Chapter Fifty-One
ChApter
Fifty-One
Celeste
My mother is bleeding.
The room is dark when the door is thrown open. My mother stands there, panting, holding a hand to her side as blood seeps through her fingers. She has a dagger in her grip as she sweeps her deep-brown hair out of her face.
I sit up, unable to slow the thrashing of my heart. “Mother?” My voice is from my past, when I was a child.
My mother slams the door and presses her back against it, panic twisting her features. Moonlight illuminates the tears running down her face.
She hurries closer in the darkness. “I’m sorry.” She reaches out to me. “I’m sorry.”
I think she means to embrace me, but I flinch from the sight of the blood on her hands.
The dagger is firm in her grasp. “I’m sorry. I can’t let him take it from you.”
“Mother, no!”
The dagger pierces my chest, and I let out a scream. I clutch the hilt, but my mother’s hand is still holding it firm. Blood pools around the blade, and I’m in so much pain, I cannot move. I look up at my mother to see her eyes closed. She mumbles something in whispers too quiet to hear.
A vibration moves through me, pulling from every part of my body and compressing to the place where the dagger is embedded. I feel my veins tremble as if I’m being drained of my blood. My sobs are silent as I continue to stare at my mother.
Her red-rimmed eyes open, tears continuing to spill. She places a hand over my wound, her fingers flanking the blade as she slips it out of my chest. My jaw hangs open as a warm, tingling sensation fills my chest.
“He’s dangerous,” my mother whispers. “You don’t know what he’s capable of. He’s already betrayed me.”
My pain dissipates, but my mother’s hand is still flush against my chest. “Mother?”
“I don’t want to leave you without your powers, Celeste. But if he finds a way to take them, it would have dire consequences.”
“Dahlia!” My father’s voice roars through the castle, making my mother flinch.
“Quickly,” she whispers to me, “change into a fresh nightgown. Hide this one. Go back to bed, and forget this ever happened.”
She hurries from the room.
When the door slams behind her, I jerk forward and call for her. “Mother!”
But I’m no longer in my room. It takes a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness I find myself in.
The walls curve around me, smooth, damp, and glistening in the dim light. I blink, trying to force my eyes to adjust. I’m in… a tunnel.
The air bites at my lungs, thick with the scent of wet stone and something sharper, stranger, beneath it. Every inhale feels weighted, every exhale a pale ribbon in the darkness.
Somewhere ahead, water drips in slow, deliberate intervals.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Each sound ricochets off the stone like the echo of a clock, counting down to something unseen.
I hug my arms to my body, panic scraping at the edges of my mind. My pulse lurches. How far from my chamber have I wandered in my sleep? How far from safety?
The tunnel slopes downward, a jagged vein plunging into the earth. The stones beneath my feet form uneven steps. A faint draft stirs against my skin, carrying a chill that cuts deeper than the damp air before it. The hair along my arms lifts.
I turn, searching for the way back, but the shadows behind me are heavy and seamless, swallowing any sign of the path I came from.
My heartbeat hammers in my ears. I take a careful step forward, the stone beneath my boots slick with moisture.
The air shifts again. Growing warmer.
Too warm.
I frown, slowing my steps. How did I even get here? Torbin locked my chamber—I checked the door myself before bed. Did I…? The thought catches in my throat. Did I use my power without knowing? Could I have slipped through the lock in my sleep?
A shiver coils through me that has nothing to do with the temperature. If I can leave my room without realizing it, what else might I do?
Another step, and the warmth becomes oppressive. The scent changes—less like stone and more like something raw, something ancient.
I glance behind me, thinking of the way back to the castle. If I could find a way out, would I even survive the night air? Dulcamar’s winter would slice right through a nightgown. My bare feet would freeze before I made it past the gates.
The temperature rises too quickly. For a moment, I think I’m making it happen, like the way I kept warm when Torbin made me come to his balcony dinner.
But no, this feels different. My skin prickles; sweat gathers at my spine, my collarbone, the hollow of my throat.
My breath catches, the thickened air scraping against it like grit.
The tunnel yawns into a cavern. The walls drip with condensation, but the floor—
I stop dead.
The stone beneath my feet is fractured, blackened as though fire once claimed it.
A faint, pulsing glow spills from the far end of the cavern, casting long, quivering shadows. My gaze locks on it.
Then I hear a sound that isn’t the drip of water or the crackle of heat.
Low. Deep. Resonant.
Like thunder rolling beneath the earth.
I draw a sharp breath. Something stirs within the glow—a slow, deliberate shift, the movement of something vast, a shimmer that doesn’t move like flame.
Two round shapes, each as large as my head, gleam from the shadows.
At first, I think they’re lanterns hung in some strange, high place, casting their silver light into the cavern.
But they hover too still… and too alive.
The glow deepens, shifting like molten moonlight. Then they blink.
The motion is slow, deliberate. Not mechanical. Not human. A chill slices through the oppressive heat as the truth sinks in.
They’re not lanterns. They’re eyes. Silver. Serpentile. Luminous. Fixed on me.
My lungs forget their rhythm. My blood surges so fast, I can hear it rushing in my ears. Whatever it is, it doesn’t feel like it’s happy to see me.
I step back, my boot scraping over loose stone. The sound echoes, sharp in the stillness.
A heavy, growling exhale follows, dragging through the cavern like a rasp, bringing with it the scent of brimstone and sulfur.
Shouts ring out. “She’s here!”
Torches flare, flooding the edges of the cavern with light. I whirl, but before I can run, hands clamp around my arms, iron-tight, dragging me back into the tunnel’s darkness.
A gasp tears from me, my feet stumbling over slick stone as the cavern recedes.
I turn my head to find Osrem glaring at me beside the Dulcamaran guards who hold me tightly.
“Going somewhere, Your Highness?” His voice is laced with bitter cruelty.
I’m not given a chance to answer. The guards drag me through the tunnel, back to where I came from. The last thing I hear—over the pounding of my heart—is the slow, deliberate scrape of something massive shifting in the shadows behind me.