Chapter 5
FIVE
Listen for whispers. Sometimes they hold the key to living another day.
CIPRIAN
The tank of fear inside me is gone. Not empty—like I’ve used up all my fuel and need to get more—but gone, as if someone cut me open and carved out the parts of me that I spent my whole life developing.
Without magic, without the capacity to create nightmares, I’m just some guy, and I’m not sure I can handle that.
“It’s gone,” I gasp. “My magic. It’s gone.”
Wheezing, I bend at the waist and try not to pass out.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay.” Luca claps me on the back. “There’s a magical dampener in here somewhere. Your magic isn’t gone, it’s blocked.”
“Celine,” I gasp, peering around the circular room frantically. “Where is she?”
Luca sags next to me. “She’s not here.”
“We’ll kill them,” Malach growls. “They’ll pay for taking her.”
Alistair pounds his fists against the door and screams her name.
I shrink away from his rage, studying him warily.
His hands are red and swollen from hitting the door.
If I weren’t one wrong move away from a full-blown panic attack, I would tell him to shut the fuck up.
His meltdown helps no one. What if there’s no one left to help?
I clear my throat. “Do you think—”
“No,” Luca snaps, his fingers spasming against my back. “She’s alive. If the goal was to kill her, they wouldn’t have separated us. They would have left all five of our bloody corpses to rot.” Comforting, Luca. Incredibly comforting.
I massage my temples and try to piece together what happened.
Weaving the nightmare to hide us made it harder for me to stay warm, I remember that. I held it for as long as I could, but I was barely conscious during the fight. “We never had a chance,” I whisper. “They were waiting for us.”
Luca leads me to a cot and sits down beside me, his breath escaping in a whoosh. “It’s my fault. I led us into an ambush.” He sounds utterly devastated, and I shift uncomfortably. Sad Luca is my least favorite Luca.
“Don’t be dumb.” I nudge his shoulder with my own. “Correlation doesn’t equal causation.”
“What?”
“Just because it was your plan doesn’t mean it was your fault,” I tell him. “We had to try.”
“If we had stayed in the hollow, we would have—”
“Starved and frozen our nuts off.”
“But now we’re—”
“Warm, with eight balls between us, which is a plus. We can regroup, scheme, get Celine back, then go on a legendary killing spree.”
Luca scrubs his hand over his face and nods. “Yeah, okay.”
Alistair kicks the door hard, cursing viciously, and Luca stiffens. For fuck’s sake.
“Stop that,” I snap. “You’re giving me a headache.”
“I can’t stop,” Alistair snarls. “I need to get to her.”
Red eyes burning with unfiltered madness, his hands curl into claws at his sides. The hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as he surges away from the door, knocking over a basin of water and soaking my half-defrosted feet.
I shoot Luca a side-eyed glance. He’s the best suited to calm Alistair down, but he barely seems to notice Alistair is losing it. Hunched in on himself, Luca is smaller than I’ve ever seen him, weighed down by the situation.
“Don’t ignore me, Casanell,” Alistair hisses.
“Shut. Up.” I push to my feet and get in his face. “Think of someone besides yourself for once. You don’t get to turn into a raving lunatic because you’re worried about Celine. News flash, you fanged fuck—we’re all worried about her, and you’re making it worse.”
Alistair’s chest heaves, grazing mine with each exhale. His gaze darts to my throbbing pulse, and I narrow my eyes in warning. I’ll lay him out if he goes for my throat, but I’m done with his rage.
The silence is brutal, charged and primed to explode.
I hold myself perfectly still, refusing to so much as blink until he stands down.
When Alistair finally takes a step back, my shoulders droop. His Adam’s apple bobs wildly as he rakes his fingers through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he mutters.
I nod, but I’m not sure if I’m included in the apology or if he’s simply offering a general catch-all for being dickish in front of a captive audience.
Alistair crouches in front of Luca. “What’s going on in your head?”
Luca sighs. “Too much.”
“We’ve got time . . . I’m pretty sure the door is locked.” Ali puts his hand on Luca’s knee, swiping his thumb back and forth in gentle strokes.
Luca meets his eyes and pulls his lip ring into his mouth. I sink down next to him on the cot, trying to offer silent support. Whatever my personal feelings are about Alistair, I know he cares about Luca.
“I wasn’t supposed to come here,” Luca says.
“Can’t imagine why. It’s charming,” I joke, a burst of relief rushing through me when his lips twitch.
“My parents left as soon as they found out Mom was pregnant.”
“Good timing, yeah?”
Luca grunts and scrapes at a piece of loose skin on his thumb. “It was, for me at least, but to make it happen, they had to make a huge sacrifice. There wasn’t any other way.” He tears the skin off his thumb, and blood wells up.
I wince, but he keeps scratching, doing more damage with each pass of his nail.
Alistair tracks the movement, a groove forming between his eyes.
When Luca tears another piece of skin loose, Ali grunts, grabbing his finger and slipping it into his mouth to keep him from doing more damage. By the time Alistair releases his finger, it’s blood-free and half-healed. Lost in his past, Luca barely notices.
I sigh. I don’t like seeing him this way.
“What was the sacrifice?” Malach asks.
“They agreed to have their basilisks bound. Permanently.” Luca’s voice is flat, his tone emotionless. It’s as if he’s telling us about the weather.
A cold hollowness creeps over me, and I rub the heel of my hand over my heart. My fingers shake as I consider all the things he’s not saying.
Living with my magic bound . . . It would drive me mad, and I’m a demon. Shifters are even more enmeshed with their animal side, almost dual-natured. I try to imagine any of the Therions without their beasts and wince.
Gods, they would be half-alive, and that’s the best-case scenario.
I glance away, a lump bobbing in my throat. Luca’s parents made a painful, impossible decision to protect their son, but he’s the one who had to live his entire life with whatever was left of them.
“That’s . . . fuck, man,” I whisper. “That’s horrific.”
Luca hums low in his throat. “Yeah. It is.”
“We won’t let the same happen to you,” Malach says. Stern and blunt, he sounds like a soldier.
I sit up a little straighter. “What Malach said.” I try to sound reassuring and confident, but the wobble in my voice ruins the effect.
Luca tries to smile, but his heart isn’t in it. I toss my arm around him.
The urge to fill the silence is hard to resist, but Luca doesn’t need to hear me talk; he needs someone else to know this terrible thing. Dad’s face flashes through my mind. Words can’t erase loss. I should know.
Alistair’s eyes change from blue to red, then back again. He leans forward slowly and kisses Luca. Thoroughly, but with more tenderness than I thought he was capable of. Alistair—the master spy who doesn’t forgive or forget—is trying to be gentle.
I look away.
By the time he pulls back, Luca’s cheeks are pink. “I’m okay, Ali.”
“Of course you are,” Alistair says briskly. “As Casanell said, we will work together to find a way off this realm. Now let’s discuss our strengths and weaknesses.”
I frown. He’s agreeing with me, but I’m not sure I like it. Nope, I hate it, actually. Who the fuck does he think he’s fooling? Actions speak louder than words, and Alistair has more than proven he doesn’t want to be my friend.
“I don’t have weaknesses,” I say, crossing my arms over my chest.
“Are you sure?” Alistair drawls. “Because you passed out in my arms during the eclipse.”
Gods, really? I blink, but my memories of the ambush are fuzzy, which gives me plausible deniability. “I don’t remember that.” I shrug. “Which means it never happened.”
“Yeah, okay.” Alistair rolls his eyes. “Casanell and I are sensitive to the cold. Any action on our part will need to happen outside of the eclipse windows. Otherwise, we both become a liability.”
“Don’t sugarcoat it or anything,” I mutter.
He raises one black eyebrow. “There’s no point in analyzing our strengths and weaknesses if we only focus on our strengths.”
“Cool.” I nod. “Add a foul temper to your weakness column.”
Alistair grinds his molars, and his fangs peek over his bottom lip. “Only if you add inappropriately timed sarcasm to yours.”
“Gladly.”
“Gods. Just fuck already,” Luca says drily.
Alistair’s jaw drops. It would be funny if I wasn’t also the butt of the joke. “That’s not what’s going on—”
“What’s going on is that he can’t be trusted,” I snap, talking over him. “He’s a vindictive prick.”
Luca raises his eyebrows. “Yeah, he is, but as long as he aims that energy at our long and growing list of enemies, I don’t have a problem with it.” He smiles at me, his hazel eyes softening, then darting to my lips. “And I love your inappropriately timed sarcasm.”
Sad Luca was horrible.
Flirty Luca is dangerous.
Suddenly, I don’t give a damn about making Alistair pay; I just want Luca to keep looking at me like a snack he wants to nibble on.
“Stop.” I plant my hand on his chest and hold him at arm’s length. “You’re too hot. It makes it hard to concentrate.”
“That’s unfortunate for you.” Malach joins us, sitting on the cot across from ours. “I’m never distracted by his sexual charisma.”
My eyebrows shoot to my hairline.
“Did you hear that?” Luca laughs. “Malach says I have sexual charisma, and he’s always right.”
Malach smiles for all of two seconds before the expression fades. He flexes his forehead, and I wonder if he’s fighting a headache. We’ve barely had any water since we stepped through the rigged gateway, and my mouth is drier than the desert. It’s a wonder we aren’t shutting down from dehydration.
“Do you think they plan to starve us?” I ask, glancing around the circular room.
As if I put in an order for delivery, the lower third of the door opens with a creak, and someone shoves a tray of food inside.
The opening is too small for any of us to fit through, but the door might be weaker while it’s open.
Alistair is going through a kicking phase.
Maybe he can give it a go the next time it opens.
Alistair grabs the tray and brings it to us. “It could be poisoned.”
I bend over and give the food a cautious sniff. It smells exactly how it looks: like stale bread and mystery meat. It’s drowning in lumpy gravy that’s an unfortunate gray color.
Luca eyes the food suspiciously. “How hungry are you?”
My stomach growls. It’s confused by the food-adjacent smell. “I guess I’ll be the taste-tester,” I say, tearing a corner off the coarse loaf of bread with one hand and pinching my nose with the other. “What do you think? Classic sourdough?”
I stuff the chunk into my mouth and chew slowly before they can answer. It’s tough and flavorless. “Not sourdough,” I tell them. “More like flatbread. It’s kind of chalky—” I grip my throat with both hands and pitch my body into Luca’s, making a gurgling sound.
He grabs me, eyes wide with panic, and I wink at him.
“Fucking fuck, Ciprian,” Luca sputters. “That’s not funny.”
His pupils have swallowed the hazel of his eyes entirely—I’ve gone too far. My grin fades. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Note to self: inappropriate joke did not break tension, only made it worse.” I give him my best apologetic smile.
“That took years off my life,” Luca groans.
“Now you’re laying it on too thick.” I reach for the bread again, and Alistair yanks the tray away.
“Wait a few minutes, you idiot!”
I narrow my eyes. “Can we skip what’s sure to be a dumb, drawn-out argument and go straight to the part where you tell me how long I have to survive before I can take another bite?”
“One hour,” Alistair drawls.
“Fine,” I sigh. “I’ll sit here and fixate on my guts or something.”
“Do you think Celine is okay?” Luca whispers.
Malach grunts. “She’s stronger than anyone I know. While I cannot possibly guess what she’s going through, I’m certain of two things: one, she’s furious; two, she’s fighting with everything she’s got to get free.”
He’s right, and there’s nothing left to say about it. I steel my resolve and glance at the door. We need to be ready as soon as it opens.