She needed to repel the murk, but right then she swallowed down the bile, and looked up to the two men who crouched, waiting. They gasped, and she knew her eyes had bled to black, encompassing even the whites. It was a side effect of her aura breaking down the dark charm, and from the pain she felt in her bones the spell had been more than a simple incapacitation, it had been deadly.
Cassandra had tried to kill her, and thank the goddess that the choker around her throat hadn’t interfered with her resistance. She waited a minute, frozen as she waited to see whether Dirk had felt Cassandra’s magic. Her fingers brushed the cool metal, but she wasn’t able to remove it. A horrible taste coated her tongue, and when she lifted her hand to her mouth she found blood, so dark it was almost black.
“Key?” she managed to ask, her voice throaty.
The two druids remained silent, staring at her with open horror. The one on the left blinked, as if he finally understood what she had asked. “We don’t know,” he replied, his voice equally as rough, unused. He seemed older than the man who had just passed the first stage, his face lined with experience.
Kyra managed to crawl forward, her fingers hesitant when she touched the large solid lock. It was basic, with no enchantments other than simple reinforcement that she could see. In the years she had been free, she had spent hundreds of hours learning to pick locks. She could do it both manually and magically, but she didn’t trust there wasn’t a charm hidden that would set off a silent alarm if she forced it open with a spell, or that Dirk would feel it. She knew logically she should have spent those precious hours learning how to defend herself, but then the memories of herself trapped in a cage, unable to escape had won.
“Stay quiet,” she warned, keeping her own voice low.
Reaching for the discarded wand she broke it in half, exhaustion making her muscles quiver. She placed both sharp ends into the hole, closing her eyes as she felt for the pins. Her hands shook, so much so she had to let out a breath, trying to calm herself as she moved slowly. The final click made her heart skip a beat, the lock snapping open. When she looked back up both men were crouched only an inch or so from her, frozen. The door opened against Cassandra, the gap large enough to squeeze through but they didn’t move to escape.
Kyra dropped the wand pieces, scooting back to give them space. They remained where they were. She wanted to give them some type of encouragement, but the words died on her tongue. She couldn’t tell them it was safe, because it wasn’t.
Her knees protested when she climbed to her feet, stepping towards the doorway to peer outside. When she turned back they were exactly where she had left them.
“If you stay here you’ll die,” she said, bending to pick up Cassandra’s leg. She pulled, moving her across the cold floor until she was at the threshold of the other cell.
“If we leave, we may die,” the one on the right said.
Kyra nodded. With a nudge she was able to shuffle Cassandra fully inside the second cell, closing the door and locking it tight. “I wouldn’t blame you for staying.” And she didn’t, not when she understood how hard it was to overcome fear, the emotion so strong it had paralyzed her muscles to stone on more than one occasion. “Only you can decide which is best for you, but I can’t stay here.”
“Will you come back?” the left man asked, attention flicking to the blood smear left by Cassandra.
“I will.” And she meant it. “I’m going to try and find a safe way out, and I promise I will do everything I can to come back to you.”
Her words seemed to satisfy them, and without another glance she moved towards the stairs.
The door at the top was quiet when she gently pushed it open, the hall empty. She could hear nothing, the surrounding doors blocked with furniture or locked tight. The air was heavy, thick with dust as she tried to open the first door, but found the handle broken.
Keeping her panic contained she tried the next door, and then the next, overstepping the blockades and carefully moving furniture. The house was larger than she had first thought, the main hall breaking into smaller corridors with even more possible escapes routes. She held her breath when a bookshelf screeched across the wood, her pulse a beat in her skull as she strained to hear for any movement. No footsteps. No breathing.
She pushed it a little more, the gap small, but enough for her to squeeze through. The door behind it was unlocked and lead into a kitchen, the stench immediately forcing her to breathe though her mouth. She took a second, the light from the hall scarcely penetrating into the small room.
She barely glanced at the table, or at the four decaying corpses that lay face down on the surface. Their mottled skin had been nibbled, eaten by vermin while the food had been left to rot. Flies hovered, a faint buzz that had her searching for a hole, for anything that lead to the outside.
There was no other door, the kitchen cabinets hanging off their hinges as Kyra carefully pulled herself onto the counter. The sink was full of brown water, the tap dripping every few seconds in an inconsistent patter.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The window had been covered with wood, but there was no metal lattice like the others. She tried to claw at the panels, her fingers unable to get beneath a single plank. A floorboard creaked, and before she could turn she was yanked from the counter, and thrown against the opposite wall. The tiles at her back cracked, the air stolen from her lungs as a man appeared an inch from her nose. His eyes were lavender, his ears pointed as he snarled.
Without thought she kicked out, not caring where she hit as she shoved past him towards the table. She ignored the decaying bodies, tried not to think about how long they had been there, forgotten as her hand searched through the rotten food and decaying flesh until she felt something cool against her fingertips. This time when she was wrenched back she didn’t fight it, and the knife slipped into the man’s chest with zero resistance. He looked at her with disbelief, and she was sure her face echoed the same expression.
“You sure you need to be rescued, Princess?”
Kyra gripped the knife harder, looking over the Fae’s shoulder to be met with familiar eyes of frost.
Chapter30
Xander
He had no idea what to expect, but Kyra with her hands wrapped around the handle of a blade wasn’t it, and especially not in her fucking bra. Her skin was pulled tight on her knuckles, the knife piercing clean through the man who stood very still, not acknowledging his presence.
“You sure you need to be rescued, Princess?” His gaze roamed across her, making note of every cut and bruise. Her face was pale even in the darkness, blood a stark spatter across her skin while her hair was loose around her shoulders, the ends curled as if it had been recently wet.
She met his eyes then, her amber irises and whites replaced with a black so dark it absorbed the limited light. She tightened her grip, the Fae hissing out a pained grunt. A type of faerie was his guess, but he could never be sure with the Fae.
