Chapter 35

CHAPTER35

Ashen and I rush up the stairs to grab our swords with little more than a handful of practical words between us, but the silence is replaced with heavy, worried glances. It only takes a few minutes to grab what we need and reconvene in the foyer with the others, but I wish we could just stop, if only for a moment. I just want to talk. It might be the last chance.

Everyone is ready when we arrive. Davina is the only one that came unarmed, but she pulls a medieval pike with a gleaming, sharpened silver blade down from a display on the wall. She taps the long handle against her palm, testing the weight, and meets my eyes with a determined smile.

“This will do,” she says.

I return her smile with a single nod. “Let’s go.”

I lead the others toward the back of the house, down a corridor, into the library. We stop at a tapestry of a hunt that takes up a huge section of the stone wall, right down to the floor. The main figure astride a white horse is Vlad, leading a group of friends in the chase after a majestic stag. One woman is among them at the bottom right of the scene, looking meek and pious as she keeps company with a hunting dog.

“Hey guys, check it out. Photobomb,” I say, standing next to the woman and pointing from the image of myself in thread to my chest and back again.

“Ha! No way,” Ediye says with a laugh.

“I remember that hunt. I totally killed that stag. Vlad was so loaded he fell off his horse.” I take one last look before I pull the whole thing down from the wall to reveal an iron door hidden behind it, yanking at the fabric despite Eryx’s dramatic gasp and protest about it being some priceless historical work of art. “Whatever, Mr. Art Historian Angel. You didn’t even know the difference between Mistoffelees and Aristophanes two days ago, so, I love you dearly, but shut the fuck up.”

Ediye cackles and takes aim at the handle of the door with her outstretched hands, killing the spell that seals it with a blast of her more powerful magic. We step onto the landing of a tight spiral staircase that descends below the fortress. I flick on a light switch to my right and caged utility lights burn and hum.

“She’s down here,” I say as Ashen steps to my side. The flame roars to life across his blade.

“Keep your promise, vampire. If I tell you to run, run.”

There’s a moment where everything and everyone else stops existing. A moment where Ashen looks into my eyes with that liquid crimson flame and I feel my mark sing to his. I reach out to his chest and run my fingers across it, feeling the heat of it tingle in my skin. I live there, I think to myself, and a sense of peace washes over me. I’ll always live there, and he’ll live within me, and we’ll never die alone. After all these centuries of loneliness, I finally belong to someone, and he belongs to me.

And fuck if I’m going to run and not fight for it.

A slow smile spreads on my face. Ashen rolls his eyes.

“You’re not going to run, are you.”

I shake my head.

“Figures. Just… try not to stab me today, would you? It’s getting old.”

“It never gets old,” I say, and Ashen smiles before stealing a heated kiss from my lips. When he pulls back he looks at me for one last, long moment, then leads the way down the stairs.

We head deeper into the bowels of the building, the humidity rising around us. I smell the sweaty rock and the damp dirt of the floor as we reach the catacombs. The stairway opens to a small room and a long hallway, the one from my vision within Leander’s mind.

“She’s there. So is Florin. I know it,” I say as Ashen turns back to me with a dark look of concern. He shifts his gaze to Ediye and nods.

I watch as Ediye’s steps into the mouth of the corridor. She pulls a sachet from her pocket and pours some of the contents into her hand, then faces the door. “Akbuus gallaai,” she whispers into the powder, then blows it toward the hallway. A wave of her voice cascades off her hand, blasting the door off its hinges and into the next room. She turns back to me and smiles.

“Badass bitch,” I say, and she winks before striding down the hall with the rest of us following her lead.

The dust is still clouding the end of the hallway when we step onto the fallen door and into a cavernous room.

“Holy fucking shit,” Cole whispers as he stops next to me. “Did you see this in Leander’s mind?”

I swallow a thick knot of dread in my throat. “No. He wouldn’t let me in this far.”

“I can see why,” Cole replies, and takes a step forward. To our immediate left is a small, open medical suite. There’s a metal exam table with silver shackles lying open on its polished surface. Behind it are shelves stocked with vials of serum and syringes. To our right are security glass cells that house rows and rows of people. People who look as shocked by our presence as we are of theirs. Some of them pound on the glass. Some pace by their locked glass doors. The occasional one sits on their cot and draws their knees to their chest, regarding us with suspicion and fear.

One is familiar. She presses her hands to the glass with tears in her eyes.

Valentina.

We rush to her cell. There are tiny holes in her door for communication through the glass and she presses her face to them.

“Help me, please. Please. I need you to get him out, please,” she says as the tears flow across her skin. She points to a cell that’s behind hers where a man stands not next to the door, but next to the transparent wall that divides them. Florin.

“How? Where are the keys?” Cole asks as Ashen moves to Florin’s door. He tries the thick, bolted handle before he starts smashing it with the butt of his sword. It’s not giving way.

“I don’t know. There’s some kind of control panel that opens them. Please, we have to get out before the werewolves return.”

“Are you a hybrid?” I ask.

Valentina looks at me with desperation and guilt in her face. She seems so much warmer and more vulnerable than the version that Mila tried to imitate, and my heart breaks for her, stuck in this prison next to her mate.

“No. But Abdulov… he used me to make them. He forced me to turn them all into vampires. And then he made them into hybrids,” she says as she gestures down the row of people in cells that span the length of the room and three deep. There are at least thirty cells, potentially more if there are other chambers beneath the house. I turn my eyes back to Valentina’s. Her shoulders shake with helplessness and regret. “I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t. But he threatened Florin. He… he used the witch to torture him with magic. We tried but we couldn’t hold out.”

“It’s all right, Valentina. We’ll find a way to free you.” I glance over at Ashen who continues to smash at the door with no discernible progress. “Ediye, do you have anything?”

“I just might,” she says, and I see the spark of an idea alight in her eyes. “Eryx, how much heat can your feathers take?”

Eryx shrugs and looks over his shoulder, fanning out his wings. The sound of clinking wind chimes fills the silence behind him as his plumage shifts and settles. “I dunno. But we can find out.”

“Press the tip of your wing to the glass and let’s see if this works,” Ediye says. Eryx does as she asks, the edges of his feathers scraping along the glass.

“Hula zuba u itaatuuka. Qu turkunu liteli sa me.”

Eryx’s long primary feathers begin to glow, first a dark red, then a brighter orange like the dawn, then yellow and finally white. At first nothing happens, but then I see it. The glass begins to bubble and drip.

“Valentina,” I say over the Ediye’s chants. She meets my eyes. “You can spellcast, can’t you. That’s why they came for you.”

Valentina nods.

“Follow Ediye’s words. Use her spell from your side. We need to speed things up. I’ll work on Florin’s door.”

Valentina nods again. She closes her eyes and begins chanting. The glass drips in thick globs as the feathers melt further into the surface, piercing through to the other side.

I run to Ashen, who hits the lock with relentless blows. There are dents but it still doesn’t give. I grasp his arm and point to where the vampire and witch and angel work together on Valentina’s door.

“We need Aloros,” I say. “The rest are hybrids. If they know we’re here-“

“Then so does Semyon,” he finishes, a look of dismay fleeting across his face. He pushes me behind him and shields me with his wings of smoke. He rolls up his sleeve, chanting the summoning spell that burns his hidden tattoo to life.

Just like in my vision from the crash, a pinprick of light forms before us. I watch through the smoke as it grows into a brilliant orb. It pulses and expands until it’s as taller than Ashen, then bursts into glittering sparks. Aloros steps forward from the falling light.

“Demon. While it amuses me that you require my aid, it is becoming more frequent than I anticipated,” Aloros says with a hint of a smug smile. He casts his gaze around the room, a crease appearing between his brows. He looks at Eryx and Ediye and their efforts to free Valentina, then back to Ashen.

“Less talk, more help,” Ashen orders.

Aloros doesn’t delay and unfurls his wings, pointing the tips of his primary feathers to the glass. He looks at me and nods.

I close my eyes. I hold my hand toward where the feathers meet the glass. I take up Ediye’s spell.

The heat builds within me. I feel my mated mark like a beacon of light and I channel everything through it. A wind picks up at my feet. I open my eyes and watch as the angel’s feathers begin to glow, bubbling the security glass. It’s working, but not fast enough.

I keep chanting but I look to Ashen whose gaze is soldered to mine, darting my eyes down to his sword, then to where the glass is beginning to melt. He nods. The flame comes to life on his blade.

Ashen plunges his sword into the melting hole, careful to avoid damaging the angel’s feathers. It takes no more than a breath of time and the entire wall of glass shatters and falls to the floor. Florin is free.

“Cole! Add your sword!” Ashen yells above the chanting and a wind of magic that’s picked up in the chamber. Cole does the same, plunging his hellfire blade into the hole of dripping glass. Again it shatters, and the glass isn’t even done falling before Valentina is running to Florin. They crash into one another in a desperate embrace, both shaking with cries of relief.

“Thank you,” Valentina says as she meets all of our eyes over Florin’s shoulder.

Aloros steps forward, curling his wing around his body to inspect it for damage. The glow is receding, already turning to a deep orange. The structure of the feathers appears undamaged and he doesn’t seem bothered. If anything, he almost looks bored, but I see the way his eyes dart down the chamber. “What about the other prisoners?”

“All hybrids,” Ashen replies. “We need to keep them here for now, until we can figure out how to deal with them safely.”

Aloros nods, then turns toward Valentina and Florin as they part from their embrace. “I will take you both to safety.”

Valentina takes a step toward the angel. Her eyes flare with red light. “Take Florin. They invaded my home. They imprisoned and tortured us. I want vengeance.”

Aloros sighs and looks down at me as if to say this is whyI call you ‘lesser being’. I shrug.

“Fine. Come, human. I will take you to the apothecary of Bucharest. She can be trusted. We will remain there, if you survive.”

Valentina and Florin nod before they embrace one last time and share a passionate kiss. They separate with tears and words of longing and hope, and then Florin follows the angel who strides toward the broken door.

Valentina watches until they disappear from view, then turns her tear-streaked face to me. The red gleam still glows in her eyes. “You’re Leucosia, aren’t you?”

I nod. “Yes. I’d say it’s good to meet you, but the circumstances are a bit shit,” I say, gesturing around us.

“Abdulov wants you. He’ll be coming for you.”

“Yeah,” I say, withdrawing my katana from the saya at my back. “I’m hoping he does.”

“So now what?” Valentina asks as she looks at each of us. Cole passes her a blade just as an electric clink echoes through the room.

I hear the sound of twenty eight bolts slide open at once.

“Now we fucking run.”