Chapter 6 #2
“And after? When the Nostroms are gone and he’s the last one standing?” Kalo’s eyes bored into hers. “What then, little fish? What happens when the Serpent has no more enemies to fight and turns his hunger on the only prey left?”
It was the same question she’d been asking herself. The same doubt that gnawed at her in the quiet moments when Raziel wasn’t watching.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I’d rather have him pointed at our enemies than at us. For now.”
Kalo studied her for a long moment, then nodded slowly. “You sound like Grandmother Ebiti. She said something similar when she sent me after you.”
So Nadi had been right. Ebiti had sent Kalo. This wasn’t chance or fate—it was calculation. Just another move on another game board.
“What does she want from us?”
“That’s for her to tell you.” Kalo rose from the log, brushing ash from his trousers. “We’ll reach the Grove tomorrow. Try not to get your pet killed before then—Ebiti has questions for him, and she doesn’t like being disappointed.”
He walked away without another word, leaving her alone by the dying fire.
Nadi sat there for a long while, watching the flames dance and flicker, her thoughts a storm of doubt and fear. The embers crackled and popped, sending sparks spiraling up into the darkness of the cavern, tiny stars that winked out one by one.
When she finally returned to the wagon, Raziel was watching the door. It was only his red eyes that caught the light, just two pinpoints in the darkness. It made the flesh on her arms stand up despite herself.
“What did he want?” His voice was carefully neutral, but she could hear the edge beneath it.
“To warn me about you.” She settled onto the pile of blankets beside him, close but not quite touching. “To remind me what you are.” She huffed a laugh. “Like I don’t know.”
“And what am I, according to Kalo Lohti?”
“A monster.” She met his gaze steadily. “A weapon that will eventually turn on the hand that wields it.”
Something flickered in his crimson eyes—amusement, maybe. But with Raziel, it was impossible to tell. “He’s not entirely wrong.”
“Oh, I know.” She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “Which was the conversation we were having. But I know I’m in too deep, no matter what.”
The silence stretched between them, heavy with unspoken words. Outside, she could hear the sounds of the camp settling in for the night—the low murmur of voices, the crackling of fires, the occasional cry of some creature in the depths of the Wild.
“I won’t lie to you, Nadi.” Raziel’s voice was quiet, stripped of its usual sardonic edge.
“I am exactly what Kalo says I am. A monster. A predator. A creature built for violence and manipulation.” He lifted his chained hands, studying them in the purple glow.
“But I am also someone who loves you. And I don’t know how to reconcile those two things any more than you do. ”
It was perhaps the most honest thing he’d ever said to her.
She didn’t know what to do with it.
The next day passed in tense silence.
Nadi fed Raziel from her wrist, letting him sink his teeth into her skin where she could hide the bite marks. She didn’t want to get more disgusted looks than she already did. He drank slowly, carefully, his eyes never leaving hers as he took just enough to dull the edge of his hunger.
She didn’t tell him about her conversation with Kalo. Didn’t tell him about Grandmother Ebiti’s machinations, or the questions that still haunted her about what came after their revenge.
Some things were better left unsaid. For now.
The caravan wound its way through tunnels and caverns that grew increasingly strange as they traveled.
The ubiquitous purple vines thinned, their glow dimming.
The creatures that inhabited the Wild grew bolder too—she spotted hunting insects skittering along the cavern walls, and once, something enormous and serpentine slithered past in the darkness beyond the caravan’s torchlight.
“I thought we were going to ‘the Grove.’ It seems we are still going toward the surface?” Raziel observed it all with the eyes of a predator assessing new territory.
“The Grove isn’t a forest. It’s a… city.
Where the elders gather. It’s named after a place that I think was once alive, a long, long time ago.
One we had to abandon.” Nadi watched him as she spoke.
She could practically see the calculations running behind those crimson irises—threat assessments, tactical advantages, potential weaknesses to exploit.
It was, she realized, exactly how he’d looked at her when they first met.
The thought made her stomach turn.
She forced herself to change her line of thinking. “It’s one of the last safe places for our kind. I haven’t seen it since I was a little girl.”
“Safe.” He repeated the word like it was foreign to him. “Nothing in the Wild is safe.”
“Safer, then,” she corrected herself. “Safe enough.”
The wagon lurched as they crested a ridge, and Nadi felt her breath catch in her throat.
The Grove stretched out before them in the vast cavern below—and it wasn’t like what she remembered.
To be fair, she had only been there once as a child, long ago, and the flashes of it that lurked in her memory were vague and, honestly, she couldn’t swear if they were the product of dreams or stories she’d heard.
But it was as she’d said to Raziel—an entire city, swallowed by the Wild.
Buildings rose from the cavern floor, cobbled together in impossible shapes—towers that were built to resemble the spirals of seashells, domes that gleamed with some kind of metallic sheen even under the purple glow of the vines that grew in the space, twisting and tangling together overhead.
Bridges arched between structures at dizzying heights, elegant, arched things made of whatever the fae could find. She could see the dark mouths of tunnels burrowing into the cavern walls at every level.
But everything was overgrown. The vines hadn’t just encroached on the city—they had consumed it, threading through windows and doorways, splitting stone and metal alike as they claimed the structures for their own.
Trees with luminescent bark grew from the rooftops, their branches laden with fruit that glowed softly in shades of amber and violet.
The architecture, though. The buildings that had clearly predated the arrival of her people?
They were just… wrong. She didn’t recognize when or where they were from.
They had passed a few of them before, but not like this.
Not in this measure. They were cut into the walls—carved from the walls, more precisely.
Soaring facades of glistening stone columns, overgrown with the ubiquitous vines.
But the windows still had glasswork in them. It didn’t look ancient. It hadn’t been abandoned for thousands of years.
“What is this place?” Raziel’s voice was barely a whisper.
She turned to look at him and saw something she’d never expected to see on his face.
Confusion.
Genuine, undisguised confusion.
“I don’t know these buildings.” He pressed closer to the window gap, chains rattling as he strained to get a better look.
“I’ve studied every architectural style in Runne.
Human, vampire, even the old fae settlements from before the wars.
But this…” He shook his head slowly. “This is something else. Something older.”
Nadi felt a chill run down her spine that had nothing to do with the cool air of the cavern. If Raziel didn’t recognize the architecture—Raziel, who hoarded knowledge like other vampires hoarded gold—then what were they walking into?
“The Grove,” she said quietly. “But I was a child when I was here last. I don’t know.”
The caravan began its descent into the city, following a path that wound between the overgrown towers.
As they drew closer, Nadi could see figures moving among the buildings—fae and humans alike, going about their business in the shadows of structures that apparently predated everything Raziel understood about Runne.
She had no answers for him. And that bothered her more than she liked.
Kalo’s wagon pulled ahead, leading them toward a central structure that rose from the heart of the city like a great tree, its walls encased in vines so thick they seemed to have become part of the building.
Somewhere in there, Grandmother Ebiti was waiting.
And she had questions.
Nadi glanced at Raziel, at the vampire in chains who claimed to love her, who had promised to burn the world down at her side. At the Serpent, who looked, for the first time since she’d known him, genuinely uncertain.
Good, some part of her thought. Let him be off-balance for once.
But another part—the part that had rested her head on his chest while the wagon rocked them to sleep, the part that had let him drink from her wrist and felt the strange intimacy of his fangs in her skin—that part felt the first cold tendrils of fear.
Because if Raziel didn’t know what this place was, then they were both walking blind into something far bigger than either of them had anticipated.
The wagon rolled to a stop before the great vine-wrapped tower.
They had arrived at the Grove.
And Nadi had the sinking feeling that nothing—not her revenge, not her love, not even her life—would ever be the same again. Whatever Ebiti planned for them, it would change their course. And she knew it wouldn’t be for the better. With things like this? It never was.