Chapter 40
We didn’t speak on the way back to our quarters.
The hall behind us was still loud and full of chatter, the fire throwing heat and shadows across the stone walls as though nothing had changed, as though the last hour hadn’t stripped away whatever thin sense of safety I’d been holding onto and replaced it with something cold and urgent that sat at the base of my throat and refused to budge.
Cael had walked us out of the mead hall personally.
He’d said goodnight with that same even pleasantness he applied to everything, and then, almost as an afterthought, mentioned that he thought we might benefit from another day at the settlement before considering our options.
He’d framed it warmly, generously even, the way you’d present a gift, but something in the way he said it made it feel less like an offer and more like a door being shut behind us.
“Sanguinarium has a way of wearing on newcomers,” he’d said, his gaze sliding back to me and staying there a few seconds longer than it needed to.
Long enough to make me want to climb out of my own skin.
“The open terrain is unforgiving to those who don’t know it yet.
Better to wait. Rest.” A long pause. “Think it over. We’ll send for you in the morning. ”
Not we hope to see you. Not you’re welcome to stay. We’ll send for you.
Yeah. Sure. Like we were still going to be here in the morning.
I smiled graciously and thanked him for his hospitality, doing my best to look like I was grateful for the offer, and then I kept walking.
I kept my eyes forward and my pace even, doing my best not to look like someone who was counting every step back to the door of our quarters.
I wasn’t sure if I was being paranoid, but I swore I could feel a change in the way people watched us pass by.
The looks were somehow longer. Cooler. Less curious and more… calculating.
By the time we reached the perimeter wall near our quarters, my skin felt too tight, like it couldn’t hold everything buzzing underneath it anymore, but I didn’t stop or slow down until the door to our quarters was shut behind us and the metal latch was dropped into its bracket.
Pressing my back against the door, I met Trace and Dominic’s eyes and shook my head. “We need to get the fuck out of here. Like yesterday,” I hissed, low enough for only the two of them to hear.
“Agreed,” said Dominic as he sat down on the edge of the bed, his movements unhurried in a way that only made my nerves bristle harder. His gaze travelled the length of my body, something dark brewing in his eyes. “The way he was looking at you…”
His words dropped off but I didn’t need him to finish for me to know what he was talking about.
I’d felt Cael’s eyes on me all night. It was more than just curiosity. I could tell he was assessing me, analyzing me, trying to figure out what I was and just how much I might be worth in a place like this.
One thing was for sure—I wasn’t planning on giving him a chance to figure that out.
I pushed off the door and started moving.
I couldn’t stand still. The room was too small and the ceiling was too low and my skin was crawling as though a swarm of bugs had made their way under it.
I wrapped my arms around my middle and paced the length of the room.
Three steps one way and three steps back the other way.
I needed to keep moving. I needed to think.
“You think he knows?” asked Trace as he leaned back against the wall near the doorway, arms folding across his chest as he watched me wear a path back and forth across the floor.
I already knew he was talking about me. About my blood.
“I don’t think so,” answered Dominic, his words careful. “But the longer we stay here, the greater the chance they figure it out. This place runs on blood and hierarchy. One taste of her and she becomes the most valuable commodity in Sanguinarium. They’d never let her go.”
His warning landed like the lid of a coffin slamming down on me.
I turned on my heel and walked back the other way.
“We should just split now,” suggested Trace, a low urgency threading into his voice that hadn’t been there earlier. “Take our chances out there until we figure out our next move. It’s not worth the risk staying.”
“That may be our best bet,” agreed Dominic as I kept pacing. “However, we need to be smart about this. If we rush out of here without warning, we’ll only raise suspicion, and the last thing we want is to give Cael a reason to look at her any harder than he already is.”
I knew he was right. I’d already felt it at dinner.
Felt it in everything Cael hadn’t said, and in the way he’d watched those women move through the hall with the detached appraisal of someone taking inventory.
I had no doubt that if he so much as suspected I was different, let alone got close enough to scent my blood, I would never again see the light of day outside this place.
Which meant we had to go. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Now.
But how? How were we going to find a way out of here when no one else had been able to do it? I knew there was a way. There had to be, since Alford had been able to do it. I just didn’t know what it was, or where to even start.
Think, Jemma. Think.
I tried to work it out, piecing together everything we knew about Sanguinarium, looking for some kind of seam or door between Realms that we could exploit. But what if we couldn’t find one? What if there wasn’t a door at all?
And then my mind snagged on something.
Last year, when the Roderick sisters had cast a spell that was supposed to allow Engel to day-walk…
I’d Invoked in the middle of it, and instead of granting Engel the power to walk in the sun, their botched spell wound up weakening the walls around the Realms. Enough so that Sanguinarium itself was bleeding into our world, allowing Revenants from every walk of life to day-walk in the streets.
The sisters hadn’t found or used any sort of door then.
They’d simply used enough of their magic to destabilize the dimensional walls and cause a tear.
If they had been able to do that without even trying, then it only stood to reason that with a little bit of effort, we could do the same.
Just like we did with the Barrier.
I’d been able to use my Nephilim abilities to destabilize enough of the barrier for us to get Tessa, Ares, and Gabriel through.
Not because I was stronger than it, but because I was something it had never been built to resist in the first place.
The magic holding that barrier together hadn’t known what to do with me.
And frankly, it still didn’t, so who was to say I couldn’t do the same thing again here?
I stopped walking.
All we had to do was disrupt the magic for long enough to make it unstable. To create some sort of tear in the walls. An opening for us to slip through.
I looked up, my plan slotting into place like a key turning in a lock.
Both of them were watching me. Trace was still leaning against the wall, his jaw muscle ticking as he tracked every change in my expression, while Dominic had gone perfectly still, his eyes narrowed slightly, like he was trying to read the blueprint straight out of my head before I said a word.
“I know that look,” said Dominic, his eyes holding mine. “What are you planning, angel?”
I took a breath.
This was the part where I had to get it right.
Not just the plan itself, but the way I laid it out.
Because if I stumbled over it or made it sound half-baked, Dominic would pick it apart before I finished my first sentence, and Trace would spend the whole time worrying about me instead of trusting that I knew what I was doing.
I needed them both certain, and that meant I needed to be certain myself.
Because the truth was, I had no idea what was going to happen when I pushed against the walls of this place.
Whether it would draw the Order’s attention.
Whether Cael and his people would feel it.
I had one shot at this. One. And if it went wrong, or if someone came for us before we made it through, that was it. There was no backup plan. No do-over.
It had to work.
“I need to draw on you both,” I finally said, looking between the two of them. “I need everything you have.”
* * *
It hadn’t taken me very long to convince them.
I’d laid out my plan carefully, making sure to cover the logic behind it and exactly how I planned to do it, and they’d listened without interrupting—which was either a sign of their confidence in me, or just the wordless acknowledgment that we really didn’t have any better ideas.
Probably both, but I was choosing to go with the former.
By the time I finished, I was fairly certain they were both on board, if for no other reason than they’d already arrived at the same conclusion I had the moment the pieces clicked together for me. That this was it. Our one and only real shot of getting the hell out of here.
Whatever the reason, I wasn’t questioning it.
We cleared what little space the room had to offer and lowered ourselves to the floor in a loose triangle, cross-legged, knees touching, the three of us forming a closed circuit in the dim of the quarters.
The oil lamp Dominic had lit earlier burned at the center, small and guttering, throwing just enough light to see their faces by.
I rubbed my palms against my thighs, anchoring myself. “Ready?” I asked no one in particular, my skin practically buzzing with anticipation.
“Ready,” said Trace, his dimples popping on both sides for good measure. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”