Chapter 32
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Dorian
We walked and walked into the earth’s heart. Until I hardly felt real, and only the fae changeling behind me provided any proof I existed. The air cooled, the passage narrowed until we could only walk single file. The ceiling pressed in until I had to duck my head.
Though she wouldn’t say it, I felt Eurydice’s fear. Since the day I’d met her I could hear her heart—could hear its quickening, its rhythmic thud in sleep, its everyday cadence.
Her heart beat fast and faster the deeper we went. Yet she didn’t slow, didn’t speak up.
Still, I walked ahead. That spot on my chest, the spiritstag’s brand, had at first only ached. It was ignorable until it wasn’t. Now, with every fork we took and every mark we etched on a skull, it burned keener and hotter.
And my eyes had begun to sting. A familiar heat built behind them, the rims pulsing with it.
The deeper we went, the more I knew the truth.
The more I knew the truth—could smell and hear and feel it—the easier it became to navigate the catacombs.
Because it wasn’t just Eury’s pulse I sensed anymore.
Another creature—much larger, with far more blood to circulate and a heart bigger than the two of us put together—waited in the deep dark. Could she hear it?
If your body knows something your mind doesn’t, boy, Haskel used to say, shut your mouth and listen to your body.
We came to a fork, and Eury made to go right. Perhaps the smell was too strong now to discern between paths. I caught her arm, shook my head. “This time it’s a left.”
She didn’t move. Her crystal’s light caught her face—jaw set, eyes narrow. "How do you know that?"
“I can sense it. A heartbeat.”
“A heartbeat?” A pause as she no doubt listened. Then, “You’re sure?”
Down here in the deep dark, surrounded by the dead, it seemed almost fitting to speak of it. I touched the skin beneath my eye. “I’m sure.”
She stepped closer, face rising as she studied the red rims of my eyes.
"Everyone asks eventually,” I said.
“I always assumed you drank too much.”
“Noctere has a method. Old, not spoken of outside the winter court. They take noxveil—concentrated shadow—and put it into the eyes. A hollow needle. Liquid dark." I kept my voice level. "They pin you still and push it through."
Her jaw tightened. She didn’t look away.
“Most go blind. Some go mad. I came out able to see things I couldn’t before—the residue of death, traces of old magic. Things hidden in darkness. The path something has taken through a place, hours or years after it passed.” I looked down the left corridor. “And what lives at the end of it.”
Her nostrils widened. “Maeronyx did this to you when you were captive.”
“Gawain held me still for it. Told Maeronyx’s shadowsmiths I was strong enough.” Somehow the past felt easier to speak of here, like we’d entered a dream. “I was his project. His changeling, a weapon for the Black Frost.”
She said nothing for a time. I knew she had absorbed every word, but by now she knew I wanted sympathy as much as I wanted a cuff across the head. Both were difficult to accept.
So she turned to the nearest skull and cut her crosshatch into its brow. “Left, then.”
I followed her into the dark. We didn’t have to travel much farther.
After the fork, we soon reached the end of the catacombs. The bones stopped, leaving only an ancient stone passage. Huge, hewn rocks set carefully atop one another, filled in with crumbling mortar.
We stopped. Behind me, Eury raised the sol key to the tight walls and low ceiling. “If the catacombs stop here, then what lies beyond?” Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper.
There was no other answer I could give besides—
“I think you know.”
That was when I heard its breath.
In, out. In, out. A barely-there current through our tunnel.
Every time it breathed in, strands of my hair pulled gently forward. Every time it breathed out, those strands disappeared from view. Before me, her flaxen hair glinted as it moved in the light. Back, forward, back, forward.
Turn back. Turn back, a voice inside me begged. But I couldn’t turn back. I was bound to her, in life and in death. Even if she didn’t know it yet, I already did. I’d rather die to dragonfire if it meant standing at her side than living a thousand comfortable, painless years.
We stared at one another. It was unequivocal—she now knew the truth as well as I did.
Whatever could create a breeze through these tunnels must have lungs bigger than bellows. Bigger around than Sylvanwild’s mature trees.
Haskel had been right. Fucking bastard was always right.
She said, “Dorian…” The key’s light began a faint quiver on the walls, the shadows growing frenetic.
I stepped close to her. My hand came up to her soft cheek, and I set my thumb there. “I’m here.”
The vein in her cheek pulsed under my thumb—her heart must be pounding for its life. Her blood must be singing.
She was most powerful like this. Real, fearful, standing without running. That was power. Maybe someday I would have the words to tell her how much I admired her. Maybe someday she would believe it.
“We can still turn back, Eury.”
Her face lifted. Fearful blue eyes; a gutsy, firm mouth. I already knew what she would say, or at least the shape of it. Offering to turn back was an arrow straight to her heart.
“Let me walk ahead for this part.”
What could I say? What could I do but step aside?
So I did. Because if there was one unignorable force in my life, it was this woman.
She walked ahead of me, her cloak blowing forward and back, forward and back, until she came to an end to the passage almost like a rough-hewn doorway. Beyond it, the darkness went on and on—a void so deep and large I couldn’t even see a thing with my attuned fae eyes.
She lifted the key, its white glow so miniature it looked like a child’s toy. And, without a word, she stepped through the doorway.
Into the deep. Into the darkness.