They were back to lying to one another.
37
Francine
The fortress was incredible. It should have been claustrophobic—windowless, underground,inthe ground, the solid rock on the other side of the magical shield a constant threat. And yet she couldn’t help but look around in wonder as they completed their tour of the underground castle-city.
Better to gape like a tourist than watch Julian, of course.
There had to be some logic to what made the mate bond flutter between them like that, a stammering reminder that the universe had chosen them to be one another’s fated mates for the rest of their lives.
So, a few days.
Her lion snarled a warning, and she relented. Fatalism was pointless. As was destabilizing what little certainty they already had.
She was certain Julian didn’t see a way out of this. He was still fixed on his initial plan. The suicide mission.
Her chest clenched.
She was Francine Delacourt. She had everything all shifters desired. Wealth, status, equally wealthy and powerful friends, in sufficient amounts that she and her fated partner could avoid any danger associated with their shifter nature.
It hadn’t helped her save Mathis. It had done the opposite. And now, if she couldn’t save her mate, what use was any of that? What use wasshe?
An ordinary lion shifter, trying to make sense of a world so soaked in magic she had no comparison for it. And that magic was going to take her mate from her.
They found the fraying edges of the enchantment, room by room, corridor by shadow-eaten corridor. There must be some way to use this to their advantage. Francine racked her brain, trying not to remember that strategizing had always been her downfall.
And it was hard not to be distracted by wonder at this place.
The fortress was a marvel of—she couldn’t even call it engineering. Magical engineering? And design. Parts of the fortress seemed almost to have grown naturally, like cave systems dug out by water or ground-dwelling animals, but other parts were clearly human-made. Dragon-made. Shifter-made! Corridors shaped and sized to fit human and dragon pedestrians, rooms with space for a dragon to stretch out and nooks sized for humans, too.
Bedrooms.
Gardens.
“How is this possible?” she burst out. “We’re below ground. There’s no sunlight. Any water would have to be—”
“Melted from Antarctic ice, like the water in the bathing pool?”
Francine shut her mouth with a click. “And the sunlight?”
He raised one eyebrow. She made a frustrated noise.
“Oh,magic.Of course.”
“You’ll find it’s the answer to most of your questions, I expect.” He knelt to gather armfuls of mushrooms and strange greens. Small fruits clustered in some vines, stretching up towards glowing stones that themselves seemed to be growing from the walls…
Magic.
Ridiculous. He spoke as though magic was as natural as the wind or the tides, but some ancient dragon shifter was behind everything they saw. The fortress had been crafted deliberately. Even those parts of it that looked organic. The world wasn’t builtforthings to live in. Animals, humans, or shifters, they all found where they fit best in the world and shaped it to fit them better.
They returned to the kitchens. Another miracle: ovens and open flames, so far below ground that either one of Julian’s ancestors had plucked a specialist engineer from the outside world at some point, or … magic.
Magic.
And Julian had no idea how it functioned. Could not control it. Her fingers twitched. She was no stranger to lost knowledge—well, she knew about it in theory. She remembered one of her professors telling an anecdote about Roman cement. Coastal structures built from this cement still existed thousands of years later, while modern cement would crumble in a fraction of that time. Only in the last few decades did modern humans rediscover the secret behind how it lasted that long. The seawater itself, as it battered the ancient piers and harborside buildings, literally altered the chemistry of the concrete, strengthening it instead of wearing it away.
The concrete had been there the whole time, its mysteries on full display. The same way the fortress was right here all around them, interacting with Julian’s magic, and yet…
