The dhampir is right: This isn’t about us. This isn’t about our eternal feud. It’s about our shared love for Sephania Lock. Andwhether I like it or not, Lukain Mortis is entwined in this fucked-up tryst. My little temptress refuses to let him go, and Lukain showing his face here, putting himself in such danger, is proof he’s far from letting her go, too.
When I take the girl and turn to leave without another word, Lukain’s words stop me in my tracks. “Have you told her about the sword yet? How you got it?”
I clench my jaw and jerk my chin over my shoulder. “Why would I, when you hardly understand it yourself, half-blood? You talk about things you don’t understand.”
He fixes me with a dark glare, his serious face blank besides the glimmer in his eyes. The hatred. “I will come for you, Skartovius. I will kill you.”
“You may try.”
“I know what you are,” he says. “Does Sephania?”
My nostrils flare with sudden anger. “No one knows what I am, Lukain Mortis. You least of all. Though if there’s anyone who might . . . I daresay Sephania Lock gets closest to the mark.”
Lukain breathes heavily, his chest pumping. He steps back into the shadows. “Then she knows you’re nothing more than a monster?”
I gaze into the shadows where Lukain stood, seeing his body meld into the darkness, waiting only to catch my answer.
“Yes. She knows.”
Chapter 35
Sephania
“I don’t like that bloodsucker’s presence staining these hallowed halls,” Antones tells me as we march back toward Old Endolf’s abode.
“Please, Ant, you make it sound like a gilded palace, when it’s just a dank dungeon with little slavefighters running around, and a sewage system we literally call theshit pit.”
I glance over to see him smirking.
“Yes, but it’sourdank dungeon. It’sourshit pit. There are no more slavefighters—I took your advice on that. Maybe I could show you, if your eminence has the time, of course.” He rolls into a mock bow and I smile. Then Ant’s voice drops to a warning rasp. “If the people here knew of Skartovious’ part in Cul’s death . . .”
“That’s why I sent him out to retrieve the silver, as Old Endolf requested, old friend.” I don’t want to talk about Culiar’s death. I can tell he doesn’t either, so we drop it.
We fall silent as we walk. I realize I have to slow my stride to keep pace with him, which is new. It reminds me of our surface outings in years past, carrying on casual conversation above this mad place filled with constant struggle and conflict. Except then, as a youngling, I had to quicken my pace to keep up with his long strides.
Everything I learned, I learned here. Every heartbreak and struggle on the Floorboards happened down here on a smallerscale. There was death, love, happiness, and sorrow shared in these walls.
I suppose, in that sense, this underground labyrinth of winding tunnels really is hallowed. Sacred. It certainly holds a sacred place inmyheart. Though Antones claims to have forgone the fighting ways of the Grimsons, I’ll never forget my time here and all I fought for and learned. The Grimsons will always be part of my story.
When we reach Old Endolf’s sanctuary, which is little more than a stuffy cave cut into the back of one of the tunnels, we stop at the makeshift wooden door, which is now closed.
I raise a brow at Antones, and he shrugs.
In the five years I spent growing up here, I ran into Old Endolf maybe a handful of times. To call him an “acquaintance” to my mother was stretching the truth to its utmost, but sometimes a white lie is needed to get things rolling.
The most I ever earned from Endolf, the stoop-backed curmudgeonly alchemist always locked in his cave, was a stern scowl or frown from behind his clean-shaven, sagging face.
Now, when I open the door to the cave, I’m greeted with something different entirely. Jinneth and Endolf stand at opposite sides of his work table, which is strewn with beakers, vials, tinctures, potions, and odd tunnel creatures stored in glass cases.
But Old Endolf is like a man reborn, staring at my mother with such awe that it seems she’s a goddess returned to his orbit. For her part, Jinneth tries to hide the flush of her face, a demure smile crossing her lips.
“Oh,” I eke out, standing in the doorway. “Oh my.”
No words need to be spoken for me to know that, in Old Endolf’s case—a man who seems at least twenty years my mother’s senior—Jinneth iscertainlythe one that got away.He can’t stop looking at her with such admiration, it’s almost painful to witness.
I feel like Antones and I shouldn’t be here. That we’re disrupting something special and reverential. These two clearly need a moment.
“Erm,” I stammer, scratching the back of my neck and feeling a flush come tomycheeks. I turn to Antones. “What were you saying about showing me around the new haunts?”
