Chapter 24
I ran through the entire castle, searching every single inch of it, my body numb with fear and despair.
Where was she? Where was Damien?
After a while, there was only one place left to check—my brother’s room. My pride hated it, but I had no choice. To find Gwendolyn, there could be no such thing as pride.
I knocked, barely containing the urgency inside my chest.
Sparrow opened the door with his usual smirk. His hair was perfectly styled, and he was dressed in a blue blouse and purple pants.
“Nice to see you, brother,” Sparrow said, grinning.
“I need your help.”
“Hmm,” he chuckled knowingly. “First Damien, now you?” I hated how much he enjoyed being the center of attention. It was natural for sirens to yearn for attention and admiration.
The fact that Sparrow’s gills and siren-ears were starting to show, was proof enough that he had been using his powers in the last few hours.
Did my brother really shift into his fish-tail here?
“What happened, Sparrow?” I didn’t let my brother respond before I strolled in his room, just to see a naked blonde man lying in his bed.
Nathaniel.
“Can’t I enjoy my sweet boy in my siren-shell? Or are you just jealous, big brother? Don’t pretend you’d never wondered how it is to take Gwendolyn in your pure, animalistic vampire form.”
I grabbed Sparrow by the throat and pushed him up the wall. He just smiled, completely unbothered by me.
“It’s urgent, Sparrow. I can’t deal with your attitude right now.”
His expression grew serious as he sensed how important this all was.
“Okay, how can I help you?”
“Gwendolyn and Damien.”
“What about them?”
“They both… disappeared,” I stuttered, almost on the verge of screaming. Because as soon as I spoke it out loud, the realization of my love being gone hit me all over again.
“What do you mean they disappeared? Carnivalland is hidden behind a Veil.”
“Gwendolyn followed him to the Ancient Springs, where he was in his dragon form. She was curious and I let her go. But now both of them are gone.”
“Damien would never just vanish with her,” Sparrow declared, and I knew he was speaking the truth.
But at the same time, I was aware of how much Damien wanted to find his brother, and how much his powers have changed since Gwendolyn came here.
Even though he would not want anything to happen to her, he was also not completely in control over his inner dragon.
No one knew to what extent his abilities could develop after he had bonded to her, not even him.
“So, you want me to use my siren powers in the springs?” he asked as he brushed a strand of Nathaniel’s hair aside. It shocked me to the core how vulnerable my little brother was with him near, like he was taking care of him in ways he never even took care of himself.
“Yes… it is the only way to make out if there are traces of any kind of dark magic.”
The weight of that word seemed to draw the air from the room.
Dark magic wasn’t supposed to be used in the sacred water, but there are always ways.
“It is like they vanished in the wind, Sparrow.”
Nathaniel sat up slowly in the bed, as Sparrow kept stroking over his wrists. He didn’t say it out loud, but he was just as restless as I was, fearing it might have been someone from Aetrum, someone that wanted to destroy not just my bond with Gwendolyn, but also theirs.
“Damien’s magic is evolving… if their bond is intensifying right now, it could awaken powers, new powers no one of us knew about,” Nathaniel said, and he could be right.
“Which already happened…” I confessed. “Damien isn’t fully in control right now. One of the reasons he’s spent most of his time in his dragon form.”
“Then it’s possible,” Sparrow murmured, standing up to gaze out the window, “that he didn’t vanish with her. But something happened, and he took her somewhere only a dragon could reach.”
Nathaniel and I were both narrowing our eyes at him.
“You’re speaking as if you know exactly where they are, Sparrow,” Nathaniel said.
He gazed back at him with a slight grin and nodded slowly.
“I talked with Seth right after Damien knocked on my door asking for help. He wanted to search for his brother. And Seth mentioned a place beneath the cliffs of Aetrum… it is ancient and tied to old dragon bloodlines. It is not even marked on a map. But it is connected to all sorts of sacred waters, including…”
“The Ancient Springs…” I finished his sentence.
Nathaniel stood up and began pulling on his clothes.
“Then what are you waiting for Sparrow? Use your powers and save them!”
I was taken back by the sudden flare in Nathaniel’s sweet temper, but the entire situation seemed to make him just as anxious as me.
Though his own powers weren’t so strong, he was able to multiply and even enhance the powers of others.
A very rare gift, but also a great burden.
Similar to Damien, he was forced to bear every emotion felt by others.
Nathaniel was also full of yin energy, which made him more vulnerable to the chaos of other people’s emotions.
And right now, it seemed to be overwhelming him.
Sparrow took him into his arms as he looked at me.
“I’ll need something of both of them; it doesn’t matter if it is hair or a piece of clothing. I need the smell to trace his magic in the water…”
“I’ll get it, be ready at the Ancient Springs when I return,” I said and quickly left the room.
I didn’t care how deep I was forced to dive beneath the surface if it meant bringing her back. She was all I cared about and ever since she vanished without a trace, the ache in my chest hadn’t eased for a second.
Desperation gripped me as I stormed into Damien’s bedroom, quickly grabbing his hairbrush and one of her night gowns draped over the edge of the bed, the faint scent of her still lingering in the fabric. My throat tightened as I smelled it. I needed her so fucking much right now.
Without wasting another heartbeat, I ran to the Ancient Springs, where Sparrow was already sitting in his fish-tail form. His posture was unusually still, his normally teasing expression serious.
Nathaniel was kneeling at the edge of the water, his hands tight around one of Sparrow’s arms. He was breathing heavily, as if the emotions were pressing physically against his chest with the aim to crush him.
My brother turned to me slowly, one hand reaching out to take the items from me. His iridescent eyes fluttered shut. Then, with surprising gentleness I wasn’t used to from my brother, he took Nathaniel’s hand and laced their fingers together. Almost as he needed him as an emotional support.
Although my powers weren’t the best in water, I felt a current of air rippling forward.
“Hmmm…” Sparrow exhaled. “Their essence… his dragon magic is here, but deeper.”
Suddenly, a pulse of pressure rolled through the water, the surface shimmered and then the water was unnaturally still again.
Sparrow looked down, dipping his head shortly into the water, disappearing for some seconds, his fingers still laced with Nathaniel’s.
“Something down there… in the waters, it’s changed.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is a portal, Xavier,” Sparrow said.
A portal?
And then the water swallowed him whole, leaving nothing behind. Fear and shock spread through me. Where was he going? Why didn’t he say a single word before vanishing?
My gaze drifted to Nathaniel who was gripping the edge of the marble stone, looking at the water where my brother had just disappeared.
“He’s searching for them…”
I knew I should wait… my kind wasn’t meant for water.
I could barely make use of my shadows there.
I once tried it with my sister when we were kids and wanted to trick her.
I failed, and instead of wrapping the shadows around her ankles to make her fall, I wrapped them around the entire pool and carved out the entire water.
But I couldn’t just stand there and wait for my brother to save both of them.
I looked down at the nightgown clenched in my fist, her scent lingered there.
Pears, cherries and flowers. It was home. She was my home.
“I’m not waiting,” I stated, adjusting my hair with my hairbands before jumping into the water.
“You’ll drown…” Nathaniel said. “And Sparrow will kill me for it.”
I grinned at his comment. “I doubt my brother would be the first siren in history to kill his mate,” I replied, before I dove into the water, the cold slamming into me like ice.
The energy of the portal tugged at my senses like a magnetic force and all that mattered in this very moment was her.
Although I couldn’t breathe underwater, the energy around the light made me able to take a breath.
It felt like a cocoon filled with air in the middle of the ocean.
The moment I crossed the threshold, the pressure vanished, and so did the water around me.
It felt like falling.
Was this how Gwendolyn felt when she fell through the portal into our world?
And then I landed on cold stone. My lungs seized, coughing up whatever I had inhaled, but I was breathing air. My palms pressed against the slicked stone as I steadied myself. Water still clung to my clothes, but the air wasn’t as wet as I thought it would be.
I blinked against the dim light. There was no sky or anything. It looked almost like some sort of underground cave.
The floor underneath me was as cold as ice and somehow, I felt a strange energy pulsing beneath my feet, like the entire room was impregnated with dark magic.
A few meters away from me, I noticed Sparrow leaning against the wall, tracing out where we had landed. His tail was gone, replaced by his legs once more.
“You feel it as well, right?” he asked without turning to me.
“Yes, magic is in here. But I don’t see Gwendolyn and Damien,” I replied. “Where are they?”
My brother turned to me now, his eyes glowing faintly with purple, a side effect from shifting into his siren form.
“They definitely came through it… just not in there…”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“What do you mean?” Panic unfolded in my chest; I needed to see her.
“It means that when his dragon magic created a portal, there also must have been forces of his energy wandering through other places, causing the portal to split into pieces. And we just found one of the pieces…”
“So, we found the wrong one, I guess?”
Sparrow stayed silent as he kept studying the wall.
“This isn’t a game, brother. Tell me what you know. What did Seth tell you about this place?”
“If the portal is truly connected to Aetrum,” he began slowly, “then there might be ways to other places… including the ones that can’t be hidden behind a Veil, Xavier.”
“You mean?”
“Yes,” he exhaled. “I’m pretty sure this place is tethered to the forgotten places of Lasrach.”
Lasrach. This had been a realm existing several thousand years ago, it was said to be the land of dragons and time travelers, including the most powerful sorcerer in the world.
Merlin.
And the nightmare bringer.
“But fire dragons have died out… Damien is the only existing dragon in this land…”
Sparrow nodded, but then his gaze drifted to mine, his eyes widening.
“What?”
“You remember telling Damien you have sensed Gwendolyn to be something other than human?”
I nodded slowly.
“I’d say it is possible that due to the bond they share, either her powers are coming back… or it’s worse…”
“What do you mean by worse?”
How would Gwendolyn even feel when she learned about her entire life being changed by someone else?
“If this place was taken by the cursed ones…”
The Nightbinders.
A chill went through me, colder than ice.
“Seth once mentioned, when he was very much under the influence of alcohol, that your father was in love with one born in a place where gods went to die, where magic grows too wild to be controlled. It could be the reason even Damien’s powers can’t keep the energy flowing in here in check.”
My mother…
Leanan was indeed connected to the dark, born into a family that possessed dark magic.
Even her father was said to have bound himself to an ancient dragon years ago, and after the dragon died, his powers were said to have died as well.
Except, what if he had found a way to steal the powers from the dragon and keep them somewhere else.
Hidden, in here.
“If the portal split them from us, and this realm is reacting to our intentions,” Sparrow said, his eyes darkening, “then it’s testing each of us differently.”
I clenched my fists. “Then we need to move. We find the next gate, and we tear it open if we have to.”
Sparrow touched the stone wall again and frowned.
“These realms can respond to emotions, Xavier, including to desire. Maybe all you need to do is to create some sort of mental connection to her, even when this portal is surrounded with dark magic.”
I met his gaze. “Then it will show me where she is?”
He didn’t argue.
So, I tried searching for her inside my mind. To think about all the moments, I had her in my arms, kissing her, pleasuring her.
Gwendolyn, are you in there somewhere? I asked, trying to build up a connection. It was way harder than normal, in this room drenched in dark energy, I couldn’t feel her. And normally I’ve always felt her, even when she wasn’t nearby.
Gwendolyn, my love. I thought about the first time I’d seen her, in the underground tunnels. The way her brown eyes looked at me like I was a dangerous stranger, not knowing I was going to be hers just the way she was going to be mine.
Listen to me.
Before I thought it hopeless, the floor beneath my feet started trembling faintly, and a door into the wall had opened, leading toward another sort of cave underground.
The realm must have heard us and accepted our bond, but where were we supposed to find her?