“They’re not killing wounds.” I move past her, toward the trail we were following. “We need to keep moving. The fight will draw more of them. The wraiths communicate somehow—screams we can’t hear, messages in frequencies the living weren’t meant to understand.”
She falls into step beside me as if the fight changed something between us.
Maybe it did.
∗ ∗ ∗
We find more signs of Gror’s passage as we move deeper.
Another scrap of fabric. A boot print in centuries-old dust. A smear of blood on a jutting bone—fresh enough that I can smell the iron, the fear, the particular tang of a man running for his life.
The trail is too clean. Too deliberate. Breadcrumbs leading us exactly where someone wants us to go.
I don’t share these concerns with Ivalys. Not yet. She’s had enough reality for one night—the fight with the wraiths, the revelation about her brother’s capture, the growing certainty that we’re walking into a trap we can’t avoid.
Instead, I focus on the path. On the signs the tunnels leave for those who know how to read them. On the route I’ve pieced together from decades of enforcing in these depths—the route toward the secret entrance beneath Ledger Hall.
“How much farther?”
Ivalys presses her marked palm against the tunnel wall, and the sigil flares briefly—a pulse of light that illuminates the bioluminescent fungi clinging to the stone. The blue-green glow makes the blood on her hands look black, makes her face look like something carved from stone and shadow.
“Left or right?” She studies the junction ahead, reading it with instincts she doesn’t know she has.
“Right. Left leads to the Bone Pit. Right leads to much deeper tunnels. That’s where the secret Hall entrance should be.”
“Deeper?” I don’t like the sound of that. “And my brother’s trail leads there?”
I breathe deeply. Follow the scent through the maze of smells that make up the labyrinth.
“No.”
She looks up sharply.
“The trail ends here.” I indicate the junction ahead. “Everything we’ve been following—the fabric, the blood, the boot prints—it all leads to this spot. And then it stops.”
“Stops?”
“Vanishes. As if whoever laid it wanted us to reach this exact point and no farther.”
The sigil blazes, painting her face in white-gold light that makes her look like something holy. Something terrible. “Don’t tell me it’s a trap. Don’t tell me we’re doing what he wants. I know.” Her voice cracks. Just a fraction. Just enough to show the fear beneath the fury. “I know. But my brother is still in his hands. And the only way to free him is to destroy the monster holding him.”
I stare at her. At the fire burning in eyes that refuse to dim, no matter how dark the tunnels get. At the stubborn set of her jaw, the determined angle of her shoulders, the way she faces me like I’m just another obstacle between her and her goal.
She’s magnificent.
“Then we go to the Hall.” I turn toward the right passage—the path to whatever lies beneath the Ledger Hall. “But we go my way. Careful. Quiet. No more fights we can avoid.”
“And the fights we can’t avoid?”
I glance back at her. At the woman who killed a debtor-wraith with nothing but a broken bone and more courage than sense.
“Those, we win.”
Something that might be a smile flickers across her face. Brief. Gone before I can be sure I saw it.
We move into the darker tunnels. The older tunnels. The places where death has lived so long, it’s forgotten what life looked like.
When she stumbles slightly on the uneven ground and my hand shoots out to steady her—palm finding her elbow, fingers closing around warm flesh—I let the contact linger a moment longer than necessary.
