Chapter Thirty-Five Arion #3
I glance between her and the stairs and the surrounding pitch blackness.
She shifts closer to me as we rise higher and higher into the sky, and she’s fucking terrified.
She’s been terrified this whole time, and I’ve been useless.
My magic thrashes between my ribs like a wild animal, begging to be released.
Demanding freedom. The sorcerer could arrive at any moment, and we’re no closer to finding the heart now than we were—what?
An hour ago? Two days ago? Who knows how long we’ve been here?
I promised Zephyra I would get her out. I need to get her out.
This fucking place is cursed. And I’m done with it.
I am Warlock Arion Stone, and I am not going to let my mermaid die here. This is not the end of us.
“Fuck this,” I growl.
Seizing Zephyra around the waist, I haul her against me and dive over the side of the staircase. Straight down the center of the stairs. Cool, damp air rushes past us.
More and more and more fucking darkness.
Zephyra screams again, but I’m not waiting around any longer. I am Warlock Arion Stone, and I can—and will—save her.
When we land, it’s in a rough-hewn chamber of jagged limestone.
Bits of iridescent shells gleam within the rock from the faint light above.
Starfish. Mollusks. Petrified crustaceans that appear centuries old, if not older.
There are no doors or windows here, and as soon as our feet touch the floor and my wings relax, the staircase folds up on itself like an accordion. Disappearing into nothing.
“Fantastic,” Zephyra seethes. “Great plan. Now what are we supposed to do—”
I clap a hand over her mouth, thinking. Magic riots inside me, painful and bruising as it bears down on me.
As if it’s attempting to grind me into the floor.
As if we haven’t gone low enough yet. But there are no exits here.
The stairs are gone. Zephyra grumbles against my hand, biting at my fingers so I might release her. But—
My eyes snag on the wall beside her.
She follows my gaze, and her own eyes widen. My hand falls from her lips, and she whirls around, snatching the sapphire dagger from her bandolier. I quickly brandish my sword.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” she hisses.
Seven guards begin to break free from the walls in a crescent-moon formation, their faces chiseled from the limestone itself.
Barnacles hardening their jaws and crusting their lips.
Long-dead crustaceans fill in gaps of their missing flesh and broken bones.
They are revolting, hideous creatures, and each of their beady black eyes are fixed solely upon Zephyra.
“You want to try talking your way through this one?” I ask, sliding her behind me. But it’s no use. They’re going to surround us. She pivots swiftly, back-to-back with me, her dagger pointed outward.
“I hate to say this, but I have never seen these guards in my life.”
The sound of her voice splinters their stony expressions, their faces twisting into ferocious scowls.
“Oh good. They seem friendly,” I mutter. “Where are we on the whole ‘no killing’ rule?”
I feel her tense behind me. “They’re not in control of themselves. We don’t hurt them.”
“Zephyra, Zephyra, Zephyra,” they moan, one after the next, until their haunted gasps fill the open chamber like a noxious gas. They skulk forward, almost limping with stiffness. “You are home, and he is near. The sorcerer will be so pleased.”
He is near.
He is near.
He is near.
The chanted words sear through my gut like bile, and Zephyra wavers, her body quivering against mine. It’s her worst fear come to life. The sorcerer is close, and we aren’t.
“I… I don’t…” Her braid whips me in the mouth as she twists and turns, searching for any way out of this. And then—“Do you hear that?”
I glance over my shoulder at her. “Are you referring to the seashell monsters’ demented chanting?”
“No. No, the voices, Arion. Do you hear them?”
In the minuscule gaps of silence, I seek them out.
A whisper or a scream or anything, but there is nothing—nothing—in this fucking chamber.
And she has started losing her mind with fear.
“There are no voices, Zephyra, but there are guards. You need to decide what we’re doing, because I’m not certain we can debilitate seven stone men at the same time without magic. Even if they are slow.”
“No killing. No magic,” she says.
Right as the guard nearest her shouts, “Seize her!”
All at once, the guards stop moving slowly.
All at once, they leap across the chamber.
Straight toward Zephyra. Her gaze widens further as the first lands in front of her, his flesh oozing black ichor and sand.
I whirl around to protect her, to stop him by ramming my sword through its skull, but she rears back.
Not with her dagger, however, with her fist. She punches the guard straight on his gnarled nose.
Her knuckles collide with sharp green barnacles, and she hisses with pain—but the monstrous guard makes no sound. Has no reaction.
While her skin splits, while she bleeds, it remains frozen.
Her chest heaves as she clutches her fist to her chest, and the monstrous guard—it raises a hand. It moves forward as if to seize her by her throat. And her blood is still dripping, oozing down her arm, beading along the floor.
The sight of her blood, of her pain, sickens me as much as it did on the ship. Worse than it did on the ship. Because she isn’t safe here, and I’m supposed to protect her. I need to protect her.
My magic stops roiling, stops thrashing and clawing and snapping rabid jaws inside me, and it finally explodes.
A ring of blue flame erupts from my chest, devouring the guards in a split second.
Incinerating them into seven misshapen piles of ash and dust. Unfortunately, I’m not in control.
The magic doesn’t stop there. It blows against the limestone walls—through the walls—into the very heart of the castle, and the whole thing rumbles in response.
Not as if the halls are changing, but as if the halls are breaking.
Pieces of rock fall overhead. Chunks of limestone crumble from the walls. The floor splinters under our feet.
“What the fuck did you do?” Zephyra backs into me, horrified. “You can’t… you shouldn’t have…”
Her words drift off when she notices my gaze is still at our feet, and she gasps as her blood spills into the tiny fissures, filling the stone crevices, somehow expanding and swirling larger and larger, slicing the fissures deeper and deeper, seemingly carving them into the shape of…
I still. My heart stops beating.
Her blood has revealed the shape of—
“A door,” she breathes. “That… looks like a door.”
The castle quakes again, rough enough to throw Zephyra off her feet.
I manage to catch her before she hits the floor, and I hurl us out of the way of more debris.
Rocks. Stones. I don’t give a fuck what it is, so long as it doesn’t hit us.
Hit her. I sweep her hair from her face, checking her for injuries, my palms hot on her cheeks.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt anywhere else? Let me heal your hand.”
“I’m fine, Arion.” She pushes me away, seconds before a massive boulder crashes between us.
No. Not a boulder.
A person.
What the fuck?
Philippe splatters against the floor, viscera exploding outward just as violently as my magic had, leaving only his boots, his sword, and his hat untouched. Zephyra looks up, and so do I. It’s not just rocks falling. It’s people. Our people. All of them.
Two more smash. Splatter. Die. And decades of training and years of the Trials flash before my eyes. I stop thinking. I start reacting. Using my magic, I manage to catch two crew members inches before they hit the floor, phantom hands hoisting them aside as I prepare a method to rescue the rest.
“Please,” Zephyra whispers, staring at the bloody mess with wild eyes. I’m not sure if she knows she’s speaking the word aloud. “Please, please, please.”
I can’t catch them all, however. It requires too much magic, and already—from the decimation and the first rescues—my lungs ache. My heart slows. My vision blackens. I’m too weak. But Vesper is falling, and Gavriall, and Amaya, and—
A burst of smoke blows through the room, charcoal gray and thick. It tangles with their limbs, their hair, their clothes—and it slows them. Just enough. It slows them all so they’re no longer crashing but drifting. Easing their way down as if each of those remaining have wings of their own.
Thank the gods.
I exhale in relief when Vesper touches down first, still brandishing her sword and her hair knotted as if she’d been in a fight only seconds ago.
Gavriall drops with a clam crunching on his finger and Emilia’s skull chewing through his sleeve.
Blood drips down Amaya’s cheek. Each of them appears visibly shaken.
Everyone does, even Zephyra. Although, she has torn her gaze from the gore, and now it rests upon me.
She reaches forward with a trembling palm. “No.” Her hand tentatively brushes my cheek.
And I know. I know what she’s seeing, what everyone can see.
The blackened veins of death spiraled out from my heart have finally crested the column of my throat.
Crested the hard line of my jaw too. I can feel the ash in my toes.
Zephyra’s brow pinches, and her eyes water. “No,” she repeats. “You can’t be—”
I capture her wrist and press it to my lips.
Minutes. In my heart, I know that’s the truth of how long I have left.
I’ve spent my life fearing it. I’ve spent the last year cowering from it. But I am dying. Now. Right in this moment with Zephyra and her sad turquoise eyes gazing into my own. I am dying, and that means she’s dying too. Which is fucking unacceptable.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
She blinks rapidly, trying to dry her tears. “I don’t feel it. Why don’t I feel it?”
I can’t answer that. I don’t know. “This castle—”
“If you don’t fucking mind,” Vesper interrupts, “would someone like to explain what the fuck just happened?” The siren drags her sword along the floor, the earsplitting shriek of metal against stone forcing Zephyra and me apart.
“One minute I was tying three guards to the table they sprang from—because they were disguised as chairs—and the next minute, we were just… falling. The floor vanished. The walls vanished. And we fucking fell.”
Gavriall peels the skull from his clothes, glaring at Zephyra. “The halls didn’t rotate every ten to fifteen minutes. You said they rotate every ten to fifteen minutes.”
Amaya is the only one who doesn’t ask questions or demand answers. She stands over the three corpses of her crew, removes her hat, and sets it between their broken bodies. Then she straightens, turns, and thunder reverberates around the chamber. “My people will not have died in vain.”
“No, they won’t have.” I gesture to the floor, where Zephyra’s blood has finally sunk into the stone, solidifying into a door with a handle carved in the shape of a mermaid’s tail.
Every bone in my body burns to open it. The weight of my remaining magic forces me toward it.
There is no question. No doubt left in my mind.
“I think Zephyra just found us the entrance to Abysses.”