Chapter 21
Jesamin
Istood frozen on the threshold in the sudden darkness, wondering if there was any way out again. If this passage would link up to the others, let alone a path to the outside.
Or…if we were doomed to wander here in these endless shadows forever.
The darkness was so complete it actually pressed in on my eyeballs with a tangible weight. If not for the ache in my tired legs and shoulders, or the weight of my pack, I could genuinely believe myself nonexistent, nothing but a disembodied consciousness floating in a void.
“Jesamin,” Wroth said, his pale eyes burning pinpoints in the shadows, and I realized I was hyperventilating.
I forced myself to take a deep breath, holstering the pistol I hadn’t realized I’d drawn. “We’re trapped.”
“We will find them again,” he said, his words carefully spoken, almost as though he were attempting to manifest that outcome. “There are other paths out of here.”
I heard the soft sound of rough pawpads shifting on the floor, and felt a faint hum emanating from the walls.
With Wroth’s movement, the fulmen coursing through Liuridar’s veins glimmered to life above us, running frenetically along the quartz veins embedded in the ceiling.
Now I could see the solid wall that blocked us from the danger of the carrion-feeders, but also blocked the only straightforward path back.
He took me in his arms, and I rested my head against his chest for a long moment, breathing in his scent and forcing myself to inhale slowly until my heart stopped racing.
“I trust you.” I whispered the words against his fur, knowing them to be entirely true. If Wroth believed there was a way out, then by the Light, there was a way out.
But not until this moment had I truly believed I was going to die down here. It was no longer a fear, but a certainty.
“For a little while longer,” he said, stroking my hair. “I promise, I will make sure you get through this.”
My arms tightened around him. “And you. Don’t make me go back alone. When I see the sun again, I want you right there beside me.”
He paused in stroking my hair, his monstrous hand resting on the crown of my head. “I will do everything in my power to see it done.”
“No.” I drew back and looked up, taking his silky-furred face in my hands and forcing him to look me in the eye. “I want you to promise. We will see each other again in the world above. We will survive this.”
His hesitation was so brief I might’ve imagined it. “I promise.”
“Well, then.” I gave him a small smile, and his eyes flickered. “That’s all I needed to hear.”
“I have not seen you smile since we passed the Gates,” he said. “It’s…good to see it back.”
He drew a thumb over my lip, his claw catching at my skin. Not heavily enough to draw blood, but enough to send a pleasant shiver down my spine, remembering the faint lines of pain and pleasure he had drawn on my skin in the bath.
Just as much pleasure as his promise gave me, the genuine faith I had in him. He gave me his word, and I believed he would keep it.
Strange, that I would put faith in a man again. A vampire, no less. And yet I felt, deep in my bones, that Wroth would never break it, here in a place where it counted the most.
I kissed his thumb as he brushed it over my lips again, listening to the comforting bass rumble of his purr.
I do believe I love you, was on the tip of my tongue, but I froze before the words could slip out. Those were words I could never say, not when I knew they would come back to stab me in the heart as soon as I felt the sun on my face again.
The same sun his future wife was basking under now. A knot of pure, twisting jealousy cramped in my stomach. Oh, to see the sun again…
“Yes?” He had felt the tension in my body, his hands stroking over my upper arms. I met his concerned, ice-blue gaze and tried to keep my smile in place, now nothing more than a mask.
“We should get moving,” I said, my throat tight. “They’ll be trying to find us, and gods only know where the paths converge.”
The light in his eyes dimmed, but he nodded and reluctantly peeled his hands from my arms. I regretted his absence immediately, but if I leaned into him any more, I would eventually confess those forbidden feelings, and that, I wasn’t sure I could live with.
We both peered down the hall. The last thing I wanted to do was move forward and find another pit full of countless bodies, unfathomable quantities of death, but I would also never forgive myself if I hung back too long and my cowardice led to Wroth’s beloved niece getting hurt.
“If we find another pit, we should keep taking paths to the right,” I said, keeping my voice low as we moved forward. “As quickly as possible.”
The worms had clearly been planted to quickly ingest the corpses, but it seemed they didn’t disdain fresh meat—if anything, I wondered if our body heat, or breath, or even the vibrations of our footsteps drew them out. We needed to be prepared to run for it without losing our bearings in this maze.
Wroth nodded, but he was squinting into the distance. “I don’t think I’m looking at another pit,” he said, and there was a strange trepidation in his tone.
We paused at the end of the hall, waiting for the fulmen to creep into the room ahead of us. As soon as our destination was illuminated, I sucked in a breath.
It reminded me of the water station in Liuridar, the biomachina now turned to clinical, unknowable purposes: a long, narrow room full of tables, and the tables held strange objects.
I moved closer to one of them, peering at the thin, rectangular sheets of perfectly pure crystal atop it. They hung in midair, with nothing visible to support them. When I reached out to touch one, it wavered as though it hung on strings, and slowly returned to floating in its original position.
Then the fulmen came flickering through the table itself, lighting up the crystal sheets, and I saw there were odd strings, in shades of sickly pinkish-grey and white, suspended within the crystal itself.
I pondered the three sheets of crystal floating one over another, each holding a different set of strings, and when my mind shifted and the whole shape of it clicked into place, my throat clamped tight around a shriek of pure horror.
They were from a human body. From the top down, peering through the sheets, I saw the outline of a human shape. Whatever these sheets held, they had been peeled from within a person, preserved, and laid into an anatomically correct diagram to be studied in layers.
Wroth stalked around the table, peering at the sheets with a troubled frown. “These are…from the human nervous system. Marrion would understand more. These are the passages of thought and movement in the human body.”
I stared at the tiny strings, the nerves that had once controlled fingers, hands, arms, legs, heart and lungs, all laid out like a healer’s diagram.
“Here is the brain.” Wroth reached towards a pedestal, but stopped short of touching it.
The pedestal held far more than three sheets of crystal, the human brain cross-sectioned onto each layer so thinly it was nearly transparent.
From above, the brain appeared whole, pink and wrinkled; from the side, it was distorted, cut into a thousand slices.
My stomach clenched and I swallowed hard. “Let’s just get out of this room.”
We kept moving past sectioned hearts, rows of glassware with long-dried substances caked to their bottoms, and a human skin, dried and cracked with age, stretched across a fulmen-illuminated table.
“I hate this gods-damned, benighted hellhole,” I muttered as we passed a pair of pale green eyes pierced with multiple needles.
I thought of the flask of apple brandy in the bottom of my pack.
If ever there was a time for a bracing gulp of smooth fire, it was right now, but I needed to keep my wits about me.
Wroth peered into a glass case, which held several vials of fluid that resembled the milky blood of the relics. “They were studying us,” he muttered. “To what end?”
I knew he was right, as little as I wanted to accept it. This place reminded me of an alchemist’s laboratory, or the Healer’s Collegium; a place of learning and occultism twisted into one.
Had we been considered people by the Fae? Or were humans little more than animals in their eyes? Or had they merely been cataloguing us in the way a botanist might collect and collate a rare plant?
Another case held an entire head, preserved in a round glass orb.
I gazed at it uneasily, understanding that it was human…
or had been. The heavily pronounced brow ridges and jaw and the bulbous cranium were nothing I had seen before, but like the thick-leaved, primordial plants in the garden, I had the sense that this head was precisely as it was meant to be.
It was too…too natural, despite the features that appeared massive and misshapen to my eyes.
It was not the only head. I moved along a line of them, each orb glowing pale blue under the fulmen, seeing as the lines narrowed, the jaws slimmed and the brows flattened, until the final head showed me the perfect face of a man like any other, who could have been sleeping but for the flawlessly tidy termination of his neck.
Staring back down the row, I developed a hypothesis I didn’t like much.
“I think that was us,” I whispered to Wroth when he came to stand at my shoulder. I pointed to the first case, unsure of why I was suddenly leery of raising my voice. “That was us…before the Fae did what they did.”
He grunted, but it was not a sound of negation.
I touched my own high cheekbone, comparing it to that first head, and wondered if I was entirely human, or if some of me had been engineered by a long-vanished species.
And then I looked at Wroth, realizing he had been living with this concept for years: being a product of someone else’s design. He had told me outright that their vampire goddess, Mother Blood, had been Fae, and had created them.