53. Syneca
Syneca
Forgive no lycan and trust no mirror, but keep both close. The useful things are rarely the safe ones.
Nine witches in formation was nine more than I wanted to fight today.
Calder’s voice cut through the chaos like gravel. “Pip. Window. Now.”
“But—”
“Now.”
She went. A streak of blue through the nearest window, gone before anyone could track her. I knew how hard that must have been for her. How much more brave it made her than if she’d stayed.
I turned back to the room, stepping away from the king and scanned the witches properly.
Not as a threat. As a problem to solve. But half the room had already shifted into varying beasts, the illusion of too many demons was gone with the magic suppression, and I had to move quickly to see around the chaos and into the spell circle.
They were working in a nine point formation, spread across the hall.
The suppression wasn’t coming from all of them equally.
It couldn’t. Nine points meant one anchor, one witch holding the shape of the spell while the others fed power into it.
Find her, break her circle, and the whole thing collapses.
I hated this. Every one of them was doing what I’d spent my life doing. Surviving. Following orders. Keeping their heads down and their magic pointed where they were told. I looked for the anchor anyway. Because this was survival and my family, my coven came first.
A massive chimera crashed into the table beside me, wings folding below his feline body as he sent Life Runes scattering across the floor like coins.
Silas and Ramiel were already cutting through the room.
I didn’t have another word for it. Moving through the beasts and hunters and chaos like blades.
The witches threw power at Silas and it didn’t land.
Whatever they were reaching for when they tried to bring him down found nothing to grip.
That, or his power was just too vast for them to contain. I wasn’t sure.
Someone grabbed my arm from behind. I spun, drove my elbow back hard, felt it connect, and didn’t wait to see what happened before I was moving again toward Dez on the floor.
He was down on one knee, strained face, breathing through his teeth. I dropped beside him. “How bad?”
“Power’s nearly gone.” His eyes found mine. “They know what they’re doing. They’re targeting me and Calder more than others.”
I looked across the room. Calder was up but barely, one hand braced against the wall, too far for me to reach through the crush of bodies between us. Both of them. The two people who could get us out, and the witches had gone straight for them.
A guard came at me from the left and I caught the water from the nearest crate of Life Rune cleaning supplies, drove it into his knees as ice, and stepped over him.
Dez’s voice scraped like stone. “I need… power. Or I don’t leave this room.”
I locked eyes with him. “I know. I’m going to clear a path. The anchor is in the middle of the formation. Center point, eyes closed, she hasn’t moved once since they set up. I’m going to break that fucking circle and she’s all yours.”
He didn’t argue. That was all I needed to know about how close to empty he was.
I reached for Silas through the bond and pulled hard, drawing water from every surface in the room, the condensation on the stone, the cleaning basin overturned near the far wall.
It came all at once, answered all at once, because it always did when I pulled from him.
A witch cut toward me. I sent a wave of ice across the floor between us and she went down hard but I didn’t stop moving. The anchor was twelve feet away, completely still inside the chaos, her eyes closed and her breathing measured. She felt me coming. I could tell by the way her jaw tightened.
“Aquaris vinculum.”
The water hit her circle like a blade, driving into the runes she’d laid on the floor, splitting the seal from the inside out, and she opened her eyes a half second before it shattered.
The suppression dropped. The whole room gasped.
Dez surged up from the floor and I turned away because I knew what happened next and I didn’t need to see it. Across the room Calder was still on both feet, color flooding into his face.
Then the king’s arm came around my throat from behind. “Nobody moves.”
The room obeyed. The chaos paused, guards and witches and beasts obeying. The bond flared hot and immediate, and then Silas was before me. He shifted.
One moment he was a beautiful demon and the next, my griffin, great and terrifying and growing larger by the second.
His eyes pinned the king with a cold stare.
The rumble that moved through his chest wasn’t sound exactly.
It carried through the stone and up through my bones and into the air, and everyone in that room felt it at the same moment.
A wave rolled outward from him and hit every person like a hand closing around their chest. Not pain.
Not fear. Something that bypassed both of those and went straight for the marrow, an overwhelming, crushing need to stay, to kneel, to never look away.
The witches went down first. Then the guards and hunters.
Then the king, suddenly graceless as he dropped his sword, brought low not by force but by something that felt like worship and hurt like it too.
I ran.
Straight for the door, not stopping, exactly as I’d promised. My boots hit the corridor and I did the one thing I’d told myself not to do.
I turned back.
The griffin’s eyes found mine across the room.
A hand closed over my mouth. An arm locked around my waist and I was wrenched backward partially down the hall and into an alcove smothered in darkness.
I had half a second to decide whether to burn through whoever had me before a voice came, ragged and desperate and shaking.
“Please don’t scream. Please. I’m not going to hurt you, I just need you to not scream. ”
I went still.
The trembling arm loosened, like he knew exactly how badly this could go for him. I turned. Lucy’s father. He was older than the sports pages had made him look, and considerably more terrified, his face slick with sweat, his hands up the second I faced him.
“Please. Don’t let them hurt me. The red scales. I need to tell you something, and I need you to tell me something. That’s all this is. That’s all I want.”
The others poured into the alcove behind me. Dez had the man on his back before I’d finished processing the sentence, one knee on his chest, forearm across his throat.
“Dez.” I touched his arm. “Let him up.”
“He grabbed you—”
“Dez.” Silas’s voice was cold. His eyes moved over me first. Fast and thorough, checking for damage with an urgency he didn’t bother to hide, and through the bond I felt the jagged edge of his panic before he locked it down. It lasted only a second. Just long enough to feel it. “Let him up.”
Dez rose slowly, eyes still fixed on the man. Lucy’s father scrambled upright, chest heaving, hands still raised. “More guards are coming. There are always more guards. There’s a passageway out and I know where it is. But we have to go right now.”
We followed that shifter from the heart of the Venom Court stronghold through a passage so narrow we had to walk single file until the mountain spit us out into the cold open air of Aventh Gate like it had never wanted us inside to begin with.
We’d failed. Monumentally. We’d kept as many alive as possible, including the king, but still, we’d failed. And now, our only hope was the father of a missing woman, who would no doubt want answers we didn’t have.
Ramiel touched my arm at the threshold of the Varrow’s home. “Dez and I will find Pip. She’s smart. She’ll go back to where she knows we can find her.”
“The broom closet,” Dez confirmed. “It’s the only location she knows for certain I can return to.” He was already moving. “We’ll meet you back here.”
They went. The rest of us continued inside.
The Varrow home was exactly what I’d expected. Trophies in the entryway. Framed portraits of matches won. A house built around achievement that lifted a son much higher than a daughter. I hated them already.
After welcoming us in, Lucy’s father sat across from us at the kitchen table. His wife stood at the window, arms crossed, holding herself together through sheer force of will, it seemed.
“I got you out, now please tell us. Where’s our daughter? She was with you the last we knew.”
There was no gentle way to say it so I didn’t try. “She went missing after we left Grimora. We don’t know where she is. That’s the truth of it.”
“We plan to search for her. If you know something, anything that could help us find her, now's the time to share it,” Calder said gently.
Lucy’s father looked at his wife once, something passing between them, before he pushed back from the table and left the room. He came back a moment later carrying a small cloth pouch, one that seemed to have been handled many times over many years.
He set it on the table and loosened the drawstring. Red dragon scales spilled out, catching the kitchen light, glowing faintly gold at the edges.
Every person at the table went still.
“Where did you get those?” Silas asked carefully.
“They came with Lucy,” her father said. “When she was brought to us.”
The kitchen was so very quiet.
I managed a breath. “Brought to you?”
Her mother turned from the window. “Twenty-seven years ago a blindfolded woman came to our door. She carried an infant and a small pouch and she said—” Her voice caught.
She steadied it. “She said the child was not safe where she was born. That we were to raise her as our own. That we were never to let her remove her ring and never to speak of where she came from. She said we needed to keep her close. So we did. Maybe too close.”
“The pouch,” Calder said quietly.
“The scales were inside it.” Her father touched the edge of one without picking it up. “We’ve kept them all this time. We didn’t know what they meant. We still don’t.”
I looked at Silas across the table but his face was completely unreadable.
Lucy’s mother pressed her hand flat against her sternum. “We know now the woman was the Oracle, but we’d never seen her prior. She didn’t come with a Guardian, nor prophecy, only a baby. Like she knew how often I wished for a daughter.”
Her husband’s jaw tightened. “She shifted when she was six. We were in the garden. It happened so fast we barely understood what we were seeing.” He looked down at the scales on the table. “A dragon. In our garden. Our six-year-old daughter.”
“We didn’t know how it could be,” her mother said.
“But we couldn’t allow it. The woman that had brought her told us to keep her close, to protect her, and this was why.
You have to understand what might’ve happened if anyone had known.
There are only supposed to be four dragons in existence.
She would have been taken. Studied. Used. Or worse.”
“So we made a decision,” her father said.
“She would never shift again. We kept the scales in case she ever needed to understand where she came from, but every instinct she had, every impulse toward her origin, toward what she actually was, had to be trained out of her.” He stopped. “We told ourselves it was protection.”
The kitchen was very quiet.
“But this makes no sense. Why would you ever allow yourselves to stand in the spotlight if you were trying so hard to hide? Why Nexus?”
Her father sighed. “It was our family’s assignment from the king. We had no choice. He preferred Draven, of course. We did our best to hold Lucette back while still following orders.”
“She had to have discipline,” her mother said. “Control above everything else. She had to be reminded every single day of what she could never be.”
I thought about our Lucy. About the way she moved through the world with coiled restraint, always precise, always contained, always three steps ahead of everyone else in the room. A woman who had spent her entire life being trained away from herself.
I knew something about that.
“Where did she say Lucy came from?” Silas asked.
“You’ll think it impossible,” the woman said.
Lucy’s father looked at Silas for a long moment before he answered. “The Sleeping Ring.”