My feet were glued to their spot as she walked off down the path, glaring back at me.
I needed to get back to Val and Amari.
I held up the feather I still had in my hand. It was the only explanation for how I’d arrived in this weird location that was brighter than a thousand moons.
I brought it closer to my face and gasped.
Blood.
It had to be angel blood. My brother had returned to Inferna with angels to rescue Lucifer and his daughter.
Was this Lucifer’s feather? How had it even worked?
They said that Lilith was draining Lucifer of his blood to open the magical barrier between Earth and Inferna.
Holy shit. I was on Earth.
My entire body shook, and I leaned against the odd metal box to the side of me. It reeked, but I needed to steady myself.
Thiswas Earth?
It was so loud and bright, and it smelled horrible. I wanted to go back to Inferna.
I touched my finger to the dried blood on the feather, hoping it would work the way I thought it did.
I stumbled as my body was pulled again. My ears popped, and I practically fell on my ass, the metal box no longer lending me support.
“Samara!” Val’s voice brought me back to reality.
I was outside my cell now, approximately the same distance as I’d walked off the road on Earth. If dried blood held this much power, I didn’t even want to know what blood fresh from the vein could do.
I rushed to the stone steps leading out of the dungeon and snagged the keys hanging on a hook by the door, careful not to let any of them clink together. I went to Amari’s cell first and unlocked the door and his cuffs before doing the same for Val.
“I need a shirt.” I quickly went to the cell I had been in and unlocked it. “Quickly. We don’t have a lot of time.”
I used my foot to gather the feathers.
“What are you doing?” Amari stopped outside the door of the cell. “We need to get out of here before they come back.”
“Give me your shirt.” I held out my hand.
Amari didn’t move quickly enough, so I grabbed the hem of his shirt and started lifting it. He tried to bat my hands away. “What do you need my shirt for?”
“No questions now. Give me your damn shirt.”
He relented, and I lifted it off his head. I ripped it at the bottom so I could tie a few knots and went back into the cell. I carefully scooped the feathers up off the floor.
“Are we going to talk about what happened?” Val sounded confused. “You just vanished and then were in the middle of the room. Can you teleport now and bypass the magical constraints down here?”
I finished tying off the shirt, making a bag I could sling over my arm. “Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
I rolled my eyes at Amari and gingerly held a feather with more blood than the other one I’d had. “Well, you can stay here, or you can make your way through the tunnel. I don’t want to take the chance that they might know about it and have guards at the other end or track our scents. I don’t know how many people know about it.”
“What tunnel?” Val narrowed his eyes at the feather. “Is that a fucking angel feather?”
