Chapter 43

"There's no door."

We'd been over this mausoleum three times, and there was no way inside except for windows twenty feet up that were too small for any of us to wiggle through in our current Fae forms.

"No wards either, which is good news." Torin stepped forward and tested the smooth rock wall again, blowing on her frozen fingers when she stepped back. "Not a drop of magic protects this place," she muttered, clearly puzzled.

"This is further north than any Fae or shifter would ever venture," Zephryn pointed out. "Perhaps the distance from the settled realms is protection enough."

The seer seemed unconvinced as she studied the stone then stared at those narrow slitted windows. Torin and Simon shared a look before he groaned and began stripping, golden skin turning to gooseflesh.

"And that's going to help us how?" I asked quietly. "This place is fucking huge. We have less than an hour."

"Simon knows what the pendant looks like," Torin said with equal quiet. "He's seen it a thousand times around her neck. Simon will not fail."

We all watched the owl float up to that high ledge and peck at the window hard enough for the glass to shatter. One hop and he was gone.

"So what, we wait?"

"Now we wait," Zephryn muttered, looking around for somewhere comfortable to sit. He headed for a black rock jutting up from the snow-covered ground. "This is about the furthest north you can go in the world," the dragon said conversationally. "I flew over once, but…" He stomped his boots, sending snow flying. "It's different when you have your feet on the ground."

I gazed out over the ocean. We were close enough to endure the gale coming off the cliffs, the expanse of water stretching out to the sky, and the crashing waves below, the dull roar echoing off the side of Ashbane like a siren's song. Some long-forgotten part of me remembered this smell.

Brine and fish and wildness.

Once, when I'd been very young, I'd been to the ocean. I didn't remember which one, but the air had smelled like this. Though warmer, perhaps, less…wild than this sea.

Wyverns had a keen sense of smell, but we also had something even better.

A photographic memory when it came to cataloguing those scents. And by memories, I meant every single aspect of that long-ago memory evoked. I remembered the exact turquoise shade of those crystalline waters, the silky soft sand beneath my toes still plump with baby fat. The comforting feel of my mother's hand wrapped around mine as…

The tears froze to my cheeks before I wiped them away, stalking off toward the Oracle's lair as if I was checking on Simon's progress not fucking imploding over a memory from six centuries ago.

As if he could read my mind, Zephryn stopped me with a question. "How old are you, wyvern?"

"Older than you." I scuffed my boot toe in the snow, meeting his eyes.

My age made no difference, given I was the only wyvern left in this miserable world. If there was still a pyre of us, I could be their king by now, I supposed, as my sire was. Although…I looked over at Zephryn.

What sort of fucking luck brought us both here, would-be kings of lost kingdoms that would never rise again?

Torin disappeared around the building, her boots crunching in the hoarfrost as she trailed her fingers over the smooth stone exterior, muttering about there being no protective ward.

"Do your companions know?" Zephryn asked, never taking his eyes off the spot the seer had last been. "How old you are? That there are no more of your kind?"

"It's never come up," I told him with a glare that clearly said, and don't you fucking tell them, dragon. He raised his hands in mock surrender then glanced back to the building, frowning.

"Where did she go?" Zeph said sharply, an edge of fear to his voice as he jolted to his feet.

"She was right there, double-checking to make sure there's no ward." Jeez, if the old drake was this spooked at letting his female out of his sight for a minute, what had he been like for three hundred years?

An image of Anaria's face flashed in my head, followed by a bone-deep shudder that left chills in its wake. Okay, fair enough. I'd fought my attraction to Anaria for weeks, then months, only to fall under her spell in the end, and I couldn't even be upset about it.

Maybe my advanced age did have something to do with my initial contempt for a princess who'd killed my friends, and yet…I'd been smitten with Anaria from the first time I'd seen her.

From the moment she'd begged me to go back into Tempeste to save her friend.

Something moved in the shadow of the building cast by the moon rising overhead.

"There she is, safe and sound, dragon. You can't even…"

Every last thought eddied from my head at what crept out of that darkness.

Grotesque. Corrupted. Nightmarish.

There was no sign of Torin when the dark, twisted creature skittered toward us on stick-thin legs moving so fast they were a blur, holding aloft a soft bulbous body swollen and mottled and spongy with age.

"What the fuck is that?" I hissed to Zephryn. We were shoulder to shoulder as we backed away, minding our footing on the treacherous ground. The thing's black-as-night eyes—three of them—gleamed with hunger, and all were firmly fixed on us.

"I'll hold it off; you transform."

"You're bigger," I countered, turning as the thing changed direction and unslinging my bow from my shoulder. Where the fuck was Torin? Was she already dead?

Beside me, Zephryn's breathing turned raspy, as if he'd just asked himself the same question.

"Torin's alive, Zeph." I took another step back, not daring to look down as I slid an arrow from my quiver, knocking it in my bow. "She's smart enough to avoid danger, she's probably waiting for the right moment to come up behind this fucking thing and use her magic to save us both and make us look like arses."

My string creaked in the cold and the creature shifted to one side, blindingly fast, faster than something of that size should be able to move. But with all those fucking legs, the creature moved like an unstoppable wave over the rocky, uneven ground, while we had to watch every fucking step we took.

Below those glittering eyes were pincers as long and wide as my arms, dripping something green and frothy. Poison, most likely, a sweet, rotten smell hitting me as the bug-like creature drew closer.

"If you are going to shoot that, I would do it now, Lord DeVayne."

"Will iron even kill this thing?"

"Only one way to find out," Zephryn hissed. "Do it."

My fingers gripped the fletching, my back muscles strained as I drew the bow taut enough to send my arrow straight through the monster's eye and out the back of its head, if its skull was as soft as the rest of its spongy, grotesque body.

Something shifted in the darkness behind the creature, Zephryn disappearing from my line of sight as he lost his balance and went down. My perfectly aimed arrow missed completely as the creature lunged at the dragon shifter, pincers clicking, the horrific sound echoing against the distant mountains.

Snow flew as the bug-like monster hurtled toward Zephryn then crushed him beneath its soft, slithering weight, legs slashing and stabbing like a thousand little daggers until the snow was painted red.

My next arrow didn't miss, taking out an eye and the back of the thing's head before I rushed over and heaved the still-twitching corpse off Zeph. Gods, less than ten seconds and he was shredded, blood and muscle gleaming through what remained of his clothes.

Another one hurtled from the darkness, and I took that one down, too.

Then the next one. And the next.

"They're being spawned by the shadows." Zephryn heaved himself unsteadily to his feet. "No wards to protect this place, but darkness that gives birth to protectors." His eyes were wild. "Find Torin. Get Simon out of there."

His teeth gleamed as they grew longer and longer. "Find her," he roared, and I shot another arrow, barely taking down another one about to snap those venom-coated pincers into his leg.

Then a black dragon stomped the bodies into steaming piles of sticky green goo as Zephryn hurtled around the edge of the mausoleum into those deep shadows…and disappeared.

Like the darkness-that-wasn't-darkness swallowed him whole.

"Fuck." I knocked another arrow. I had two more after this one.

They wouldn't be enough.

"I got the pendant." Simon stuck his arm out the window, the only part of him that would fit since his shoulders were too wide. "It took me long enough, but here it is." Something red and glittering dangled from his fist.

Then he spotted the crushed corpses littering the churned-up ground.

"What the fuck are those?"

"Guards. Protectors. I don't fucking know but get down here and help," I hissed up at him, listening hard for any indication of skittering insectile feet, a dragon's deafening roar, or a female's frantic scream. But nothing came out of those deep shadows, like they not only swallowed all the light but every sound.

I didn't dare take my eyes off that darkness. "Shift and circle around Ashbane. Tell me what you see. Stay high if you know what's good for you."

Simon disappeared, then his owl sailed out into the night and made a tight, swift circle around the building. When he made another round, I knew there was nothing there.

Nothing…and yet such malice throbbed from that abiding darkness…as if the shadows contained every evil thing the Oracle could come up with.

"Fuck." Snow flew as Simon landed behind me. "Explain. Make it fast because I'm freezing my fucking arse off."

"Torin was double-checking the warding. She never reappeared, but these protectors started emerging from that shadow. Zephryn went in after her…and never came out."

"The shadows are a magic sort of…prison and they can't get out because they're trapped in the darkness. No light can penetrate."

"Where does that leave us?"

Simon drew even with me, arms wrapped around himself, his teeth chattering. "We go in there, we get trapped, too." His gaze drifted to the darkness. "You have fire magic. Send a plume of flame into that darkness."

"I'd have to drop the bow."

"You've only got two arrows left and I expect fire can kill them as easily as iron." Simon nudged the nearest creature with his bare foot, sending a gush of steaming green liquid into the snow before it melted down through the rock beneath, sending up a putrid cloud. "Fuck. That's every bit as disgusting as last time."

"I thought you'd never been up here?"

"Only once. Cosimo had one of these things strapped down to a table in his laboratory. Said it crept down out of the mountains, but now…now I'm not so sure the Oracle hadn't sent one of her minions to spy on him."

"Hold this." I handed him my bow and conjured an orb of fire as we picked our way around the carcasses, careful not to touch them or any of that green venom.

I stopped a few feet from the shadows then sent the tentative flicker of fire inside. The darkness smothered every ember, snuffing my magic out like a match.

"Again. More."

"I can't see Zeph or Torin; I don't want to burn them. If I use too much, I can't shift and fly back," I warned, but this time I sent more magic into that dark pit, a thundering plume of fiery death that bent the air around us with rippling heat.

Inside that darkness, hundreds—fucking thousands—of eyes stared out at us. Unblinking, glittering black orbs in groups of three, sets of powerful, crushing pincers moving below. But within that teeming mass, Torin's pale face was outlined against Zephryn's massive chest, as if the dragon stood guard over her.

"Here." Simon waved his arms and every single beady eye homed in on that movement. "We're right here."

But Zephryn and Torin saw the movement, too, clawing a path through the beasts, wounds opening on the seer's face and arms as pincers gouged her skin, Zephryn snapping and spitting out bursts of blue-flecked fire that sent the monsters careening back.

Torin collapsed the moment she emerged from the dark, but Simon was already there, dragging her through the gauntlet of crushed corpses and steaming poison. Zephryn thundered out of the dark with monsters clinging to his back, pincers cutting through scales as thick as flagstones to reach the vulnerable flesh beneath.

I killed two creatures with bursts of fire while Zephryn tore off the rest with meaty chomps, a writhing, gnashing horde streaming from the dark.

"We have to get airborne. Now." Simon half dragged Torin over to Zephryn and heaved her onto the dragon's back. She wasn't even fully seated when those powerful wings beat downward and lifted his massive bulk up off the ground.

Out of reach of the lunging insect creatures.

"Shift, Tristan, right the fuck now," Simon screamed. "I'm going back for the pendant. Get in the air. I'll catch up."