4. Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Z ylah waited until the ribbon of sunlight passed by her bed, until it thinned to a narrow point. She had nothing to take save for the clothes on her back. Mercifully, Raif had left her boots, but she had no weapons, no food, no tools with which to make anything.

She’d improvised before.

A sound from deep within the maze had her pausing as she fastened her laces, her breaths shallow as she tried her best to remain quiet. Whatever it was, it wasn’t Raif. She smoothed the hem of her sweater, the deep red covered in dark patches where her blood had dried from Aurelia’s beating. One sleeve gaped open where the Fae had dragged the splintered shard across her arm; there were holes big enough to fit her fingers through across her ribs. Her trousers were still intact, at least.

The last two times Zylah had tried to evanesce, the pain had been so blinding she’d had to lie down, so leaving on foot was her only option. The idea of walking out of the maze didn’t fill her with much hope, but she was going to give it her best shot. She flexed her magic again, hoping to summon a dagger to her fingertips, but nothing came. No weapons, then. Fine. With a deep breath, Zylah left the confines of her room and made her way out into the narrow passage leading into the dark.

The temperature dropped almost immediately; the air seemed to shimmer around her. Wards. Lots of them. “Fuck,” Zylah murmured. If they were tied to Raif in any way, he’d have been alerted immediately.

A cave was her first impression of the space, only the walls were so densely woven with roots and those strange vines that stretched far above her head. Light filtered through cracks somewhere, but it was still far too dark for her to see perfectly, to run rather than walk. Had it not been for her keen Fae eyesight, she wouldn’t have been able to see a thing. Still, Zylah left one hand tracing the wall at all times, just in case.

An earthy scent clung to the air, pulling her back into another memory, when she’d been searching for Malok’s key with Holt. To how the roots had pressed into her when Holt had backed her up against the wall. “Tell me what you want, Zylah. Say it.” To how he’d kissed her for the very first time.

Zylah’s hands were shaking. And it took her a moment to realise she’d stopped walking, her chest so painfully tight, the darkness like a weight bearing down on her. He was gone. In the space she should feel him, he was gone. And there was nothing but silence in his wake.

Something made a noise in the darkness, like the clicking of pebbles dropped against each other, and it was all the encouragement Zylah needed to press on, to remind her she didn’t have time to waste. The narrow passage soon led to a junction, and she had to decide whether to continue following the wall or take a right. There was nothing to differentiate the two routes, no change in the air, no scents, no sounds. Nothing but more gnarly roots and a few cobwebs. Perfect.

She opted for following the wall to her left, passing more junctions, sometimes two at once. All looked identical. Occasionally a shaft of light fell across the dirt at her feet, narrowed almost to a point, but she’d lost all sense of time without a fixed point with which to follow it. What use would Ranon have for a maze? Zylah wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer as the sketches she’d once seen of his and Sira’s reign filled her thoughts, the war they’d started, the monsters they’d created.

Another corner; a dead end. There was no choice but to turn back the way she’d come, taking the first left and hoping for the best. Even if she couldn’t get out before Raif returned, lost was still alive.

Zylah pressed on for what felt like hours, passageway after passageway, turn after turn, dead end after dead end, not even a glimpse of a wraith in the darkness until, at last, she felt a change in the air pressure. Her steps slowed; her Fae ears picked up the sound of quiet breaths, unlaboured, but not asleep. Whatever it came from, she only hoped it was Fae. But deep within the maze, untold power thrumming through every rock and root, the chances were slim to none.

With her body pressed flat against the wall, Zylah chanced a look around the corner. A small chamber, more cave than anything she’d seen so far, with another shaft of light slicing through from far above, the narrow beam hitting the dirt.

Zylah held her breath. On a raised stone plinth, eyes closed, legs crossed, hands resting gently on his knees, sat a man. A man, she presumed, because he had rounded, human ears, though Zylah knew from experience that could mean anything. This was Ranon’s maze, so he could be anyone. Anything.

No weapons sat about his person, though well-worn fighting leathers clung to him like a second skin. He wasn’t sleeping, Zylah was certain, though his eyes remained closed. Dark brown curls fell across light brown skin, his short beard well-kept despite the obvious signs of age to his clothing.

Zylah wasn’t a fool. She could fight, but she was still weak. And after another failed attempt to summon a weapon to her hand, she knew she had to decide whether he was going to be friend or foe.

The man sighed softly and Zylah made her decision. Cleared her throat and took a soft step closer. Dark eyes met hers; in the dim light, for a moment, Zylah feared he was one of them—a vampire. Shock settled across the man’s features, one hand rising to his chest, resting over his heart.

“Pallia?” His voice was hoarse, barely audible. His eyes scrunched shut, then he opened them again. “What are you doing here?”

Zylah could have leaned into the lie. Let him believe she was her grandmother. But lies had never served her well in the past. The man didn’t move, as if perhaps he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

“My name is Zylah,” she said, taking a tentative step closer. “Pallia was my grandmother.”

He uncurled his legs slowly, yet still, Zylah took a step back. “Arioch,” he said with a grunt as he pushed himself to his feet, stepping stiffly off his plinth into the dirt. Though he looked no more than a man in his thirties, if he had known Pallia, he was centuries old.

Which meant—“You’re not Fae, are you?”

A sad smile tugged at his mouth. “I am not anything, Zylah. Not anymore.” He studied her carefully, taking in her tattered clothes, the scar that no doubt marred her face, and she wondered if he was deciding what to make of her just as she was of him.

Then he turned, and for the first time, Zylah saw his back, the twin stumps that jutted from gaps in the leather at his shoulder blades, marred skin stretched so thinly over shattered bone. She sucked in a breath at the sight. Zylah had seen these kinds of stumps before, after a Fae in the uprising back in Virian had had her wings hacked off.

“Ranon did this to you?”

Arioch followed her line of sight, glancing over his shoulder and nodded sadly. “Ranon did many things.” His gaze slipped back to her face, assessing. “Water?” He disappeared behind the plinth, and Zylah readied herself to run, but he returned a moment later with a leather pouch, keeping his distance as he handed it to her with an outstretched arm.

He didn’t trust her, not entirely. That made two of them.

She reached for the vessel, sniffing at the water out of habit but detecting nothing untoward laced within the liquid. It tasted different from the water Raif had been bringing her, collected directly from somewhere within the maze, she suspected.

“Ranon did this to you, too, I gather,” Arioch said. It was as much a statement as it was a question, but one look at her torn, bloodied clothes would have been enough for him to make assumptions.

“Ranon. His daughter. His grandson. Take your pick.”

“His daughter?”

Zylah nodded. There was something familiar about him. The curls, perhaps. The leathers. And then realisation struck her. “You came through the strange pool in the sky.” The sketches she’d seen in the book Nye had shown her, back in the Aquaris Court. “You came with all of them. You’re Imala’s lover.”

Arioch met her gaze. “I was one of them.” There was a bitterness to the way he said it, but Zylah wasn’t about to question him, not when the logical conclusion from that statement was that if Arioch had been one of Imala’s lovers, Ranon had more than likely been another. “I am… was … Seraphim. Angel, in some dialects. But Ranon took my wings. Left me here to rot. Alone.”

To rot . How many years had he been there, trapped in the maze, with no way out? She held out the canister for him, but he shook his head. He still studied her with an air of suspicion, though Zylah couldn’t say she blamed him; she doubted he’d had many visitors over the years.

“Keep it,” he told her. His brows narrowed, as if he was considering his words. And then, “There is no easy way out of this place without magic, Zylah, and that you are still standing here before me, tells me you have none.”

“It’s…” Temporarily missing? How did she explain it to him? “Evading me.”

“You are so much like your grandmother.”

There were a hundred questions she wanted to ask him, so many he might possess the answers to. “Why… why did Ranon do this to you?”

Arioch gave a dry laugh and rested a hand over his heart. “Because he coveted my mate above all else.”

Zylah sucked in a sharp breath at the word, forced herself to focus instead on everything he’d said. “Imala?”

A bittersweet expression fell over Arioch’s face, his eyes softening. “Sira.” He breathed her name like a prayer, like he hadn’t dared speak it in some time.

It was an effort to compose herself, but Zylah focused on all she knew of the original nine, her head throbbing with the implications of his words. Sira and Ranon had been the ones to start a war, she’d been taught. She tucked those pieces of information away as she watched the remorse settle over the Seraphim’s face. “Coveted her… so he cut off your wings and trapped you here?” Cold dread speared its way through her veins. Her blood had released the Fae responsible for Arioch’s predicament. For his years of suffering.

Arioch closed his eyes again, and Zylah wondered if it was Sira he saw. “Cutting off my wings was not punishment enough, though he had stolen my mate from me first.” His eyes flicked open, so much loneliness in them that Zylah almost had to look away. “I cannot die, not through lack of trying. And I cannot escape. You are the first, the only … in years.” He looked at her as if he couldn’t quite believe his eyes, and Zylah understood how she must have seemed to him, the image of her grandmother. Like a fever dream, almost. The years he must have been alone, the decades, centuries . Her heart squeezed at the thought.

“When my magic returns, I will get out of here. And I will gladly take you with me.” He had done nothing to wrong Ranon, nothing but exist. And he had suffered for it.

The Seraphim nodded sadly. “I would like that very much.”

“Can you tell me—” Zylah began, but a blinding pain brought her to her knees, muscles locking up tight, teeth clamping together until she could taste copper. Hands in the dirt, a dark haze dancing before her eyes, Zylah fought the urge to vomit. A warm hand lightly rested on her shoulder and she flinched at the touch.

“I’m sorry,” Arioch said softly. “Can I do anything to help?”

“Zylah!” Raif’s voice echoed around the cave, and Zylah froze. Not good. This was not good at all. She staggered to her feet, one hand pressed to her head as she blinked away the spots in her vision. “You need to go,” she told Arioch quietly, shoving the canister back into his hands.

“I will not leave you.”

“Go,” Zylah hissed. “He won’t hesitate to torture you. And I will never forgive myself for that.”

“Zylah!” Raif taunted. “The farther you run, the more I’m going to enjoy myself.”

“Please go,” she mouthed to Arioch. He hesitated, indecision warring in his eyes, and for a moment, Zylah wondered if he might try to stay. To fight Raif. “His punishment will be worse than Ranon’s,” she breathed.

“And you?”

“I’ll be fine.”

He studied her face until he was satisfied, and with a reluctant nod, the Seraphim departed. Zylah loosed a breath as she returned the way she’d come, anything to keep Raif from finding Arioch. Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, her breaths short and sharp, agonising tremors still wracking her body with every step.

The vampire rounded a corner just as she did, a shit-eating grin spread across his face.

“I do love a good hunt,” he said darkly, hands sliding into his pockets as his gaze slipped over her. He’d have heard her racing heartbeat, her short breaths, would have seen her trembling and mistaken it all for fear. Sick fuck.

Another wave of pain slammed into her, and then another and another, until the last thing Zylah remembered was Raif calling her name.