38. Chapter 38
Chapter thirty-eight
The passage had given way to quiet at last, the alarm a distant peal her ears strained to hear. Lux ignored her body’s cries of protest, reveling in the physical pain that occupied her mind against every other form. It finally received its reprieve at the base of the darkened stone stairs spiraling upward. She’d found the entrance, and all that was required of her now was to climb.
She demanded her legs to obey, to step forward. But they only wanted to sink down and rest onto her knees. Lux hung her head, her breaths filling the air around her, loud and gasping, and she clutched Shaw’s bag like it were Shaw himself, the scent of him wafting from his coat to torment her. She closed her eyes, pressing her nose into her shoulder, inhaling deeply.
A grunted oath floated down from the stairs. Followed by a shuffling gait and a steady thump as if something were being dragged.
Lux didn’t give her limbs a choice as she shoved herself up from the floor, flattening against a shadowed wall.
The shuffling grew louder.
A swish of skirts followed.
Lux caught her lip between her teeth, forcing the air in her lungs to remain still. Her eyes squinted into the darkness to observe deep skirts of blue or plum. She’d only a moment to focus on them before they were hidden once more beneath the covering of a familiar grey cloak.
The hooded figure didn’t look toward her.
Instead, long fingers reached back into the entrance alcove and dragged forth a body. A body in a blood-red gown and a mangy sack over its head.
The phantom hoisted it up and into its arms. Without a glance in either direction, as if it knew its path with comfortable surety, it continued to drag its captive. Down the hidden passage, Lux had felt but not seen, and into the icy beyond.
Shaw’s long coat provided little comfort from the frigid gusts that assaulted her with reckless abandon. Lux wrapped her arms about her chest and attempted to keep her teeth from alerting the phantom to her presence with their incessant chattering. All the while, she followed.
The passage had sloped downward at first, but had since leveled out, making the pace easy if not terribly cold. At least the phantom had the exertion of towing another body along to keep it warm.
Lux knew she shouldn’t complain—she’d chosen to give into the mystery. The phantom wore no rags or spectral skin but a very real gown. She doubted this event occurred often within the safety of the mansion, and right now, the being was an ideal distraction to keep her from running back to take on the Shield single-handed.
The tunnel eventually gave way to hard-packed soil. So much so, it was an almost imperceptible shift from the carved stone prior. She may not have noticed had she not felt something similar beneath the trap door of her apartment. And that of her parents.
At first, only the grating sound of booted heels upon stone, and then soil, alerted her to exactly where the figure walked ahead. But now the phantom’s breaths were labored. It must not be accustomed to carrying bodies such long distances. It was little comfort.
A draft of warmer air brushed against Lux’s cheek, and she turned into the darkness. She stretched out her fingers. Where rough soil had been beneath was now empty space. A connecting tunnel.
Her skin crawled.
She knew where this tunnel led. Which meant her growing suspicions about where her current path was taking her were also likely correct. Lux dropped her fingers back to her side, tucking them deep within the sleeves of Shaw’s too-big coat. Another gust of frost-tipped air ran over her exposed skin in a gentle caress.
Welcome back, Lucena.
Lux pulled back into the darkness of the tunnel when the first glimmer of silver fell through the trap door.
The phantom abandoned the body in a crumpled heap at the base of the ladder, rising to push along the seam, opening with ease against its hands. The silver glow emanating from the trees in the center of the cottage spread to the passage beneath it now, and with a grunt of effort, the cloaked figure hoisted the body up and through the narrow space. Red silks and finely made boots were the last things Lux glimpsed before they were swept from sight.
Tentatively, she reached for the rung at eye level.
When Lux first peered over the floorboards, her mind flashed with visions of her death, stabbed mercilessly by the phantom’s narrow blade. When the attack didn’t come, she braved a look around. A flourish of red and the body was gone—around the trees and to the opposite end of the cottage. Muttered whisperings and a choked cackle of feminine laughter followed. Her heart bounded.
A madwoman?
Pulling herself up and through the trap door, she reeled back from a snuffling snout pushing against a cage. A cage that had materialized at her side, shrouded in shadow, along with a rat. His companion laid asleep, curled in the corner. What awful pets. Her lingering doubt over the cloaked being’s sanity was no longer; it must certainly be unhinged.
Lux crept alongside the trunks of the silver-barked trees. She crouched, giving them as wide a berth as possible before peering around their glowing trunks.
The phantom finished tying its prisoner—either dead or unconscious—to a hard-backed chair with a coil of thick rope. The victim’s soft hands rested limp and pale against the wood grain. The grey figure stood still, studying their charge for a moment. Then, with one quick movement, it flung the dirty sack from the prisoner’s head.
Morana.
Her lips were blue with cold, and Lux thought she might be dead until she saw Morana’s chest move with a shallow exhale. Her dress was askew, her hair a knotted mass about her head, and her skin much too pale. Lux could imagine how infuriated she would be to know someone saw her in such a state. Particularly, if that someone were her.
Morana moaned.
The sudden strike against her cheek rang out over the edges of the cottage, driving a gasp from Lux and ensuing silence from the mayor’s daughter.
The phantom lowered its hand.
All Lux could discern was an unyielding shadow beneath the hood as it turned to her. As it took in her crouched position, her body hidden beneath a massive coat and her fingers clutching tight to a dead boy’s things.
Lux bolted.
The phantom flew after her.
Down into the tunnel she dropped, no time for the ladder. Righting herself, she hurtled forward, her shoulder scraping painfully against the wall. The fabric shredded, the exposed skin stinging and hot, but she couldn’t slow. For the phantom leaped down behind her.
She tore back a cry of panic.
The monster at her back knew these tunnels well; it didn’t need light to guide its way, and Lux was going to die in the cold darkness because of it.
Even with the knowledge of her futile escape, adrenaline pushed her. Far beyond the normal boundaries of her capabilities. Her muscles bunched and stretched, heat tearing through them, sweat beading her brow, but she still didn’t slow.
The phantom gained.
Lux could feel it, the long fingers enclosing around the narrow knife that had tended to so many bodies so diligently. Her exhaustion shifted into the realm of delirium. She wondered what appendage the phantom would choose from her. An eye, perhaps? She’d long been complimented on them. Her toes?
Maybe it would carve out her very heart.
A switch on the bottom and then you run.
Shaw’s voice filled her head. So achingly real, it was as if he stood at her side calling her all sorts of foolish in her forgetfulness—which was exactly what she called herself in his honor as she attempted to maintain her pace, her hand diving within the bag.
A brush of warmth fluttered across her face, and Lux spun toward the welcoming air, racing down the connecting tunnel with everything in her. It wasn’t much anymore, but the quick change of direction gave her the added time to enclose her fingers around Aline’s device as the phantom regained the ground lost.
Hands fumbled in the dark until a small protrusion caught at the pad of her fingertip. She pushed against it and didn’t hesitate.
She tossed it over her shoulder.
Blinding white light flooded the passage like the sun, and a cry sprang up at her back. But Lux didn’t pause. The phantom’s quick breaths were gone. The only footfalls were her own.
With the synthetic, fading sunlight, she came upon a ladder, and climbed.
The stains were ignored. Lux tugged and pushed the couch over the trap door within her parents’ home, and when it was done, she collapsed upon shaking legs, resting her back against the rear of it. Morning had arrived, the grim glow of a new day creeping through the windows.
She wondered why she wasn’t crying. Shouldn’t she be? Part of her remained in denial, the rest of her too exhausted to argue the point. It couldn’t be real. It wasn’t possible that their plan had gone so awry. That Shaw was captured and now at the mercy of monsters, that the phantom had discovered her at last.
It isn’t real . That’s why .
Her eyes fluttered closed, a small, relieved smile on her lips, and with Shaw’s scent cocooned around her and her head propped against his bag, she drifted into fitful sleep.