Chapter 20 #2
That sense of creeping foreboding grew as Katerina approached the open cell. Would she find Niko inside, trembling and gibbering in the corner? Gone mad with power? Stabbed through the heart?
She gathered every bit of her courage, skirted the pool of blood that seeped from the corpse, and peered inside the cell.
It was empty.
Katerina was still standing there, gaping in incomprehension, when Ana and Sofi caught up with her a few seconds later. “I don’t understand,” she said for the second time that night, numbness descending over her. “What happened here?”
“Your Shadow went on a killing spree.” Ana’s voice was dry as bone.
“Or someone tried to kill him, and he defended himself. Besides, two people hardly constitutes a spree.” She scanned the hallway, as if Niko might somehow materialize. “Where did he go? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Sofi signed, “but this is bad. I’d hoped we could get him out of here without a commotion, unlocking his cell and going back through that door before anyone was the wiser. But now, guards are dead. Someone will come looking for them, and when they fail to show…”
“He could still be here somewhere,” Katerina protested.
Ana made a show of looking around. “Where, Katerina? Unless Niko has somehow found a way to make himself invisible, his options are rather limited.”
“They could have taken him somewhere, to interrogate him. We could wait—”
“We can’t!” Ana hissed, her fingers biting into Katerina’s arm. “We’re sitting ducks here, after what we did to those other guards. We need to go. Now.”
“I won’t leave him.” Katerina set her feet, resisting Ana’s grip. “You might as well ask me to leave a piece of my soul behind.”
“Of all the stubborn…” Ana’s voice trailed off, and she rocked back on her heels, that familiar, impatient energy thrumming through her body.
“First of all, he isn’t here. And second, is this what you think Niko would want for you?
To die here because you refused to spare a single thought for your own self-preservation?
To prioritize your own survival over his? ”
It was a valid attempt, but doomed to failure. Katerina set her jaw, scanning every inch of the corridor. “His job is to protect me. When has that ever stopped me looking out for him?”
“And look where that’s gotten you,” Sofi signed, her wry tone somehow evident in the crisp movement of her fingers. “If we don’t get out of here, you’ll hang in the morning for sure—and Ana and I probably will too, for abetting you.”
That gave Katerina pause. She hated the idea of anyone else suffering on her account, especially Sofi, who’d already lost so much.
Seeing her soften, Ana pressed her advantage.
“Worry about yourself for once, would you? Not a Shadow who swallowed every tendril of evil in Kalach rather than see our village fall, and then frightened Gadreel himself away. The Darkness does his bidding, for Saints’ sake.
You don’t think such a man can take care of himself? He’s probably miles from here already.”
“Niko would never leave me!”
“He would if he knew we’d get you out,” Sofi signed. “Ana sent Alexei to free him. After that, we planned to meet at the bridge; Damien will be waiting there with the horses. Perhaps that’s where Niko’s gone. After all, Alexei isn’t here, either.”
As much as Katerina wanted to believe it, this didn’t sit right.
No matter what Niko had confessed to in the arena, or what he’d become, she knew down to her bones that if he’d escaped this cell of his own volition, he would’ve come for her.
He would never have left the matter of her freedom up to chance, or risked leaving it in someone else’s hands.
Her own hands shook as she lifted them, running her fingers over the cold onyx of the bars. The cuffs chafed her wrists, and she bit her lower lip, suppressing a pained whimper. “No,” she insisted. “If he’s not here, then they took him somewhere against his will. What if they—”
What if they’ve already killed him, she was about to say. But before the words could pass her lips, a bell began to clang in the distance, harsh and urgent.
Ana went pale in the dim light. “That’s the alarm from your wing. We have to go now, or it’ll be too late.”
Katerina’s magic ignited within her, fueled by fury. “Let them come,” she snapped, fire flaring at her fingertips and the stones shifting beneath her feet. “Let them pay for what they’ve done to us.”
“Or,” Ana suggested, exasperation clear in every syllable, “we could leave before they get here. We’ve no time for heroics. I’m sorry, but wherever Niko is, he’ll have to fend for himself.”
Lips pressed in a grim line, Sofi took hold of Katerina, her grip like iron. “I’m sorry, too,” she signed with her free hand, using the shorthand she’d taught Katerina around a Drezna campfire long ago. “I wanted to save him. But now, we need to look out for ourselves.”
Another sound joined the clamor of the bells: a terrified shriek, followed by the pound of footsteps. Her fellow Dimis began to run, dragging Katerina with them.
“No,” she protested as they tugged her down the hall. “I can’t go, not without him. You don’t understand. He needs me—”
“You’ll be no good to him dead!” Ana shot a desperate look at Sofi, who obliged by summoning her witchwind. It carried them down the hall faster than they could possibly have gone otherwise, and although Katerina fought to get free, she couldn’t manage it, weakened as she was.
Her heart ached as Niko’s cell receded into the distance, the footsteps growing ever-louder as her friends dragged her down the corridor and toward the stairs that led to the prison’s exit.
What if Berezin and his henchmen were torturing her Shadow for their own amusement, as an appetizer before the entrée of his death?
They no longer needed him intact, and the head of the Druzhina answered only to the prince, who’d publicly ordered Niko’s death.
How would Niko feel when he discovered Katerina had abandoned him, that she’d fled like a coward to save her own skin?
She knew the answer. He’d think it was no more than he deserved. That he was damaged goods, no longer worthy of being her Shadow, and that she would be lucky to be free of him.
“But where is he?” Her voice rose, louder even than the clang of the bells, because what did stealth matter now?
Tears streamed down her face, just as they had when she’d clawed her way out of the Underworld.
“Please, please stop, Sofi. I can’t leave—not before I know where he is, what they’ve done to him—”
Sofi paid her no attention. If anything, her fellow Dimi’s witchwind intensified, blowing out the torches that lined the corridor and plunging them into blackness.
Aboveground, voices broke through the din of the bells, growing closer by the moment.
Katerina could pick out a word here and there: “Escaped…” “Dismembered, the work of the Dark…” “Unholy union…” “Drugged, maybe dead…”
Oh, gods. Were they talking about the guards Sofi and Ana had subdued, or her Shadow?
The rough stones jolted her body as Ana and Sofi propelled her forward, Sofi’s witchwind brooking no refusal.
She could see the outline of the bottom of the stairs now, and the corridor that branched off in another direction, toward the occupied cells, where torchlight still burned.
The prisoners there were shouting, fueled by the chaos, hammering on the bars with their dinner plates.
Whatever direction she and her fellow Dimis took now—head-on attack or concealment—they were leaving the wing where her Shadow had been imprisoned behind.
Desperation seized Katerina, and she threw caution straight into the face of the wind that drove her onward. “Niko!” she screamed over the pounding footsteps, the roar of Sofi’s witchwind, and the unrelenting cacophony of the bells. “Where are you? If you can hear me, answer me!”
She expected nothing, and for a long moment, that was what she got. Tears streamed down her face, salty and bitter, as her words hung in the air.
And then, from the inky darkness mere feet away came her Shadow’s voice—low and rough and unmistakable, a promise and a warning in one.
“I’m right here.”