloods like me.” He grinned, showcasing even white teeth.
None of this aligned with anything I’d been told. “I don’t understand. I thought graynites couldn’t procreate with humans.”
“They can’t. They don’t.” He winked. “The boss will explain it all soon.”
“Your graynite leader?”
“Yep.”
“But the faction doesn’t have a graynite leader?”
“Correct.”
So non-graynites using graynites? “But they have graynites working for them…”
“See, you’re picking it all up perfectly.”
“What did you mean about the curse being dormant in their blood?” Sharniza asked my next question.
“Ah, yes. You see, there is only one kind of gargoyle that carries the curse.” He smiled, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “A sigma gargoyle.”
Stunned silence met Ignus’s revelation, and suddenly everything began to make sense to me. Pieces of the puzzle fell into place as he continued to explain.
“The curse is ancient,” Ignus said. “The story is long, boring, and something the boss will tell best, but this whole thing that your council has about sigmas being forbidden to consummate with their fated mates is wrapped up in the curse.”
I licked my lips and said the words floating in my head. “Consummation activates the curse, doesn’t it?”
“Yes. It activates the curse, and it kills the sigma’s mate.”
Shar exhaled sharply. “So all this time when sigmas slipped up and the council took them away…”
“The curse had been activated,” Curi said.
“Turning them into graynites,” Levi said.
“Not exactly,” Ignus said. “There’s more to the change than simply activating the curse, but boss will be pissed if I tell you everything .
He wants to speak to you himself. What I can tell you is that now that your fated mate has had his curse activated by artificial means, you’re safe.
You can consummate to your heart’s content.
” He shrugged. “I suppose something positive has come out of everything, after all.”
But how had this faction activated his curse artificially?
“Why should we believe anything you say?” Levi asked. “You could be playing us.”
“True. But I’m not, and I think deep down you can sense that.
Look, we have a common enemy. All these years we’ve been fighting the same fight.
The graynite attacks you’ve fended off have come from the faction.
They’ve dedicated their lives to finding sigmas and either forcing them to activate their curse or taking the sigmas that accidentally activate it and turning them into graynites. ”
But he was forgetting something. Something that refuted what he was saying. “Romi wasn’t a sigma.”
He arched a brow. “Wasn’t he?”
The smug look on his face annoyed me. “He wasn’t. He would have told me. Serath would have said.”
“If he’s a graynite, then it means he was a sigma. Lionel probably hid the fact. Not difficult for a man of his power.” His eyes hardened, and his jaw clenched. “I’m sure he’s used his influence many times to get what he wants.”
A flicker of anger flared inside me. “Hey, that’s my father you’re talking about.”
He blinked sharply. “Hmmm…”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that the problem is hiding in the gargoyle ranks.”
“But why?” Curi asked. “Why would the gargoyles create this faction and do any of this?”
Ignus smiled a thin-lipped smile. “You’ll get a story time off the boss later, but for now you have a choice—trust me and join me in more hospitable chambers, or don’t and continue to languish here.
” His eyes narrowed, and he wagged a finger at us.
“If you’re thinking you can trick me into letting you out so you can make a break for it, think again.
You won’t get far. The complex is heavily warded and filled with… you guessed it, graynites.”
I exchanged glances with the others, seeing my thoughts reflected in their eyes. After everything we’d seen and been through, it wasn’t too far-fetched to believe that Ignus was telling the truth. That this faction was the real danger and the real home of the alpha.
I needed to know more, but first, “We want to see Serath and Adaline.”
“Of course,” Ignus said. “Adaline has been of great help to us looking over Serath. We needed to make sure that the entity inhabiting his body was gone.”
Romi had called Serath Ubron. “What was it? What was inside him?”
“An infernal, but that’s all I can tell you for now,” Ignus said.
“Serath is the first graynite that the faction has turned that we’ve managed to get our hands on.
But he has very little recollection of what was done to him aside from the pain.
He was able to carve out an anchor in his mind. A difficult feat. Very impressive.”
My stomach twisted at the memory of the last time I’d seen Serath, the dark circles around his eyes, the gaunt look on his face…
drawn with pain. They’d hurt him. Tortured him while I’d been free, doing pathetic, mundane things.
He’d been hurting, and I hadn’t known…not for weeks.
And the shadow…there’d been a shadow by the lake… Had that been Ubron?
Ignus’s jaw hardened. “Trust me, we will make them pay.”
“Is that the curse?” Curi said. “Something takes over a sigma’s body?”
“It’s a little more complex than that,” Ignus said. “But essentially, yes. Serath has been cleared, and we removed a tracker from his neck. He’s already been debriefed and is eager to see you. I left Adaline in the guest quarters where I can take you all now, if you wish.”
This was real.
It was all fucking real.
Serath was safe. He was free of the entity. He was whole again.
“Please, take me to him.”