What had my mother been up to in Ascendria before she’d collected me from the Novak estate?
Mela’s voice broke through the silence of the burrow. “It’s been abandoned.” She shifted her tall, curvy body to face me fully, lifting a hand, gesturing about. “Yezekael’s not been here for quite some time.”
Maybe it had been driven out. Who knew?
“The trail we picked up yesterday is fresh,” I replied.
She nodded slowly. “He’s down here somewhere, but at least now we know for sure.”
Yellowed light limned the edge of the nest as she walked toward me. “There’s no point staying here any longer. Let’s get out of here for a few hours and have a drink.” She nudged me with her elbow, barely playful, but better than what she had been half an hour ago. “I think we’ve both earned it.”
Yes, we had.
A while later, after traveling through the rabbit warren of tunnels, clambering up maintenance shafts on rickety ladders, and climbing up the endless steps of stairwells with dull lighting guiding the way to the subway, finally, we reached the paint-peeled door that led out of the catacombs. Our phones went off in a flurry of notifications. We’d been out of contact for days now. I dug mine out of my daypack I’d reclaimed along our journey, and fished out a bottle of water too. Both of us were filthy, and I figured we could grab a room at a hotel, clean up, and maybe Mela could get some sleep on an actual bed,not the shitty bedroll in the fridge-like conditions down in the catacombs.
Sweat glanced over my forearm as I used it to wipe my forehead, and cool, refreshing water quenched my thirst as I guzzled half the bottle down, while flicking through my messages and phone log.
There were a series of business calls and texts to attend to, then Ferne… She’d sent several messages, a fuckload of them, and the nature of them grew more urgent for me to contact her.
Unease slid through me.
As I pressed the button to call her, she called me.
“Hey,” I greeted her, dragging a hand through my dusty hair.
It wasn’t Ferne on the phone, it was Penn. Except this time, her normally softly spoken voice was leaden with worry. I tensed instantly.
The words rushed out over the crackling line.“You need to come home. Now. Right this minute.”
A cold sensation twisted through my gut. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Nelle. She’s not right. There’s something wrong with her.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s ill…maybe…We don’t know. It’s unnatural, whatever’s ailing her. That damned collar you’ve put around her neck! And I—”She cut herself off, breath hitching.
Penn wasn’t one for being pushy or rude, not because she was a member of our staff, but her instinctive nature was to be quiet, or maybe that wasn’t right either, she’d been broken in her childhood to be that way—unassuming, fade into the background and to tiptoe around others.
It was telling how anxious she was because she’d forgotten herself and verbally snapped at me.
“You don’t stop for anyone or anything, Graysen. Get home now!”
She ended the call, not me.
I stared at my phone blankly. Fear washed through me like a dirty wave, pushing me under, choking the air from my lungs. “I’ve got…”
“What? What’s going on?” Mela asked, already concerned.
“I’ve got to get home now. Fast.”
Mela didn’t ask; she acted, and I loved her for that. She scooped up my daypack, grabbed the keys to my car, and tossed them my way. “Go. I got this.”
I surged ahead, then something made me slam to a halt and spin around. Mela looked at me in confusion.
“Elyse isn’t dead, Mela. They didn’t kill her. They took her.”
Her soft, round cheeks tightened, along with every single muscle in her body. She glanced upward, biting her bottom lip, trying not to cry. “She may as well be.”
