“A river?” she croaks, staring at me. “No. It was—” I hear her clearing her throat. “It was dawn.”
She looks at her arms. Her cheeks are damp, face frozen with panic. And I don’t stop to think about common sense before I close the distance between us and pull her into my arms.
“It wasn’t real,” I whisper.
“It felt real,” she says. Then she’s breathing me in, her damp lashes brushing my neck, the sensation enough to make me forget about the river. But as much as I want to stay like this, running my fingers through her soft hair, I remember what I heard.
“ ‘Dear sister, you have my blood, but…’ ” I start, recalling the translation in my notebook. “I heard a voice say that. But there was something else…‘chadal’?”
“My Gaelic is as good as yours,” she says. “Which I’m assuming is not very good.”
“But did you hear it, too?”
The voice we heard must have belonged to Ada, but Aliz won’t admitit.
“I didn’t hear anything,” she says. “How are we going to get through?” she asks. I draw my hand away, inching back and putting air betweenus.
“We’ll find a way.”
But though I say that, I know that whatever is beyond the altar might be far more dangerous than the labyrinth.
Chapter
Twenty-Five
That night, I don’t dream of the maze.
Instead, I relive one of my earliest, bloodiest missions.
The night I killed Cieri.
Cieri, an Italian vampire who had made a name for himself in London, had organised a party in one of his underground clubs. He had handpicked fifty human victims, all with interesting blood profiles. I let myself get captured, just as Penny instructed, and stood in handcuffs, as the other humans were brought out one by one onto a stage for the guests to take their pick of them.
Penny dressed me up the exact way I needed to be in order for Cieri to choose me. White dress, long blond hair. He had a type. She also gave me a needle to prick my skin before he inspected me. It was my first mission working alone—I’d been sent out into the shadows to prove my worth to Callisto.
All I wanted was to save the other humans, but instead, I was forced to look the other way as fangs tore through their flesh, their screams as loud as the music. I followed Cieri to his private booth. He ran his hands down my white dress, told me my blood was unlikeanything he’d smelled before. He promised he would turn me into a vampire if I asked nicely.
Something possessed me then. Instead of staking him, finishing him fast the way I’d been told to, a twisted part of my mind told me to take my time. To give him a taste of his own medicine. See, if you let a vampire bleed out, it won’t kill them. It will be excruciatingly painful, though, so I slashed his neck, his legs, I near enough carved his heart out of his chest. By the time I finally staked him, my dress was soaked through with his blood, coating me like a second skin. I threw up next to the dust left by his corpse, and wiped my mouth clean, tasting blood. I wouldn’t get rid of the taste for days.
When I wake, I can still taste the blood. Stolen blood, from previous victims dragged into his clubs. I pull the covers over my head, trying to breathe. There are careful steps outside my bed, behind the saltward.
Bile burns my throat, and I cover my mouth. Penny told me to be more careful after that mission. She’d been disappointed. Disturbed, even, by the mess I’d made. She’d said:Maybe you aren’t ready.When I was denied my first promotion a year after that mission, she brought up Cieri’s death as one of the reasons, saying I’d acted more like a monster than a hunter, even though it never happened again.
“Cassie?”
I swallow the acid in my throat. I breathe. But I can still feel his blood caking my skin.
“Are you all right?”
I wipe away tears. I don’t want her to see me like this. But the mark, now travelling down past my waist, stings, warning me that we’ve been apart for too long. Telling me it’ll tear me to shreds if I don’t get close to her again.
I open a gap in the curtains. Aliz stands behind the saltward. Her eyes are black. I am the only threat in our room. Concern furrows her brows, and I can’t seem to move my lips, make a single sound, as I step over the ward.
Only when I’ve wrapped my arms around her, pressing myself toher until the ache in my neck returns to a dull itch, do I realise what will happen next.
Every night, every dream I’ve had, has echoed in Aliz’s mind. Every image of awful delight letting her know—letting both of us know—what we can have if we just give in. But that false paradise is gone.
If our dreams are still connected, when she goes to sleep this morning, she will share my dream of Cieri, and see me as I reallyam.
