Chapter 62

62

SYLAS

After I portaled over into the forest, I spent some time performing reconnaissance. It was easy to hide from the tripwires and cameras, and I found the gate to the cellar. When I neared it, it appeared, and when I flew far enough back, it went away—it recognized my magic, somehow, which was why Mina couldn't find it with the police, or again by her lonesome when she tried—and lent more credence to my growing theory that the magic the boys had and that I possessed was similar somehow.

I seeped through it and dove into the cellar, which was dark now, without a ceremony going on—but when I cast a light I could see it glinting off of the wolf-head altar's golden tongue. I inspected this, feeling out for a secret space, in a sphere, all around—and found it, hidden inside a secret chamber in the wolf's throat.

I reached through, pulled a chain, and the tongue receded into the statue, where the rest of the throat decoration would've scraped off whatever had been on board...into a stinking pit of bones below.

But underneath all of them somewhere was a portion of the same stone that allowed me to control time .

I could feel its presence, and I used my other sight to find it at once.

What I found instead surprised me—a tangled, chaotic mess of glowing threads. Fates that'd apparently been severed from their owners and trapped by the stone below.

I didn't want to touch them. I'd never seen fates disconnected from their humans before—the entire situation seemed wrong.

Almost . . . sickly.

I snapped off one of the railings of the stair that'd led down here and used that to stir the bones instead, and the threads moved with them, still attached to their original owners somehow, no matter the state of decomposition they were in.

And because of that, it took me a long time to find what I was looking for, twenty feet down, at the bottom of the pit: the other portion of the stone, the one they hadn't crushed for dye. Because, I realized, just as Royce's great-grandfather had ground his portion of the rock up to use in my hourglass—so had their Ellis. Only he'd had them impregnate the crushed stone into their tattoos—which they retrieved, and reused, so that the magic wasn't lost when bodies were buried.

And they'd learned to use its magic, even if they didn't fully know how, to sever fates to better their own.

All they had to do was periodically kill an innocent victim and...harvest their interrupted fate for them to use for power?

No—if so, why were so many of them left behind? Fates, in and of themselves, did not have power—not until they were manipulated. The chaotic mess in the pit felt dangerous, but it was currently undirected.

Whereas I remembered the highly organized threads of fate I'd seen circling Ella .

At the time, I'd assumed they were draining her fate from her, so slowly it was almost imperceptible.

But what if I was wrong? What if they were giving it to her instead?

Loading her up with all of the bad outcomes that the boys were avoiding, sheerly by virtue of belonging to their group? Making her sicker and sicker, as they became increasingly lucky and better equipped to move through life?

If so, then what was in the pit represented all the poorer fates of the men that had come before, that'd been wrapped around their victims like chains, until they were sacrificed and took them with them.

I was attuned to the sands of the hourglass when it was with me, because it controlled my life, and I could sense the last bit of the stone below. I moved the bones to see it clearly.

It was in a gilded cage, set into the floor, with slats above it like it was in a drain, so that everything that poured down from above—cum, blood, decay—eventually went into its setting, where it used it up like kindling, burning it away.

And I could tell its powers were waning.

Whereas Royce's great-grandfather had kept his portion of the stone largely intact, albeit it in a different form inside my glass, and I only had to surrender to its powers of fate occasionally—the men of this organization had been continually drawing power from their piece of it for over a century.

Using it like a battery they were poorly equipped to recharge.

But they'd managed to constrain it—with threats and magic and nostalgia.

Which meant there was a chance that they could also constrain me .

"Like what you see?" asked a brash voice from the top of the stairs. He sounded strong, but I could sense the guilty fear in him, and I knew who he was at once, from Garrett's memories.

Braden.

"It is interesting," I said, pulling the chain again, and resetting the contraption. Once it was sealed away, I couldn't feel it anymore.

That . . . was promising.

He made it to the first landing, and then kept striding down. "We knew you'd come here."

"Yet you appear defenseless."

"Not entirely," he said, putting his hands into the pockets of his jeans. "The fact that I'm still alive means you want something from me."

And that, I could not deny.

"My father's a businessman," he said, tapping his head. "So I get my business-sense from him. What do you want? Let's make a deal."

I made a gesture at the hidden pit. "How much of this magic do you really understand? Not much, I'd wager," I said, swirling around. "These carved grooves were meant to channel energy. You fed it with cum—but it hungers for blood."

It didn't, actually—the grooves on the ground were as made up as the rest of the carvings, with the pseudo-Egyptian aesthetic, that their forefather had brought over.

The only magic present in the room was inside the pit—and on their chests.

"What if I told you, I could replace your dwindling power?" I asked him. "For a price? "

"I would ask you what it is."

"Mina Moore's life. None of your men ever touch her again."

Braden made a snorting sound. "Done. We've been trying to ignore her?—"

"And the life of your last friend from your crew," I said. "The one who is not here." I gestured at the symbol on the ground. "What was his name?"

"Trent," the man said slowly, and I gave him a deep nod.

"If you kill him, and feed this sigil his blood, my power is yours." I didn't need his blood—but my Mina did. Particularly if I was going to disappoint her by leaving this final boy with breath.

"What do you get out of this?" he asked, squinting at me.

I decided to tell him the truth. "I'm fated to kill her. I would rather not. I believe your pit here can contain me. Once I am inside of it, to protect her, I will never come out again."

"And I'm just supposed to believe you?"

"Would we still be talking if it wasn't true? I believe by now you know what I'm capable of."

I watched him weighing his options. "And . . . just Trent?"

"Yes," I said, and he heaved a sigh.

"I'll go get him. Everyone else is waiting up top. Expecting me to clean up this mess," he said, raking a hand through his hair. "Stay here," he said.

"Hurry. I hunger," I said—and it wasn't entirely a lie.