Chapter 45 Olivia
FORTY-FIVE
Olivia
“Okay, mate, you can open your eyes.” Lucien’s tone was cool and soothing, and I knew I was safe with him, but still, the terror was there, clenching my heart to dust.
I shook my head.
“Not ready yet?”
Another shake.
He chuckled. And then I gasped and grabbed on to his T-shirt when he scooped me out of the chair without another word. I kept my eyes screwed tightly shut, not wanting to see the pit of despair we were in.
But as he carried me, the air around us… changed. We’d taken only a few steps—less than ten?—before he paused, inhaling deeply.
That was when it hit me.
Fresh air.
My eyes flew open, and what I saw was beyond my wildest imaginings of what I thought we’d find inside this dusty old temple.
It was life. Vibrant, bold growth was everywhere I looked.
Plants I had no names for buzzed against my senses, caressing my energy with excited tendrils from every direction.
We were still underground—but we were far, far below the stone ceiling above us.
It had to be at least a hundred-plus feet of open space.
The air was crisp and cool, scented with the exotic perfumes of big, pink flowers that bloomed a few feet away, thick vines tangled overhead, between ancient trees I had no name for.
“Can you put me down, please?” I asked, patting Lucien on the shoulder as I continued gawking in wonder.
He set me on my feet, and I walked across the spongy earth to rest my hand on the nearest tree.
Its energy was a gentle green glow in my mind’s eye, the quiet hum of a long, protected life. It had stood here for centuries, magically renewed by this place of power for the phoenix people.
As soon as I thought of the phoenixes, an image flashed into my mind.
From the tree, I thought. It was two great, fiery birds swooping and dancing in the air overhead, their powerful, triumphant cry as they clashed together and plummeted toward the earth shattering the vision, but leaving me breathless nonetheless.
“What do you think this is?” Lucien asked, gesturing to the wide expanse of untouched nature that defied all the odds.
“I think… it was their mating grounds. A protected area where they could fly free and have a little section of paradise to bring their young into the world.”
He nodded, glancing back the way we came. “I think you’re right. Look.”
I followed where he was pointing, grinning as I saw a scene similar to what I’d just been given by the tree, painted on the wall in stunning color.
Phoenixes in a rainbow of fiery reds and oranges swooped across the walls, some locked together and tumbling, some sitting on great jeweled nests, and others just flying free for the joy of it.
You could see it in every upturned line and sweeping curve.
Joy, freedom, power.
But sadness washed over me as I turned back around. There was none of that now, only an empty sanctuary, untouched for seemingly hundreds of years. Where had all the phoenixes gone? They couldn’t die without regenerating, as far as the lore went. So why had they abandoned their ancestral home?
It was a mystery I wouldn’t be able to solve.
“Do you see any way back up?” I asked, realizing that while this place was wondrous, it wasn’t built for wolves.
While I had no doubt there was a fresh water source hidden here somewhere, there was no prey here to hunt.
Even if we’d found the nesting grounds, with no way out…
we couldn’t return the omega stone piece to our pack.
“No, but it looks like this cavern is significantly larger than the temple structure up above. Look there.” He pointed upward this time, and I saw the precise corner cut into the ceiling above us, a massive support pillar of stone stretching down to the ground below.
Turning, I spotted the other three. There were also great, burning sconces that provided flickering light to the underground area, though it defied all logic that they were still burning after being so long untended.
“You’re right. Those are clearly the temple corners overhead. So did they just… fly down here? Or… Oh, look!” Dead in the center of paradise, a twisting stairway to the surface.
The room we’d fallen into was part of a small building, tucked into the foliage and hiding human—or, perhaps, shifted phoenix—amenities. Beds, washing chambers, storage bins. Nothing fancy, though it probably was by ancient standards.
In hindsight, I suppose it was better we’d fallen where we had than getting impaled on a tree limb.
Lucien and I strolled through the mating grounds, looking high and low for any sign of a nest, stopping at any small buildings to check the storage areas for signs of the stone shard, but we found nothing.
More than that, as beautiful as the underground paradise was, there was no sign of anything resembling the jeweled nests we’d seen in the paintings.
When we finally reached the staircase, I was relieved to find it was magically hewn from sturdy stone and still looked brand-new, spiraling up the long distance into the temple overhead. But it didn’t only offer us freedom. It also spiraled down into complete darkness below.
Anxiety filled me at the thought of going farther down, back into close, dark spaces. I was shaking my head and backing away before I even realized what I was doing.
“Hey, it’s okay. If you don’t want to go down, I can go. You can start climbing, and I’ll meet you at the top with Shay and Dirge.” Lucien chafed my arms lightly, not pressuring me in the slightest. Despite my fear, though, my wolf revolted at the idea of leaving our mate alone down here.
“You can go first. But I’m coming with you.” I lifted my chin and swallowed hard as I said it, my stomach flipping like a pancake at the idea, but I meant it.
“Brave mate,” he murmured, kissing me slowly, reminding me of how he’d made me come apart just a little while before. Still, that taste made me want more.
But he was right.
I was brave. I could do hard things.
Goddess, help me.
“Should we tell Shay and Dirge before we go down?” I asked, glancing up at the damaged spot in the ceiling from which we’d fallen.
“I would love to, but our phones still aren’t working, and they’re back outside, trying to find an alternate way in. I think our best bet is to find what we came for and get back to the surface as quickly as we can.”
“Okay, then, let’s do it.”
If we waited much longer, I might lose my nerve.
One more kiss, and Lucien started climbing down the spiral staircase. I sucked in a deep breath through my nose and followed him into the darkness.
I focused on the light filtering in from the stairwell, not daring to let myself look down or think about the fact that the ground was swallowing me up with every step.
Still, by the time Lucien’s footsteps stopped, my breathing was rapid, and my heart was pounding as if I’d just run a marathon instead of descending the stairs for a few minutes.
The staircase had taken us several stories down, the light small overhead. I just kept my focus on it as I reached the bottom stair and waited.
“Hang on. There’s a torch here and what looks like a lantern.
The room is pretty big.” He kept talking as he worked, and within a few moments, he had lit the torch and was touching it to the bowl-style lantern he’d found.
But the fire didn’t stay in the bowl; it raced along the walls, where troughs of oil surrounded the room and ignited, casting their dancing light into the room.
Finally, I exhaled.
This room was at least as large as the temple itself, but now that it was lit, shock filled me.
It was made of the same stone, sure. But that was where the similarities ended. Gold and treasure were stacked higher than my head, in great mounds all throughout the room.
“Holy shit,” Lucien murmured, taking my hand in his free one as we gazed around at the massive hoard of treasure together and began to walk deeper.
“I think this is more gold than Fort Knox.” Everywhere I looked, there was some kind of treasure. Coins, bars, jewelry, and jeweled goblets that looked like they belonged on King Arthur’s round table.
“Is that… the Florentine Diamond?” Lucien paused next to one of the mounds, pointing at an enormous, glittering diamond two-thirds of the way up the pile.
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s because it was stolen over a hundred years ago, and it’s been missing ever since.” He shook his head, but we kept walking.
“We probably shouldn’t touch anything, just in case.” Maybe it was superstitious of me, but you didn’t mess with the dead or the sacred, and this place felt like hallowed ground. Almost as if the spirits of the phoenixes were still here, guarding it, watching us.
“I agree. We’re not here to get rich. We’re here to save our people.” I didn’t miss the way his gaze dropped to my palm, the way he seemed to swallow the unspoken you.
They lay heavy in the space between us, all those unspoken things. Like how he felt about me. I’d told him I loved him, and even though he’d asked me to bond with him, he hadn’t told me he loved me. I thought he did, but what if I was just reading into things more than what he actually felt?
“Hellcat, look there.” He pointed up at a taller mound, a giant, sapphire nest sitting atop it. “We found the nesting grounds.”
“Yes, we did. The question is, how do we find a single piece of the omega stone in this hoard without disturbing anything?” This was way more than finding a needle in a haystack; this was a single piece of treasure in a hoard any dragon would be proud of.
“I have no idea. I guess we just start looking.” He shrugged, and we walked deeper.
We looked high and low in the mounds, careful not to touch anything, in case they all came tumbling down. Or we set off some kind of ancient alarm system that would fry us.
You know, either or.
“All the nests so far have been empty.” I hadn’t put much weight on the first one, because, well, we’d known the phoenixes were always rare. But I’d counted four so far, and not a single egg. It looked like we were about halfway through the room, and those weren’t good odds.
Was the entire species really gone? It was a depressing thought.
So many species were in decline, and I knew the omega wars had been deadly, but wiping an entire magical race from the planet was a new level of horrible I couldn’t stand to think about, as we stood here in the midst of the amazing things they’d created.
But it wasn’t just phoenixes. We were all in decline because we couldn’t stop fighting and let each other exist. It made me wonder what would happen once we did complete the stone and Brielle’s powers extended to all the wolf packs in the world.
Our numbers would increase again, but would the new power tip us back in the wrong direction or right the scales?
All told, there were eight nests, each formed from a single, large gemstone into a bowl-like nest shape.
From the ground, they all looked empty.
At the very end of the rectangular space sat a single chest made of wood and iron. It looked old and, other than its age making it rare, relatively worthless.
“That doesn’t blend in with everything else, don’t you think?” I pointed it out to Lucien, who was studying a mound a few feet away, topped with a fiery ruby nest.
“Not at all. I think we’re going to have to check it. I was hoping we’d see the piece lying somewhere so we could take it and go, but this all seems to be unmagical, just valuable.”
I nodded, agreeing with his assessment.
“I’ll do it,” I offered, ascending the eight steps to the elevated platform where the chest sat, completely alone.
“Go slow, just in case.” He was right behind me, ready to spring into action if anything went wrong.
But when I hesitantly placed my hand on the heavy iron clasp, nothing happened. No magical zing, just inert metal.
I lifted the clasp, and it moved with ease, as if it were freshly oiled. The lid of the chest was heavier, and it took some effort to lift. Once it locked open, I looked down, and it took a moment for my brain to process what I was seeing.
There it was, the final shard of celestine, glowing softly from the side of the chest. There were also two feathers, gleaming and long, the golden tips wispy and curved against the ancient wood of the box. Beneath it all… was ash.
Soft gray and dull, it lined the entire bottom, and I felt sick to my stomach.
The lore said that phoenixes burned up when they died, and then regenerated from those ashes. But these hadn’t.
Whatever had happened, these ashes had stayed dead.
I leaned down carefully to lift the last stone shard our pack needed, moving slowly so as not to touch or disturb the ash beneath it. A single tear rolled off my cheek and landed in the ash as I lifted the piece free.
When I turned and showed Lucien the fragment, his eyes lit with a smile, until he saw my face. “What’s wrong? We found it! We can get out of here and finally put this rock back together.” He wrapped me up in a hug, and I accepted the comfort but couldn’t shake the sadness.
“There are ashes in that box.”
He froze, not letting me go. When he slowly pulled back, his expression was thoughtful. “They might not be gone, not forever. Things are changing by the minute. Magic is nuanced, and balance shifts over time. Maybe when the rest of the supernatural world comes back into balance, they will too.”
Lucien wiped my tears away with his thumbs, holding me, giving me the time I needed to grieve all that was lost from the decline of this magnificent species.
When the tears stopped, I wiped my eyes, pocketed the omega stone shard, and looked out over the nesting grounds. And when my gaze landed on the ruby nest, I nearly burst into tears all over again.
There’s an egg inside.
Golden and delicate, I could see a hint of flame, as if the pattern was etched into the shell. One tiny, fragile egg.
But there was still hope for the phoenixes.
Maybe, just maybe, there was hope for us all.