Chapter 4
Four
ZAYA
The door is broken.
I stand there with the crystal water pitcher and tablecloth in hand, swaying on my feet from blood loss and exhaustion, ready to scrub at the runes until my hands bleed … and then I blink. Then blink again.
The latch is just ever so slightly askew. The door is subtly twisted, as if one of the hinges was damaged when the Cataclysm threw his last tantrum.
Still so fucking weak, I drop the pitcher. It shatters on the concrete floor, and water instantly drenches the bottom few inches of the stupid fucking silk dress I’m dragging around after me. Shards of crystal fly, skittering across the floor in all directions. Ready to slice into my bare feet.
My head falls back, and I laugh.
I laugh, completely unhinged.
I laugh until I’m struggling to not fall sobbing to my knees.
Because I know — I know — this is only the first hurdle. If I can even shift the weight of the fucking door …
Yes, enough essence has obviously trickled through the rune wards I managed to compromise with water and blood that my luck has clearly shifted.
But only in that way it does when the universe has other plans for me.
I know I don’t simply get to go home. I don’t just get to wrap my arms around Presh.
I don’t get to crawl into bed with Rought.
I don’t get to bond with Rath. I don’t get to even figure out how to come to terms with all the shit Reck has pulled.
I’ve tallied quite the negative balance with the universe, and it’s all due. All at once.
I’m not strong enough.
I’m fucking broken.
Barely on my feet.
I can’t stand against the Cataclysm.
I also know — I know — there are secrets on the other side of this door.
Maybe even the final pieces of the puzzle of what happened to my aunt, and what happened for me to lose my connections to my soul-bound mates.
I’m not mentally stable enough to uncover those secrets, to discover the truth of it all.
I catch the sobbing laughter in my throat. It hurts. It actually hurts to contain the emotion. But I lift my head nonetheless.
Eyes fixed on the steel-banded door before me, I step through the crystal shards, dragging the wet dress behind me. Cobweb-thin threads of essence stir around my feet, presumably protecting me from the glass though I don’t bother pausing to check.
I guess the universe doesn’t need me to lose any more of my blood. Yet.
I place my hand on the latch, wrenching it up and to the side as I’ve watched the shifters do before me.
More essence shifts under my hand. Perhaps called forth by my intent from the dregs hidden deeply within me.
Or perhaps it’s trickled in from the universe through the runes I managed to smudge, along with the crack in the door.
Maybe both.
The latch lifts.
The door rolls slowly, bouncing slightly back against the corner of the wall as it comes to a stop, fully open.
The corridor beyond is inexplicably empty.
I hesitate, just for a breath, knowing that the next few steps, the next few hours, maybe even the next few days, are going to test me, hurt me. I don’t get the reprieve of death this time. I don’t get to be reset. And no matter how difficult that always is, I know this will be worse.
I’ve pissed off the universe. I’ve fucked with futures — definitely Presh’s and possibly Bellamy’s, Reck’s, and DeVille’s. I wasn’t supposed to touch any of their threads so thoroughly.
But I’ve apparently canceled out enough of the runes to get on my feet, to get the door open, so it’s past time to step into my now.
So I do … I step into the corridor.
Essence sears through me, starting at my left foot as it clears the doorway, streaking up my leg, exploding through my torso, choking my throat, and ricocheting through my head.
My eyes blaze so painfully that it’s possible they’re bleeding again. I can see violet light reflecting off the bare concrete wall across from me.
I keep walking. I keep dragging the dress with me. The corridor dead-ends to my right. I turn left. The ceilings are high. The hall is wide, likely to accommodate the shifters’ general bulk.
I try to breathe, steadily and evenly, as the vastness of the power of the Conduit settles within me. Not that it’s ever been truly, fully settled.
Inhale, exhale, and repeat.
The wound on my neck burns, radiating agony through me with each step. My amulet remains an inert hunk of metal and gemstone slung around my neck. Its unusual weight is a visceral reminder that all is not well. Not with me, and not with my connection to the universe.
I keep walking, passing other open doors, other much smaller holding cells, completely bare.
I climb the stairs at the end of the corridor, ignoring how all my joints ache and how I have to press a hand against the wall to stay mostly upright. There is no railing.
I make it to a landing, pausing to reach out for essence that would alert me to the presence of any shifters. None are near. Or perhaps my reach is truncated or compromised?
But there’s something through the next door off the stairwell. Something I don’t want to see.
Something I don’t want to know.
If I continue upward, I’ll breathe fresh air. I’ll find a vehicle. I’ll twist some luck. And I can go home. Well, I can head in that direction at least.
A terrible sob rips through me.
I nearly stumble. I nearly falter.
But I don’t take the stairs.
Ignoring the electronic locking mechanism, I reach for the door latch with tears already streaming down my face. I know … I know what lies beyond this door.
Essence shifts under my hand. The panel next to the door sparks.
The locks clunk open. The door unseals with a hiss of compressed air and swings outward with a mere tug of my hand, revealing a medical bay of some sort.
Machines beep and pump. Screens flicker and buzz. Medical equipment is arrayed across metal tables on locked wheels.
The glass-fronted fridges to my left are filled with bags of blood.
A dark-blond male, skin waxy in death, is strapped to a hospital bed with faded preservation spells etched in blood across his forehead, chest, and legs. His hand has fallen off the bed, his wrist still bruised and bloody from when he wrenched it from his restraints.
Trying to reach for the woman in the bed next to him.
To reach for her as he watched her die, moments before following her into the after.
Devlin.
My Aunt Disa’s final chosen mate. Her combat mage.
The blood-based preservation spells are Bellamy’s work. I don’t have to step any farther into the room to know it.
The machine attempting to breathe for the woman in the hospital bed next to Devlin pumps again, wheezing. Blood runes similar to the ones in my holding cell ring the base of the bed, scuffed and faded now. More runes ring the room and around the door.
More of Bellamy’s work.
But not her blood.
I’ve known that for a while now.
I find the strength to step into the room, leaving the door open behind me and wishing I were numb. Wishing my chest didn’t feel as if it were cracked open and bleeding. Wishing fate hadn’t just stabbed an icy shard of inevitability through my heart.
All the answers to so many questions are displayed before me.
Whose blood could possibly be powerful enough to hold the universe at bay, keeping me — the Conduit of all that energy, that power — trapped at the Cataclysm’s whim?
Why has my connection to the Conduit powers and the intersection point felt so disjointed? Incomplete?
What happened to my aunt, and how was she unable to warn me ahead of time?
The woman in the second hospital bed looks nothing and everything like my Aunt Disa. She’s intubated, with tubes running from all her major arteries, some of which have clearly been used to harvest her blood.
During the confrontation at the Outcast’s temporary clubhouse in the hotel bar, Bellamy had alluded to seeing my aunt in a cage — or more specifically, of seeing my amulet hanging around the neck of another of the awry.
But this isn’t anything like the cage I thought the dire awry was hinting at — blood runes and plastic tubing instead of steel bars …
My aunt’s naturally tan skin is too pale. Her dark-blond hair is brittle, cheeks sunken. Her eyes are closed, but I know without seeing them that they’re no longer a vibrant violet to match my own. Her arms lie neatly alongside her torso — her chest expanding and contracting by mechanical means.
She didn’t reach back for Devlin in the moment of their deaths, even though she’s not physically restrained.
Because the Cataclysm, and Bellamy at his behest, used other means to cage Disa. Other means to keep her caged.
Likely Devlin himself.
Maybe my Aunt Disa was more fallible than I thought. Maybe too human. Maybe she actually loved too much, too hard. Maybe she didn’t know that the universe would abandon her here, that her rejected soul-bound mate would or could kill her, and she waited just a little too long to react.
And now her amulet hangs around my neck.
I take the last few steps to her bedside, crossing over the containment runes without feeling whatever spell was once threaded through that blood.
Disa’s blood, though I doubt that was the key to holding her.
I vaguely understand that they’ve used a combination of tech and essence to keep the vessel breathing, though.
Breathing and bleeding that powerful Gage blood.
Gage blood. Because Disa is no longer the Conduit.
I am.
A nasty, barely healed wound mars the top of her shoulder. The skin there is reddened, maybe even infected. It’s a match to the still-seething wound at my neck.
Who sat in my Aunt’s sitting room that day, sipping tea and spinning a tale compelling enough that Disa and Devlin ended up facing the Cataclysm? Being brought here? Being hooked up to these machines?
Did Disa think that enough of her rejected soul-bound mate, enough of Oso, still resided within the Cataclysm that he wouldn’t, maybe even couldn’t, truly harm her?