Chapter 9 #2
“I don’t,” Hart said. “I only dropped the leather bag at the entrance to her hoard and hid to ensure she collected it.”
Charon made a grunting sound. “A wise choice for a Champion of Themis.”
Before Charon shared anything else, we landed on a long outcropping in the middle of the range. Dark gray stone surrounded us both above and below. This particular piece of the mountain jutted out far enough to hold a dragon.
“Scarlett’s hoard, I presume?”
Hart jumped from Charon’s back. “Yes.” He stood there as if waiting for me to follow, like perhaps he’d catch me as I slid down the side of our giant, scaled companion. Charon must have sensed my discomfort, because he lowered his neck, allowing me to clamber directly onto the stone.
“Is Scarlett here?”
“We should hope not.”
“I might agree with Charon on this one,” Hart said.
I glanced over my shoulder. We weren’t exactly inconspicuous. It wasn’t easy to be sneaky with a dragon.
“You two go in. I’ll guard the entrance. I can at least distract her should she return.”
Hart didn’t need Charon to offer twice. He strode into the opening before I could question the plan, which didn’t sound like a plan at all. “Come on, Chaos. We need to be quick.”
I didn’t even have time to be irritated as we entered the cavern.
The interior was completely hollowed out, the space almost as large as the adamas room in the Oldwood Mines. Light followed us in from the entrance, but the visibility dimmed with each step we took deeper into the cave.
“This does not seem very secure,” I said as I caught sight of the so-called hoard. A large pile of objects was tucked as far into the cavern space as possible. I paused to glance between the stack of treasures and the entrance.
“Not many would risk Scarlett’s wrath,” Hart said, approaching the pile of items. Most gleamed in the little light still available. Silver plates, gold statues, necklaces with colored gemstones; every item seemed unique and wholly unconnected to the others.
“Why are we, again?” I chased after him. He knelt beside the pile, picking up individual pieces and evaluating them.
“Desperation,” he replied as he tossed aside another trinket.
I shook my head. “We don’t even know what the necklace does.”
“Your uncle made it. He went to great lengths to ensure it would be available to us.” Hart stood again and circled the pile as he arched a brow at me. “We haven’t found any other options in Delphine’s journals. Alaric’s papers are all we have.”
“Papers Lucinda and Blair were only meant to give to me if I arrived with you. What are the odds of that?” I mumbled to myself. That fact might have made the whole thing worse.
Hart turned to me, his smirk firmly in place. “I told you, Chaos. I could find you anywhere. And once I found you, I certainly wasn’t going to let you go.”
He had said a lot of things I was no longer sure I believed. I’d been so willing to accept the words when he’d originally said them. No one had ever seen me the way I thought he had. It was probably why the sting of his betrayal was so sharp.
“A single ember,” he said under his breath as he took a step in my direction.
I wanted him to stop. I didn’t want to hear the stupid promises he’d made me. The idiotic things I’d believed against all evidence that he was a liar. Mentally, I attempted to open the box where I tucked all these stupid emotions. I wanted to shove the hurt and the embarrassment in with the rest.
Another step brought him too close, within arm’s reach. “Lighting the darkest—”
But he wouldn’t stop. Why did he insist on continuing down this path? Something raw clawed at my insides, and when I cracked the lid to shove the feelings in, something snapped.
“Just—stop!” I pressed my hands against his chest to halt his progress. My heart beat rapidly. The temperature in the room rose, and I didn’t know if it was the heat of our connection or my anger that fanned the flame. “You don’t get to say any of that to me, Sebastien.”
I wielded the name like a weapon. It was the one I’d been avoiding. The one that proved how many secrets he’d kept. The one that everyone else had known but me. Using it shattered that box where I’d shoved every uncomfortable thought into a thousand pieces.
I didn’t even listen to the words I shouted. I just didn’t want to hear any more of his. “You don’t get to say that you would follow me, or that you wouldn’t let me go, or remind me of any of the stupid lies you told me in Kavios!”
He froze, though I could have sworn his lip twitched. That only made me angrier. It was as if every thought I’d tried to ignore, every memory I’d tried to erase, they all flooded my senses and coalesced as fire spewing from my lips.
“You lied to me. You used me. And what’s worse—what kills me—is that I so desperately wanted to believe you, I ignored every. Single. Sign.”
“Ember—”
Words poured forth. I wished I could stop them, but it was like a dam breaking, and I was no longer in control. “I cannot believe I didn’t see you for who you were sooner. You knew too much. You saw too much. I let myself believe that it could have been me you saw—not a prize—not a target.”
“I never—”
I laughed almost maniacally—because he was going to deny it.
The revelation should have been devastating, but fortunately, there was no need to delve too deeply into more complicated emotions when anger was still within easy reach.
I had plenty more to unleash. “You are so selfish. You thought only of yourself when you were summoned. You handed your father adamas on a silver platter in your attempt to free yourself! The consequences of your actions never occurred to you, did they? They never do! You didn’t want to be Champion, and you let everyone around you pay the price.
You’d think losing your mother would have been enough to make you think twice. ”
Something cracked inside me as the words left my mouth, but I didn’t care.
A deep red flashed in my periphery. Something in the hoard.
“And finally, I have your opinion of me.” Hart’s voice brought him back into focus.
He looked like I’d slapped him, but his hands balled into fists at his side.
“Well done, Chaos. Don’t stop now.” He turned in a slow circle, as if making a final attempt to search for the prize that brought us into this cave in the first place.
I couldn’t stand even the veil of calm he held in place.
I kept going. “I was so angry that Alaric kept so much from me. The more I learned, the clearer it became that he’d made decisions on my behalf.
Decisions that were mine to make. You hated it when a goddess took away your choices.
You saw how I hated what my family hid, how it crushed me, yet you did the exact same thing! ”
His hand was in his hair as he lost whatever internal battle raged within him. “Why don’t you take a little responsibility yourself, Ember? Yes, your family kept things from you.” He choked on the following words. “I kept things from you.”
I wanted to hurl every emotion into a void. His keeping things from me and my family doing the same were too different to explain. If he didn’t get that, I didn’t know why I bothered.
“Aren’t you forgetting someone on this list of people you’re angry at?” he asked. “What about yourself! You made your own choices. Alaric wanted you to leave, and you chose to take his place as jeweler. I wanted you to leave me in the woods, and you chose to answer Eris’s call.”
Another flash of red lit the cave as he finished. This time, it didn’t disappear—the glow remained.
My anger roared back to life at the sting of his words. What was I supposed to do? Let him die? “You make it sound like I’m such a burden, never doing what I’m told.”
Hart made a strangled sound, and I couldn’t look at him a moment longer.
I tracked the red light as the last words I wanted to hear echoed through my head. “Hurry up in there. I see wings on the horizon—Scarlett returns.”
My heartbeat raced even as I tried to calm myself. The red glow was too familiar to ignore. A color I’d learned to fear in Kavios. I didn’t quite understand what it meant here. Brushing past the questions on why it would glow for now, I ran toward the light on the opposite side of the hoard.
“Ember—”
Hart’s words caught as he seemed to note the glow.
I skidded to a halt by the eerie light and reached down.
A gold pendant on a chain was tucked into a silver cup.
I pulled the pendant free, and the heat of the adamas told me what it was before my eyes did.
The shape matched the picture in Alaric’s pages perfectly.
One of the adamas gems in the throne glowed red.
Hart arrived at my side, staring at the necklace.
How did it glow? The gems were adamas, that much was clear, but we hadn’t touched them. They should only glow when the bearer collects an emotion or wields one of the associated magics. This glow should have been impossible.
I grasped for words. “But we didn’t—”
“We don’t have time.” Hart grabbed the necklace and slipped it over my head. He wrapped his hand around mine and tugged me to the entrance, pulling hard as we approached Charon.
“We can’t get away,” he said.
With a single glance, I agreed with him. The approaching dragon’s wingspan was at least as large as Charon’s, and the red scales left little doubt about who she was.
“What do we do?”
“Hide the necklace beneath your blouse. Maybe she won’t want to fight if we haven’t taken anything.”
A growl tore through the sky.
“Unlikely,” Hart mumbled.
“If you have any better ideas, speak now, Cursed.”
“Don’t bother,” Scarlett’s voice was only slightly less gravely than Charon’s. Like him, she spoke directly into our minds, and she did not sound pleased.