Sabrina gasped.
“Then hurry up and ask him where he is and why he can’t come out,” Sinora said impatiently.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t hear him in my head right now. I don’t know why. I just can’t. But if he can’t protect me because Helen has him trapped in there . . .”
“The Death Bond will claim you both,” she finished gravely.
“Exactly.”
Sinora pondered in silence for a minute, occasionally glancing from the temple to me, her fearful expression never changing, as my eyes pled for her to believe me.
“Counterparts,” Sinora sighed heavily. “Well. Then, I suppose, if you really think he’s in there.” She worried her lower lip. “Well. We shouldn’t be stopping you from getting to him. We came to keep you out of trouble. But if you die because he’s missing, then we haven’t done our job.” She pointed her lens at me with a little bit of doubt creeping back into her expression. “How sureareyou?”
“I really think he’s in there,” I said. He had to be. The alternative was . . .
I swallowed tightly. I wasn’t ready to consider it.
Sinora dropped her lens with a reluctant nod. “Navigating the temple will be a challenge, but you’re a smart girl. You listen to your heart, understand? Don’t be listening to your head. Not in there. What you need to remember is in here.” She pointed to her chest. “We’ll give you Shadowcover to the entrance, but we can’t go in.” Rolling up her sleeve, she showed me her Death Bonds, one light and one dark, I guessed for her and Sabrina. “There is only so much we can do to interfere with Helen’s plans.”
After Sabrina released me from her gift, we crept to the temple in shadow. We made it to the top of the steps, but once there, I was useless. I stood on the worship terrace, Arissa’s coin sliding between my fingers.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I tried tapping it against the thick stone door, but it didn’t open. I had the notion to chuck the stupid thing at the wall, and was about to, but Sabrina calmly plucked it from my fingers and gently placed the coin in the offering tray of a stone land dragon sculpture.
The coin vanished from the tray, and the entrance to the temple rolled open with a heaviness that would’ve given me pause under different circumstances. But I was committed to finding Leland.
I gave a fleeting smile to my aunts, thanking them for their help, then briskly slid through the temple’s shrinking opening before the heavy door rolled closed, locking me within.
* * *
The inside was dark with a loud, watery echo. Paltry orbs of light emanated from antique brass lanterns affixed to the stone block walls. High above, a dramatic, cathedral-style, vaulted ceiling loomed like a Gothic spiderweb.
I paused to get my bearings and noted the massive interior support pillars were intricately carved with symbols representing the seven schools of light magic. Pepper, who had been calm since we left the academy, pawed and scratched at the rough side of my burlap bag.
“What is it, Pep?” I asked. “Do you feel Belinda?” The second I set her loose on the ground, she bounded away from me.
Her eagerness equally comforted and saddened me. While she sensed Belinda, I sensed nothing. No pull. None of the magnetic charge that electrified my veins whenever Leland was near. But even if Leland wasn’t here, I kept going, because I could still help Belinda, Trist, and everyone else who was missing. Because I was responsible for them being here and I needed to fix that.
I approached a wide, stone staircase descending to the level below. From the top of the steps, I heard the sound of rushingwater, and as I ventured farther down the stairs, the sound multiplied, echoing like an indoor swimming pool. Pepper rushed so far ahead I could no longer see her, but I went down cautiously, carefully stepping around holes in the steps and jagged spots of unevenness that might have been death traps.
Reaching the landing, I reunited with Pepper and swatted through a dense field of mist generated by the central waterfall. It was a hanging curtain of glistening threads, plunging from the ten-foot-high ceiling and bisecting the room. The runoff from it drained to the center of the floor, where it gushed out through a five-foot-wide hole, carrying down to the level below. I took a step back from it.
The energy around that hole was unnatural, wrong, a deep chasm for drowning, a bottomless pit. I judged from the way sound seemed to go on and on that so did the waterfall throughout the entirety of the temple.
Pepper froze before it, the curtain-like stream of water a barrier we had to pass in order to complete this chamber and continue our descent. I settled her in my bag and zipped it closed so she wouldn’t get wet.
“It’ll just be a minute,” I promised. Hoped.
I walked carefully through the water, trying not to slip and fall through the eerily gaping hole in the middle of the room, eventually making it to the other side, drenched and tracking wet footprints across the slippery stone. That was when it sank in. The water wasn’t normal. It was elemental.
The next set of stairs was in view, and Pepper, jumping inside my bag, was eager to get there, but all I could do was slump against the nearest pillar. There, I was overcome by haunting flashes of every hour I’d ever exhausted in Gray’s bedroom. My flush was so strong, I didn’t even feel the hail of the icy waterfall. My sodden clothes, seeping with hypothermia, were the last thing I had the capacity to think about.
I felt skin and sheets.
I watched vivid flashbacks of me falling over myself to be with him.
I watched Gray falling asleep. Me climbing out his window.Answering texts at two a.m.
But for what?
