Another came at me from the side, and I caught him by the throat, slamming him into a broken wall hard enough to crack his vertebrae. I pulled him closer, his eyes rolling back in his head, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth.
“You will never take me alive,” I snarled. “And tell him he should have sent more guards.”
“Tell… him… yourself,” he rasped, then went limp.
Power surged all around me, the sigils projecting lines of arcing light up over me, around me. The edges of my vision dimmed for a heartbeat, then the magic in the air pulsed again, stronger this time, pushing against my skin like two sets of toothy jaws closing.
They weren’t here to fight.
They were here to pin me down long enough for the spell to trap me.
“Prisoner fourteen forty-five.” A deep, amused voice barked. “Stand down.”
I dropped the corpse and whirled to face my worst nightmare. The Overseer stood at the lip of the crater, cloak trailing, brutal hands spread. No mask, his neck bare. All the better to showcase the brand marking his throat in dark, raised lines—a heavy black chain, the mark of The Fossa.
My lips peeled back from my fangs in a feral snarl.
“You’ll never take me back there,” I hissed.
He just snapped his fingers, and the circle around us flared blinding white, the sigils firing another burst of magic up into the air.
For half a second, I felt nothing.
Then pain ripped through me, detonating behind myeyes, through my bones, melting flesh off my body like butter.Fuck, I forgot how bad this hurt.
It wasn’t the physical kind I could push through. This was different—slicing down to my bones, threading through every exposed nerve. My muscles locked, then spasmed violently. My knees hit stone, fingers clawing at the ground as if I could somehow dig my way out.
The guards moved in, keeping just outside arm’s reach, the symbols on their armor pulsing in time with the circle. They didn’t need to touch me; the spell did all the work. A spell that had kept me contained for almost fifty years. A spell I’d never figured out how to break.
Blood dripped from my nose. My hearing disappeared into a roar.
I thought of Ember suffering here as she died. Of the house that had been ours for less than a week and was now nothing but rubble.
“Fuck you,” I forced past clenched teeth. “I’m going to kill you all.”
The tips of the Overseer’s boots appeared in my line of sight, slightly dusted with ash, before he leaned down. “You thought you could bribe us, like money has any meaning in our world. Pain is my only currency, Prisoner fourteen forty-five. I hope you’ve enjoyed your little vacation, because it’s time to come home.”
My vision tunneled. The world narrowed to the circle of light and the taste of my own blood. Somewhere, very far away, rough hands grabbed my arms, my shoulders, my broken ribs screaming.
Darkness rose up, thick and inevitable.
I let it take me.
61
EMBERLINE
Nico hid me in a house somewhere near the old market, tucked behind a crumbling brick wall and a locked iron gate that only opened when he whispered to it in a language I didn’t know. I arrived, dragging the stench of fire behind me and the terror of nearly dying, and for the past two days, I’d barely been able to move.
Today, I didn’t move at all.
I lay curled on my side on a narrow bed, staring at the faded wallpaper until the shapes bled into each other. I was so depleted from my burns, the gash on my palm still throbbed, my blisters still seeped, and my scorched throat and lungs were still raw. Yesterday, I managed to change out of clothes that reeked of smoke and put on a clean shirt.
Not Dante’s shirt.
Dante’s shirts didn’t exist anymore.
The thought sliced through the shock with bright clarity, so I shoved that reality away, let the haze flood back in so I didn’t have to think about anything at all.
