“It isn’t us you have to fear, young one,” the woman beside the man spoke. She was younger than the men, her dark hair only showing the first signs ofgray, and she was well-muscled beneath her leathers. Strong arms crossed as she leaned back in her seat, glaring at all of us in a way that was spectacularly unimpressed. “No one has escaped the Underground since it was created. Until now, that is. Your disappearance will be noted. We'll be suspected of aiding you. The creators of your prison will undoubtedly come for you. Far too much is at risk to allow your escape.”
“Creators?”Zyaasked, eyes widening. “You don’t mean…theGeist? You think the gods themselves are after us?”
The woman scoffed.
“TheGeist, yes,” she answered. “Gods, they are not.”
I eyed her for a moment. In any other circumstance, I might like her.
“Then we're doomed,” Zya muttered.
“Hardly,” the first man scoffed. “We’ve taken on theGeistbefore and we're prepared to do so again. Though I would rather face them with more of our forces and far more provisions than we have now. So we'll be returning toArchí.”
The man and woman on either side of him nodded in agreement with the plan, clearly having heard it before. The warriors gathered on the sides of the tent seemed to nod as well. All butthe silver-haired man in the corner, Gryfon,who, I’d noticed, hadn’t taken his eyes off of me since the moment I’d entered.
“Archí?” Kane asked.
“Our homeland,” the third man with thickgrayhair and a patchy beard replied with a bow of his ancient head. “It's where our leaders are and where the best ones to answer your questions will be.”
“How did you get past the border?” I asked then, remembering the magic around the tunnels and how long I'd had to practice phasing, how long I’d had to hold my intangibility, just to exist beyond it, invisible as I was.
The three at the table exchanged a glance as the tent fell into silence.
“You,” someone spoke from the corner.
I recognized the voice immediately, a sensation of familiarity nagging at the back of my subconscious. But then I looked up to findGryfonpushing off of the tent pole to step forward and knew that couldn't be right.
“You broke through them with your power.”
I stared at him. Power?
“The shadows,” Roxy gasped.
Gryfonnodded but the others looked away, avoiding my gaze.
“How's that possible?” I asked. “Isthat possible?”
“Apparently,” Darius muttered.
“The wards surrounding the Underground and Sanctuary, separating them from each other and the world beyond, are made of light,”Gryfonexplained, his gaze remaining on me as he did. “Your power is of darkness. When you…imploded, you blew a hole straight through them. We were able to move into the tunnel the moment the wards dissipated. That’s how we found you.”
“You were just…waiting outside?” Zya asked, suspicious.
“We’ve been looking for a way into the Underground for centuries,” he said. “We’re always waiting outside. Always.”
His gaze met mine once more and something sparked in those blue eyes I simply couldn’t look away from. Something about him felt so familiar, even though I knew it was impossible we'd met before. But then he shifted his gaze away from me to my friends sitting before me and that expression hardened.
“The rest of you can either come with us or risk survival in the desert, as you wish,” he announced. “We’re here for her anyway.”
He nodded once in my direction before striding purposefully out of the tent, leaving the flap blowing in the breeze behind him.
It was then I realized why he seemed so familiar to me. It was his voice. Deep and drawling. Smooth. Like velvet.
Chapter Twenty-One
Dante
“We found father standing in the basement this morning, staring straight into the tunnel down. It took both my mother and I to pull him away.”
