I don’t risk any hesitation.
I can’t give him the chance to evade me.
Wrapping my arms around him, I throw myself forward, taking him into Veritas with me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Emil’s roar sounds in my ears, angry and unintelligible, a shout of pure fury.
The magic takes hold even faster than Halle warned me it would, a sensation like iron bars wrapping around my chest and dragging me farther inside the room.
Whatever power has now taken hold of us, it doesn’t stop Emil from pushing away from me, both of us tumbling to the floor and landing several feet apart.
Just as Halle described, the opening is now obscured. A thick curtain of darkness has descended over it, very similar to the black rock around us, while lamps have appeared on each wall, sending soft lighting around the room.
I don’t hesitate to speak in case the magic that controls the room requires me to stake my claim. “I am the truth seeker.”
Emil shakes his head at me, snarling like a caged animal as he lurches to his feet and strides to the entrance.
He rams his palms against it, roaring at it when it doesn’t give way. “You don’t want the truth from me.”
I could ask him why not, but I’m certain the answer will be complex.
I need to test the room first.
Rising myself up into a kneeling position and trying to calm my rapid heartbeats, I listen carefully.
I assess the silence in the room first—a silence that’s only broken by Emil’s seething breaths and a final slap of his palms against the barrier before he begins to pace from one side of the room to the other.
The room is so small that it only takes him ten paces before he has to turn around again.
Watching him carefully from my kneeling position on the floor, I take a breath and ask him a question to which I already know the answer. “What were the first words you spoke to me?”
I remember those moments so clearly.
I’d found myself—inexplicably—in his Realm, a place of complete darkness.
Later, he explained that the angels had committed a crime that had thinned the boundaries between his Realm and the veil prison, which was how I’d stepped directly from the prison into his Realm.
At the time, he’d glided toward me across a black, marble floor, his tall, wraith-like figure swathed in a black cloak that had made an unsettling swishing sound as he’d moved. The air had blackened even further when he’d approached, as if he had brought the darkness with him.
I hadn’t been afraid of him in those moments.
In fact, a thrill had passed down my spine, and it had only grown stronger when I’d seen his crown, its spokes rising up over his forehead and past the top of his head.
The immense power in the crown had called to me like water to my parched lips. I’d experienced an undeniable compulsion to connect with the crown and, despite the danger of the keeper’s presence, I’d reached for it.
Now, Emil glares around the room, taking a few moments longer to answer than I thought the magic would allow. “Yougreeted me by my title: the keeper of dark magic. I was surprised that you knew who I was. So I simply said:You know who I am.”
As he speaks, an echo builds within the room.
A male voice that sounds exactly like Emil’s repeats every word he speaks, ending with: “You know who I am.”
The echo repeats several times before it fades, an eerie declaration. “You know who I am. You know who I am…”
Fuck me.Those might have been the words he spoke, but I’m so far from knowing who he is that my heart hurts.
Still, the echo repeated his words, which means he spoke the truth just now. Which, of course, I already knew.
