Chapter 14
Callum
I stumble out into the human realm with Seren clutched tightly against me. She’s fading fast, breath wheezing in and out of her lungs. Panic crawls up the back of my own throat, and I have to remind myself to breathe through it.
“Hey.” I jostle her slightly. “Are you still with me?”
Her eyelids flicker, but don’t open, and I jostle her again. Another flicker, another wheeze, and I look wildly around the clearing.
Seren said witches would find me, didn’t she? She wasn’t making a lot of sense before we stepped through the Veil, but I think that’s what she said.
“Hello?” I call out, and my voice echoes through the darkened woods surrounding the Veil.
No voice calls back.
The magick here is different, the air thinner, less power coursing through it.
Still, as I close my eyes and try to summon a portal, I think I could do it. It would take a little more concentration and effort, and likely be much more uncomfortable than the easy magick back in the demon realm, but I could do it.
If only I knew where to take her.
“Is anyone there?” I try again, and again, no one answers. I take a few steps away from the Veil, toward the forbidding forest, and run right into some kind of barrier. It crackles a warning against my skin, alive and pulsing with magick.
Seren shifts in my arms, breath coming out in a choked gasp, and I bite back a curse.
Enough of this.
No matter how skilled these witch healers might be, it won’t make a damn difference if she doesn’t live long enough for them to help her.
I’ll take her back to the demon realm and to the court. They have a healer there, Vayla, who can help her.
Fuck, I hope she can help her.
Panic again rising hot and sour in the back of my throat, coating my tongue, twisting my stomach, I turn to head back for the Veil.
“What are you doing here?”
The witch who steps into the clearing has bright red hair and a smattering of freckles across her pale face. Her hands are raised, and living flame licks around her fingertips.
At least until she sees Seren.
“What happened to her?” The witch rushes to us, takes in the sight of my mate struggling for breath, and must decide her question doesn’t need an answer because she immediately takes my arm and tugs me toward the woods.
“This way.”
I’m about to tell her I can’t, that there’s some sort of magick caging me here in this clearing, but as soon as we reach the same spot I was struck before, the magick recedes.
“You can’t get through the wards without a member of the Crescent Coven.” The red-headed witch says in answer to my surprised inhale. “Well, unless you’re Seren.”
I’ve got no idea what she means, but there’s no space left in my mind to question it as I follow her through the thinning woods. We reach the edge of them in short order, right where they meet the base of a long, sloping hill.
“Is that where we’re going?” I ask, nodding toward a large stone building at the top of the hill.
“Yes.”
“Take my arm.”
Maybe this witch already knows about demons’ ability to travel through portals, because she doesn’t hesitate before laying her palm on my forearm.
With effort, I open a portal that takes us right to the manor’s front gate.
The witch stumbles out, clutching at her chest, blazing curls tumbling around her face as she finds her feet again.
“Fuck,” she mutters. “They really weren’t kidding about those portals. Come on, it’s just through here.”
She cracks open the gate, but instead of leading me up the cobbled drive, we head around the side of the palatial estate, to a set of stairs leading down into the earth.
They bring us to a cellar door, heavy wood pitted with age.
“We’re almost there,” I whisper to Seren, but the slight rise and fall of her chest—still with that horrible wheezing—is her only reply.
The witch beside me raps hard on the door, and with each passing second it doesn’t open, I’m more and more ready to portal back to the Veil, to hells with all of this, and get Seren help back in my own realm.
“Who is it?” A voice calls from inside.
“Open up, Soleil. I’ve got someone here for you.”
The door swings open and a harried-looking, black-haired witch—Soleil, presumably—stands there. She opens her mouth to speak before all the color drains from her face, her bright green eyes widening when she sees the woman in my arms.
“Bring her in here.”
In an instant, Soleil regains her composure and leads us inside. Down another set of stairs, then another, the air growing cooler with each floor descended and flaming torches burning on the walls to light our way.
We reach a set of double doors, also heavy and wooden and obviously as old as the rest of the manor, if not older.
Inside, a circular chamber filled with work tables in the center and shelves built into the walls.
Stacked high with bottles of tinctures and dried plants, ancient tomes and witch’s tools, the air in the chamber is filled with the scent of herbs and sorcery.
“Put her here,” Soleil commands, tapping her hand on one of the tables before she turns her attention to a tall cabinet at the back of the room, rifling through its contents.
I lay Seren gently down and take off my cloak, rolling it into a makeshift pillow to put beneath her head. Almost as soon as I’ve got her settled, the other witch is back with some strange contraption in her hand.
A narrow glass tube with a stopper at one end, a wickedly sharp-looking metal needle at the other.
“What magick is this?” I ask, restraining myself from stopping her as she lowers the tip to Seren’s arm.
My mate asked me to bring her here. She trusts these witches, this coven. I can only hope that trust wasn’t misplaced.
“Not magick.” The tip pierces Seren’s skin, and the witch presses down on the stopper, emptying the cylinder’s contents. “Medicine. Human medicine. It should help her breathe.”
For a few agonizing moments, nothing happens. Seren’s shallow wheezing continues, the rise and fall of her chest so slight that it might stop at any moment.
I take her hand, and Soleil’s keen green eyes follow the movement.
Familiar eyes.
Eyes I’ve been dreaming of incessantly these past weeks.
A slightly different shape, set in a face that’s a bit smoother, rounder, but undeniably the same shade that caught me in its snare that night in the Middle.
This witch must be Seren’s sister.
Before I can ask, Seren’s tight breathing eases. She pulls in a deeper breath than she’s taken since I found her in Faerie, and I do, too.
“Seren,” I murmur. “You’re safe. Can you hear me?”
A few silent seconds pass, and any relief I might have felt evaporates.
Her breathing stays steady, but her eyes don’t open and her skin still has that same ghastly pallor.
Her lips, too, have a strange cast to them, a deep blue-black lining the edges that seems to spread outwards, staining her skin.
I look at Soleil, and she’s studying Seren with deep furrows in her brow.
“What did this to her?” She’s back on her feet as she asks the question, heading to a neatly organized rack of sorted herbs and vials of various liquids.
“A—a mushroom,” I stutter, mind flicking through terror-filled memories of watching my mate nearly be shot through with an arrow. “Or a fungus, of some sort. She was covered in its spores.”
“What kind of mushroom?” Soleil never pauses for a moment as she rifles through hundreds of glass vials, barely looking at them as she plucks one, then another, and another.
“I don’t… I don’t know.”
She grunts her frustration. “Color? Shape? What were the spores like?”
“Black. Very large, round, and attached to a tree. The spores were dark green.”
She asks nothing else, and I doubt I’d be much more help, anyway. Fingers moving this way and that over the bottles, she plucks one, then another, and another, until she’s got an armful that she takes to a workbench and starts measuring into a bowl.
“Want me to get—”
“No,” Soleil cuts off the red-headed witch, who I’d forgotten was still here. “No one can know she’s here.”
The note of warning in her tone sends a shiver of ice down my spine.
Is this place not safe for Seren? Are these not her people?
The witchmagick emanating from this place is overwhelming, undeniable. Seeping from every inch of stone, like it’s been woven into the bones of the manor for generations.
Why would Seren not belong here?
The red-haired witch nods her agreement before slipping out the door.
“If anyone tries to—”
“No one’s going to hurt her.” Soleil doesn’t even look up from her work as she cuts me off, too. “They’d just be royally pissed to know she’s here.”
“Why would they—”
“Let’s save the questions for after she’s awake.” She returns to the table with a small stone cup filled to the brim with dark blue liquid. “Help me sit her up.”
Seren’s body is limp and unresponsive as I put my arms around her, supporting her back as I get her upright.
“Sorry, Ser.” Soleil tips the cup into Seren’s mouth. “If you didn’t hate me before, you will for this.”
Alarm rings through me, but the liquid’s already passing her lips.
Seren jerks to attention almost immediately.
Or, at least her body does, reacting to whatever foul concoction Soleil is forcing into her. With a firm hand over her lips and the other massaging her throat so she swallows, Soleil makes sure she consumes every drop.
“Alright, back down now.”
Despite her visceral reaction to the potion, Seren’s eyes never open. She stills again as soon as she’s down.
“Stand back.”
Soleil’s eyes are fixed firmly on Seren’s as she speaks, hands hovering in the air over her chest, and my terror is so absolute that I don’t even think to question it.
A moment later, the air is filled with magick.
Warm and slow and powerful, coming in great waves from the earth beneath the manor, the stone of the walls, the very air around us.
“What are you—”
“I work best in silence,” Soleil says through gritted teeth, eyes closed now, body taut and straining with the force of the power she’s drawing forth.
The power she’s sending straight into Seren.
It might go on for minutes, or maybe hours, whatever strange ritual Soleil is lost in. Beyond an occasional quiet hum or a grunt of something that sounds almost like pain, she’s still and silent, though sweat beads on her brow and her muscles begin to tremble the longer it goes on.
My panic doesn’t ebb until I watch the color around Seren’s lips recede, watch some of the pink return to her cheeks.
Her breathing grows deeper. Her heartbeat stronger.
A small tendril of her familiar magick even rises in the air, the storm-rich scent of it a complement to Soleil’s pulsing earth and copper fanning out in waves around them both.
Soleil lets out a long breath and swipes a hand over her damp brow, finally breaking her silence. “I think that should do it.”
“What did you do to her?”
The sane half of me recognizes she just saved my mate, but that half isn’t in charge right now.
The other half—the one still run ragged and half-crazed by everything that’s happened over the last hour—only saw Seren’s violent reaction to the potion, felt the impossible waves of magick flowing into her prone body.
“I kept my sister alive,” Soleil snaps at me. “And if you think that was bad, then I’m glad you’ve never had to witness someone dying because their lungs are being eaten from the inside out.”
I flinch, but Soleil isn’t done.
“Never mind the fact that she’s not even supposed to be here, that she hates me, that I probably just landed myself in so much—”
Soleil’s words cut off abruptly, and I don’t miss the flash of tears in her eyes before she turns away. Her shoulders rise and fall once, twice, on deep, steadying inhales.
When she turns back around, her face is stone. Carefully blank, all emotion shoved aside.
“Stay here,” she commands. “And be quiet. I need to go run some interference and make sure nobody else comes poking around to see what’s going on.”
With that, she leaves, and even if she wasn’t in such a hurry to get out of here, I don’t think I could have formulated a single question I want to ask.
I’ve got plenty of them, all clamoring to stand in the forefront of my mind.
The confirmation of who Soleil is to Seren. The looming threat of whoever lurks on the other side of those doors. The magick I just witnessed and what it means for Seren.
But it doesn’t matter right now.
Whatever the nature of Seren’s relationship with her sister or with the coven, regardless of the trouble she might be in by coming here, it was worth it.
My mate is breathing easier on the table in front of me. I adjust the cloak beneath her head, wishing I had another so I could drape it over her and ward off the chill that permeates the cellar.
And then I wait.
And wait.
And wait.
Though it’s likely only minutes passing, each one feels like hours. They feel like days, months, and I count each of Seren’s breaths, press my fingers to the inside of her wrist to mark the beat of her heart, my only sign that time is still—somehow—passing.
Soleil comes back to check on her patient, listening with some strange piece of metal that she places in various spots on Seren’s chest, connected to a long tube split into two ends that she sticks into her ears.
Satisfied with whatever she hears, she also leaves a pitcher of water and a glass on the table beside the one where Seren is lying.
“She’s going to need that when she wakes up.”
Soleil leaves again after administering another, smaller dose of what she gave Seren earlier. The potion goes down easier this time, and it might just be my overwrought nerves showing me what I need to see, but I imagine I can see Seren’s breathing grow deeper, her color brighter.
Silence settles over the cellar, and from where I keep my vigil, I close my eyes and concentrate on other sounds. Sounds I can hear now that the beating of my heart isn’t quite so frantic.
Above, distant signs of life echo through the manor. Doors closing and water running in pipes, faint voices, and even one set of passing footsteps that makes my breath catch as it goes by.
But no one else comes to the workshop. Whoever might take exception to Seren being here, they don’t materialize. They don’t come to kick her out, or worse.
Another eternity passes before Seren finally stirs on the table. She shifts, breathes deep, coughs, and I shoot up from my chair, leaning in close and whispering her name.
Her eyelids flutter open, then go wide with surprise.
Green, green eyes stare back at me, and I’ve never seen a sight more beautiful.