“Me first,” I sign, but Hel cocks her head.
“Me,” she signs back, holding up her new, deadly friend.
Rhonin frowns hard at us both, his scowling face shadowed in the dim room. But I can tell he realizes he might have a difficult time maneuvering into the cellar, and that isn’t a scenario he likes. Neither do I. That means we must get the Collector up those stairs if we’re all going to travel out of here together using my abyss.
There isn’t anything we can do but try. We need to hurry.
Suddenly, Hel grabs Rhonin’s face and kisses him on the mouth. It’s a deeply passionate kiss, one that ends mere seconds after it began, and yet it says so much as she pulls away and presses her forehead to his. “You earned that, my magickless human.”
Rhonin smiles, though there’s a sadness to it, and kisses her back, his hand fisted in her long, black hair. Then he moves around to the hatch and grips the iron ring.
He stares at us, one finger raised. If those hinges creak, whoever is below will be alerted. Hel and I will have a fight on our hands before we make it down the steps. There’s also the chance that no one is with the Collector. They could all be outside.
Time to find out.
Rhonin carefully lifts the door, and those godsdamn hinges scream through the quiet house anyway.
Hel bounds down the wooden steps like a force, and I follow, a dagger in one hand and a ball of fire in the other. If they can’t immobilize Nephele’s magick without seeing her, they won’t be able to reach me through her construct. I can leave this place in a pile of ash if I so desire.
Before I even see the first Dread Viper, I hear the clang of Helena’s sword meeting metal, and her resounding grunt. As I clear the low ceiling, she ducks beneath the swinging arc of his blade’s edge and rams her foot straight into his groin, sending him stumbling back, howling in pain.
I hurry down the stairs, met with a dank, dark room lit by two hanging oil lamps, filled with four smiling Dread Vipers, each one hungry for a fight, brandishing swords clenched in bloody fists.
Behind them, the Collector is suspended from a wall, his shirt removed, his sweat-soaked hair in his eyes, his handsome face and scarred body covered in blood.
He looks up and arches against his restraints. “Raina! No!”
But any mercy I’d felt before has already vanished.
Though one of the Vipers lifts a hand with a haughty look on his face, likely to disarm my fire magick, he fails, and I launch vindictive flames at each man, one at a time, until they’re consumed and screaming. The sounds of their misery and the smell of burning flesh is a memory I didn’t want to relive, but this rage inside me—this absolute hatred—is beyond anything I know how to control.
Hel storms forward and swings her sword, slitting the first man’s throat to end his suffering. Then the next and the next and the next, until they’re lying in flames around us, the fire catching on the wooden steps leading up the hatch and crawling up the wooden supports along the walls.
Hel spins toward the stairs. “Rhonin!” Then she grabs me, her eyes wide and wild. “We need to get Alexus off that wall! You don’t know if you can sift him with him chained like this!”
I can’t explain the fighting calm I feel. The assuredness that we will leave this place together, all four of us. It’s a certainty that has settled in my bones as we hurry to Alexus’s side.
I touch his face, push his hair back, and look into his eyes.
“I told you,” he says, his green gaze holding mine. “Don’t you ever put yourself in harm’s way for me.”
He can scold me later because I had no choice. Much as a part of me still wants to deny it, my heart would not have allowed any other end.
With fire quickly eating the room, Hel and I search for keys to the manacles holding Alexus to the rock wall. Too late, I realize that they’re probably still on the burning bodies.
I face the smoke and fire, coughing, my mind working through what to do as a deep groan of wood sounds from the hatch.
A curved blade, like that of an axe, juts through the ceiling, again and again and again, sending splinters and shards of wood flying.
Rhonin.
Like some kind of feral animal, he rips the floorboards away from the hatch, widening the hole. In seconds, he drops like a rock into the middle of the licking flames, shoving through their heat with his arm shielding his face.
I don’t have to say anything. When he sees Alexus, I swear he’s swallowed by the same rage that devoured me.
He reaches for one of the iron stakes driven deep into the rock wall, folds his massive hand around it, and pulls. But even Rhonin can’t dislodge them.
Alexus looks up at us, and the swell of his power sweeps through the room, newly freed. It’s weaker than before, but it feels like salvation, nonetheless.
