Corey slowly blinked, refocusing her eyes on Luna, returning from wherever she’d gone. “I don’t know. I figured she was just taking her sweet time to annoy me, but she never came back. Everyone searched for her, Gregory still does I think. But she left no trace. It’s like she just . . . vanished.”
Luna didn’t know what to say. No wonder Gregory had her grave at Winta and Felix’s, that’s where Ella went missing.
Corey rubbed her forehead. “You know the most ironic thing is . . . I don’t even remember what the fight was about.”
Probably something small,Luna thought to herself.Something minor. Nothing worth losing a life over.
“Sorry, Corey,” Damien mumbled, biting his lip. “I went too far.”
“No.” Corey shook her head. “It’s fine. I get it.”
An awkward silence fell on them. Eager to escape it, Luna rose and began gathering the broken shards of glass and scattered cookies. Corey fetched a broom and swept up the smaller fragments, tossing everything into what looked like a garbage can in the kitchen. The scaly container glowed bright red, then gulped and the waste completely disappeared.
After a bit, Damien entered the kitchen. “Marion is with Nina, I presume?”
Corey nodded. “She’s in the basement. Cuffs on to suppress her magic, just in case. We’ve also been taking turns watching her. Don’t want her pulling any tricks, you know.”
“If you still want to see Nina, we should go now,” Damien said, turning to Luna.
“Of course,” she replied. It was the whole reason they had come, and she wasn’t about to change her mind now despite the dread filling her gut.
“I’ll come down with you,” Corey said, already heading down the side hallway. “It’s my shift anyway. Marion could use a break.”
Luna followed, bracing herself for what waited below. After a lifetime of longing and questions, she was finally going to speak to her birth mother. All she could do now was hope that it went well—that it wouldn’t break her more than it healed.
Chapter 41
Down, Down, Down
Stone steps curved steeply downward, vanishing into a shadowed throat of earth. Corey led the way without hesitation, her hair bouncing lightly between her shoulder blades. Luna followed close behind, with Damien’s quiet presence a steady pressure at her back.
The air cooled with every step as the warmth of the upper floor slipped away. Luna dragged her fingers along the stone wall, rough and slightly damp beneath her touch.
But after the second landing, the chill was noticeably less.
By the time they passed the next landing—one of several narrow levels marked by iron-banded doors—the air had become a rising heat. Not comforting warmth.No.It was stagnant and cloying, the kind that made her skin itch and her scalp dampen.
They passed a third level, then a fourth.
At last, Corey stopped before a blistered ochre door, its paint warped from heat. A single rune was carved above the handle—nothing Luna recognized. She pushed it open.
A wave of heat hit Luna square in the face, curling through her hair and down her neck like breath from an open oven. She wiped the sweat from her brow and stepped inside.
The space was sparse: a crooked table littered with old cups and rusted tools, a lopsided cabinet slumped against the far wall. As Luna took in the red light glowing from narrow bars of metal fixed like sconces, she couldn’t help but feel as though hope had long since died here, and wasn’t welcome back.
And there, lounging on a stone bench, was Marion idly swinging a set of keys around one finger.
“You made it!” she squealed, a smile spreading across her face. “We’ve been suffering without you.” She placed her hand on her forehead, feigning exhaustion. “Counting down the days until you arrived to save us from our misery.”
Marion had none of the telltale unicorn features—no horn, no equine ears. Instead, her skin looked as soft as moonlight, smooth and unblemished, with intricate dark purple lines tracing up from her fingertips to her forearms like hidden pathways of magic. A quartz crystal necklace rested at her collarbone, catching glimmers of light as she moved, and just behind her ear was a tattoo of half circles woven together. It reminded Luna of something Damien had said ages ago, that Marion was something else entirely. What that something else was, Luna had no idea, and she wasn’t about to ask.
“Is the misery named Nina, or is it simply the lack of Gregory?” Damien asked.
Marion laughed a little too loudly, giving him a firm pat on his shoulder. “Oh, Gregory. I hardly thought about him at all.” She winked, but then her smile slipped into something more serious. “It was definitely Nina.”
“Well, she won’t be our problem for much longer,” Corey added.
“Thank the skies above. For someone who has barely said two words since leaving the human side, she gave me the worst head pains.”
