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I shrug, looking at Dezi for an answer. “Do you know? Obviously, we’ve exhausted Fae causes if Rev doesn’t know.”
“We’re alive. That’s all that matters,” he says in resignation. “I am not certain what it means, and it may even heal at the end. We must carry on.”
Khol gets to his feet, shaky but upright. “Okay. What’s next?”
Revelin looks at the corridor ahead—a tunnel lined with nothing but smooth, empty stone—and snorts. “Probably more funhouse bullshit.”
The blackness ahead fractures as we move into it, and eventually, we spill into a room that isn’t a room so much as a lunar hallucination. The floor is a swirl of black and silver tiles laid in a dizzying spiral, each fragment a sliver of moon phase. At the center, the pattern comes together into a wide pool of full-moon white. The light from above catches every one and throws it back in a pale glow. The walls are lower here—less cathedral, more amphitheater—and the silence is even more total than before.
So dramatic, these Fae bastards.
“I hate this,” I whisper in irritation. “It’s like being stuck in a Faerie version of Jumanji or something.”
The mark on my palm tingles, and the tiles nearest my boot glow blue in response to my emotions. I put my foot down—carefully—and the moon-tile beneath it lights up, illuminating a perfect crescent that matches the mark on my palm.
Revelin whistles, a low, impressed note. “It’s to test your bloodline via magical absorption.” He kneels, eyes flicking over the floor pattern with interest. “It’s mapping your ancestry with every step you take.”
“Great,” I say, “so if I step wrong, what happens?”
He grins with no humor at all. “Probably nothing good.”
I don’t even ask him to expound, if I do, I won’t get this over with. The only sound is our breathing, so I look at the other runes, studying them curiously. One path of runes curves up, the other down, but the left one glows brighter, and I swear I can hear it humming in my skull.
Revelin leans over my shoulder, his voice soft. “Which way, Sassy?”
I close my eyes and let the magic steer me. The left path feels right, so I’m going with it. “Up.”
Khol’s scales shimmer when a blue light flashes at us. “What was that and why did it flash? I don’t trust anything in this place, I swear to fuck.”
“It’s a sigil of dominion. Not Midnight-specific and very, very old. It wants to rewrite anyone who cannot pass through it.” Revelin frowns and shakes his head. “I don’t get why there’s such a mish-mash of religions, supernatural powers, and Fae lore in this thing. Is it possible Midnight allowed vampires to live among them in ancient times? Maybe that’s why they have always favored the darkness.”
Tiernan sighs. “Charming. They try to kill their possible leaders and they were probably breaking the laws of Faerie—at least, back then. Now it’s less segregated, obviously, but…”
I arch a brow at him. “Someone has paid attention while guarding the prince, hmm?”
He grins, shrugging a little. “Hard not to when Rev is dozing off half the time and I have to wake him.”
I guess that makes sense, but I still feel like the dumbest person in the group and it might just get us killed.
Twenty-Two
FIADH
The spiral going up feels endless, the curve so tight I can hear my breath ricocheting off the walls, bouncing back at me as a stranger’s exhale. After everything the maze has thrown at us, this climb is a joke but by the third revolution my calves are screaming and my head’s swimming with the echo of every bad memory this place tried to inject into my skull.
Stupid Fae wanted us to get our cardio in, I guess.
My growly leopard takes point, as usual. His stride is measured, as if he’s counting the steps, cataloguing every shift in the wall’s curve. The feline in him doesn’t love the tight quarters, but he hides it better than I do. Khol’s right behind, never more than two steps back. The scales on his arms are looking a bit ragged since the ghost incident, and I wonder what that means.
I’m between them, cradling my hand like it’s broken, though all that’s really wrong is the blue crescent mark is burning like crazy. Every few seconds it gives a twitch as a reminder that I’m the reason we’re not dead and the reason we might be by the end of this.
Revelin and Dezi bring up the rear. I hear the prince’s boots scuffing the glass with every step, and every so often he hisses a curse in some Fae dialect. My vampire is silent, but I know he’s there because the air behind us is a fraction colder, like he’s sucking the warmth out of the world just to amuse himself.
The spiral tightens, the walls close in, and then, suddenly, there’s nowhere left to go. The staircase opens into a dome with a ceiling so high above I can’t see it at first. When my eyes adjust, I realize the dome is obsidian, polished to a predatory shine, and etched with constellations that move. The bastards literally drift across the dome, a slow-motion hurricane of stars, never repeating a pattern.
It’s hypnotic and nauseating, which is probably the point.
The floor is another beast entirely. Tiles, a hundred rows deep, each one a perfect square, each one etched with a unique symbol. Some are familiar—crescent moons, stars, ancient sigils I’ve seen before in witchcraft training. However, some are new to me and their angles are so sharp they make my eyes water. Each tile glows with a faint blue light, but the intensity varies, like the room is rating them on a scale of one to ‘fuck around and find out’.
