Quinn #2
“So this—” I lifted my hand, and those familiar balls of light swirled down my arm to circle my fingers. One rested on my ring finger like the jewel of a wedding ring. “—won’t burn unless you want it to.”
“It’s no different than your blood magic.” Tobias reached back to hold my hand, his light scattering as he did so. “You can use it to help or to hurt. It’s in the intention.”
“Here I was so certain you’d hate my magic after what blood magic was used to do to you,” I admitted, the way my voice strained betraying my attempt at lightheartedness.
Tobias shook his head. “I could never hate anything about you.”
A lump formed in my throat, a smile coming to my face despite the situation.
I nearly tripped over my own feet as we reached the end of the stairs, my knees buckling at the unexpected stopping point.
Tobias pulled me against him, wrapping an arm around me to keep me upright before moving me behind him.
“No one’s here,” I hissed, pushing past him. I kept my dagger raised anyway.
The blood led to the middle of the room, where it abruptly disappeared. I carefully avoided stepping in it as I reached out with my blood magic, trying to sense a heartbeat.
Nothing.
“Maybe they stopped the bleeding so it didn’t lead us straight to a glamour?” I didn’t need our bond to sense Tobias’s frustration. “There has to be one. Or…”
I knelt near the end of the bloody trail, my eyes fixed on the space around it. It looked off somehow, like the stone was misaligned.
“Here.”
Tobias was at my side in a second. “What is it? Did you find…”
He trailed off with a curse as my hand sank into the stone, disappearing into the glamour in the floor. Pulling it out, I took his hand and wrapped it around my waist.
“Hold on.” My other hand tightened around my dagger. “I’m going to stick my head through far enough to see what’s beneath us. Lift me up when I squeeze your arm.”
Tobias looked ready to argue. I didn’t wait for permission as I leaned forward into the floor, flinching as my face went through the seemingly solid marble. It felt like diving into a dense fog, the stone pulsating around me as I held my breath instinctually.
A wayward curl poked through the ceiling just before my face did. I recognized where we were in an instant.
I squeezed Tobias’s arm. He pulled me back with such force he fell backwards, catching me on top of him.
“The mirror,” I gasped as I tried to untangle myself. “We’re above the mirror in the tunnel, the one that led to Silvius’s lab. It’s beneath us.”
Tobias stared at me, slack jawed. “That’s why we couldn’t figure out how Silvius was entering the Enclave.”
“The top of the mirror is close enough that it wouldn’t be hard to climb down, or up.” From the bottom, I hadn’t realized that the frame’s looping exterior formed an easy ladder to climb. “There’s no one there. They must have gone through.”
Tobias’s brow furrowed. “The gate, it’s open?”
“For now,” I said. “We need to hurry in case Silvius closes it again.”
Tobias’s lips pursed. “I take it the guards stationed down here are either working against us or dead?”
“I didn’t see anyone.”
He was likely right.
Tobias held up a missive, waving it at me. “This showed up while you were head down. Yael’s on her way with reinforcements.”
I recognized her cramped penmanship as I took the note from his hand. Reaching into my pocket, I retrieved a pen, then scribbled:
The closet in the lab leads to the mirror in the tunnels. We’re going through. No magic in the lab.
I let out a heavy sigh, then added one more line.
Don’t trust Dolion.
“Once we walk through that mirror, there’s no magic,” I reminded Tobias too. “Is there anything you want me to add before we lose contact?”
“No.” A muscle flexed in Tobias’s jaw. I knew the worry tumbling down our bond wasn’t for himself. “I don’t suppose I can convince you to wait to go through it until those reinforcements join us?”
I shook my head. The note disappeared in a flare of magic—not my healer’s blue, but a red I knew reflected in my eyes.
Dolion was in imminent danger, no matter what part he played in this betrayal. Pari too, considering I had no idea how fast the new strain of this virus worked, and Eva was comatose and counting on me.
My blood magic reddened my fingertips. No matter what, I wouldn’t let Silvius get away again.
“Would you let me go without you?”
Tobias’s face darkened. “Fair enough.” His hands found the invisible edge of where the glamour covered the hole in the stone. “My turn first this time.”
His fingers gripped the edge as he lowered himself down until they were all that was left of him. When Tobias let go of the wall, he disappeared entirely.
I swung my legs over the edge. A scream caught in my throat as Tobias’s hand gripped my ankles, guiding my feet onto something solid. His hands slid up my thighs as I crouched down, my head popping through the glamour last this time.
We perched precariously on the top of the mirror. I immediately grabbed its frame, the highest of its eight twisted points cutting into my hand. Though the tunnels weren’t tall, we were still two or three body lengths from the ground—a much longer distance than I had realized from the bottom.
The puddle of blood in front of the mirror looked a long way down.
“Don’t look down,” Tobias murmured. His hand fastened around one of the brass loops that decorated the edges of the glass, his foot finding another. “And don’t rush.”
Trembling, I copied him on the opposite side, focusing on the next rung. My heartbeat thundered in my ears as I looked down, the sheer drop below making my head spin with vertigo.
My foot slipped, and I gasped.
“Quinn.”
After so long whispering, his panicked shout echoed far too loudly down the hall.
“Fine,” I said quickly. “I’m fine.”
Or at least I would be once my feet were on solid ground.
Tobias’s lips quirked across from me. “I never realized you were afraid of heights.”
Of course, he could feel my fear, even if he couldn’t see the cold sweat now dripping down my back.
“I would argue it’s not the height, but the fear of what would happen if I fell from it,” I countered wryly. My foot slid against the curl of the next rung and my breath caught in my throat, my chest tightening.
“Don’t all fears have a source?” Tobias looked thoughtful, despite the situation.
“I’m afraid of open spaces because I spent so long trapped in that cage that being outside…
it feels like I’ll float away. But the fear isn’t of the space itself, it’s the fear of losing control, of unpredictability.
” Despite his calm facade, his emotions crossed our bond in a whirlwind I couldn’t fully untangle.
“I’m not afraid of the dungeon below Morehaven, but what waited for me in it: the promise of pain, both mine and others.
Of losing my voice along with my autonomy. ”
It had taken more bravery than I realized for him to go on this adventure with me—and to merely exist in the long months since he found his freedom.
My feet hit the ground, and I launched myself at him in the space behind the mirror. Tobias let out an oomph of surprise even as his arms wrapped around me.