18. Gwyneira

18

GWYNEIRA

E very second we crept along the road left me on edge. Casimir had taken to the air a short while ago and spotted soldiers hiding in the forest several miles beyond where the poor Huntsman finally died. But that had been ten minutes ago. They may have moved.

To say nothing about all the other threats that might be out here.

“We still good?” Clay whispered to those up ahead.

Clearly I wasn’t the only one worried.

In the lead with Casimir and Byron, Dex nodded back wordlessly. Valeria and her soldiers waited behind them, hands on the hilts of their sheathed swords, ready to draw them at a moment’s notice. We’d left the horses behind several miles ago, just in case the animals made a noise at the wrong moment, and a few of her people had stayed to keep watch over the mounts.

But of the humans, there were so many fewer than before. It pained me. My stepmother’s Huntsmen and her spell in the forest had cost us so many allies.

At my side, Ozias reached over, putting a hand to my arm in silent comfort. I exhaled slowly, appreciating the gesture, especially since I could feel his apprehension through our connection no matter how he tried to suppress it.

My stepmother had not only done damage. She’d also created wristbands that could block Erenlian magic. And what else might she have done? She wasn’t the only vampire in the world, obviously. Had she made something that would thwart Casimir’s and my senses too? Or what about weapons against creatures like Ozias or Roan?

My heart racing, I exhaled slowly, ordering myself for the thousandth time to stay calm. Stay focused. Worry wasn’t helping anything, and I needed to concentrate if I was going to keep myself and my allies alive.

Up ahead, Dex suddenly came to a halt with a brief warning gesture.

I slowed, craning my neck to see what caused him to stop.

A dead tree stood to one side of the road, its trunk split and blackened by a long-ago lightning strike. Casimir had paused before it, and he was eying the charred wood like it might bite.

“Are you seeing this?” he asked Byron.

While the scholar bent closer, Clay called in a low voice, “What’s wrong?”

Casimir’s brow furrowed with concern. “There’s something here, tucked within the tree.” He made no move to come closer to the trunk. “It wasn’t visible from the air.”

With another brief look at Byron, he murmured something I could only barely hear, even with my heightened senses. “Huntsman knew… warned us… might alert…”

I swallowed hard, guessing the rest. Whatever was there, the Huntsman had tried to tell us about a dead tree.

Maybe he’d wanted to warn us.

At Casimir’s words, Byron made a considering sound. Crouching down, he reached for something within his bag. I caught a glimpse of a tiny nugget of ore in a sliver of moonlight before he tossed it into the gap in the split tree trunk.

A strange sensation like prickly feathers ghosted over my skin and then faded, leaving the sensation of something less in the air, even if I hadn’t noticed anything before.

“Excellent,” Casimir said. “It is likely neutralized.”

“ Likely ?” Clay repeated.

Byron gave the blond man a tired look. “A warning spell was tied to a token tucked within the fallen tree. It was probably designed to alert those in the mines if someone was approaching. It shouldn’t trigger now when we pass.”

Dex nodded. “We move quickly, then. Just in case.”

As the others started forward, Clay shook his head, mumbling something about people hardly being reassuring.

Nervously, I trailed after them, straining my senses for any sign of someone on the path ahead. The forest gave no hint of that, though. Only the occasional rustle from the undergrowth broke the silence. I’d flinched at first, worried, but each sound proved time and again to merely be a small animal racing from our path, their brown fur darting swiftly beneath bushes or around trees. Bats swooped by overhead, squeaking intermittently, and nothing about the path seemed to say a mine lay at the other end with the giants my father and stepmother had imprisoned.

But then, maybe that was the way of things. Nature continued on while people inflicted horrors on one another, and even though it seemed like all the world should mark the nightmare of what we’d done, somehow… it didn’t. The sun still rose. The trees still grew. You wanted it to stop, somehow. To recoil in horror because what was happening was so wrong, and yet nature carried on.

Because it was bigger than you. Older. It would be here after all the horrors were gone.

Was it my imagination that the forest still felt hushed, though? That the air was sharper, clearer, like cut crystal through which everything held a strange sort of focus? That even though the bats squeaked and the little creatures scurried, somehow I could feel the pain of all those trapped in the mines as if it was carried on the air?

Or would this seem like any other forest if I didn’t know what was waiting at the end of this path? Or if I still believed the stories I’d grown up hearing, that all these prisoners were my nation’s enemies? That they deserved this horror somehow?

Would I still feel this pain if I’d chosen to see the world the way my father had?

Ozias came up beside me and placed a hand on my shoulder. I glanced up at him, torn between relief and guilt for where my thoughts were going—and what might have been.

“Breathe, little mate,” he murmured to me, so low only Casimir could have heard. “Breathe.”

I nodded, trying to do as he said.

In the lead with Casimir and Byron at his side, Dex held up a hand and then glanced back at Ozias, nodding briefly for the bearded man to join them.

No way was I staying behind.

Dex’s mouth tightened a bit at the sight of me, but he only said, “Noises up ahead,” when we reached them.

Casimir pointed down the path and then to the left. “I hear at least two voices. Six heartbeats. They’re not moving much.”

“Soldiers,” Valeria murmured, coming up behind us.

The others nodded.

“Can you feel anything about the mines?” Dex asked Ozias. “Anything at all?”

My mate closed his eyes, and it only took a moment before I could feel the frustration coming from him.

“Nothing. Their little charms make the earth lie.”

“So what’s the play?” Clay prompted, coming closer. “Go in swords swinging or…?”

Dex cast a concerned look at the narrow track, but it was Casimir who spoke first. “Ruhl and I could remove them.”

“And if they raise the alarm first?” Roan countered.

“I can help,” I said before Casimir could respond.

A chorus of whispered protests rose, and frustration surged in me. Yes, fine, I wasn’t a fighter like them. But I was hardly helpless.

And every second we waited meant Niko spent more time with people who might kill him.

“Let me rephrase that,” I whisper-shouted over their protests. ”I’m going. I can shift like Casimir, and three against six is better than two.”

“No,” Dex replied immediately. “If they catch you, there’s no telling what they’ll do. You?—”

“They won’t,” I said.

From his expression, he clearly wasn’t willing to gamble my safety on that. Neither were the others.

“Are you prepared to hurt your own people, princess?” Casimir asked quietly.

I looked away, my stomach churning. “We need to help Niko.”

“And if your stepmother has more traps and spells waiting?” Lars pointed out. “Ones that could hurt vampires too?”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. I knew it was a risk. For the gods’ sakes, I’d just been worrying about the same thing. But what was I supposed to do? Stay hiding back here while they raced in, risking their lives, when I was one of the few who could get close enough to disarm the soldiers before they hurt anyone?

To hell with that.

I shifted and took off into the forest, leaving the men scrambling in my wake.

“Shouldn’t have mentioned the damn queen,” I heard Clay hiss at his brother.

Beyond the next rise, a small valley came into sight, clustered with trees and holding a pond at its heart. Moonlight reflected from the water’s still surface, and nothing moved on the rocky banks. The shadows in the forest were deep, and even with my visual abilities in this form, it took me a moment to pick out the telltale shape of a man hiding in the undergrowth.

A dull gleam came from the darkened metal of his breastplate, marking him as a soldier. His sword was sheathed at his side, and his expression was bored as he idly scanned the pond and the surrounding hillsides.

I raced at him, sticking close to the tree line to hide among the shadows.

He didn’t even turn.

Slamming into him, I knocked him down and muffled his mouth before he could shout. He thrashed in my grip, struggling to reach his weapon, but my strength as a vampire was more than his as a man.

My vampire side pounded through me, urging me to bite him, end this, stop him from hurting anyone ever again. I held on tight as I fought it, but that side’s instincts were louder in this form. Stronger.

His motions slowed. He stilled and went limp. I released him carefully, relieved I could still hear the thud of his heartbeat in his chest.

One down.

I turned, making myself focus past the drumming of hunger from my vampire side. I’d need to feed again soon.

But not from humans. Never from humans. Not if I wanted to stay sane.

The vampire side of me didn’t like that.

Snarling at it silently, I lunged at another soldier walking into view. He’d been strolling along, likely following a route he’d walked hundreds of times, and he gave no sign of having heard his fellow soldier’s struggles. Just before I reached him, his eyes fell on the man I’d knocked unconscious, and he opened his mouth to yell.

I drove him backward into the bushes, muffling his cries. He was even easier to subdue than the previous one—as if, now that I’d figured out how to do this, my vampire side enjoyed tearing the soldiers down a little too much.

A smoky form rushed past me when I drew back from the soldier, and Ruhl’s green eyes gleamed as he became his wolf form in the darkness. His tongue lolled between long fangs, and I’d swear he was grinning at me.

I glanced around, searching for Casimir. Somewhere to my left, a faint grunt came from beyond the bushes and then fell silent.

Worried, I started toward it, only for Casimir to emerge and shift into his human form. “Are you all right?” he whispered.

“Yes. You?”

“Quite.” He smiled, his fangs showing. “Though I suspect Dex and your mate may wish to express some opinions later about your insistence on being the one on the front line.”

Casimir’s eyes held a gleam of amused anticipation as he spoke, and my core twisted hotly at the implication.

His expression turned more businesslike as he scanned the forest. “The rest are down. We need to get moving.” Notching his head to the side, he motioned for me to follow and then shifted back into smoke and shadow. I flew after him as he wove through the underbrush, coming to a stop and shifting back to human form a few moments later in the shelter of a large tree.

A fissure showed in the surface of the hillside ahead, as tall as three men standing atop one another and wide enough that a cart could drive through. The faintest traces of firelight gleamed inside, barely an orange blush in the depths of the entrance. In the distance, I could just make out a whisper of voices from farther within, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

But it was enough. That had to be the entrance to the mines.

I glanced at Casimir. With a grim look on his face, he regarded the fissure for a moment. “Do you feel that?” he murmured.

I gave the valley a wary look. “Feel what?”

He frowned. “Nothing. No mines. No people. Just… nothing.” Expression unchanged, he nodded briefly to the side. Silently, I followed him as he shifted and raced back to where we’d left the others.

Casimir had not been wrong. My giants were not happy when I returned to human form in front of them.

“The soldiers are gone,” I told them, trying to stave off whatever they were about to say. “And we found the way into the mines.”

They hardly looked pacified by the news.

“You cannot risk yourself like that,” Dex said, his voice hard. “If not because of what it would do to us, then because of what it will mean for your country if you’re caught. Your stepmother will make an example of you—and that’s just the beginning.”

Discomfort twisted in me at his words. He wasn’t wrong.

But I couldn’t stay behind. “I’m not going to hide while you all do the fighting for me.”

“And if you get killed?” Ozias asked, and my discomfort grew to feel his horror at his own words, no matter how neutral his voice sounded.

“There is another issue,” Casimir said carefully into the awkward silence. “I have reason to believe our arrival may have been anticipated.”

“What?” Lars turned to him, alarmed.

“How so?” Byron asked.

“There are spells within the ground,” he said. “There have to be. They’re strange. Possibly inverted upon themselves somehow. But not only could I detect no trace of the mines, I could not even detect the guards within the entrance itself.”

“So it’s a trap,” Clay translated flatly. “Great.”

“Or it’s meant to be so well hidden,” Byron said, “no one could find it unless they knew where to look.”

Unsettled silence fell over our group.

“We have to save Niko,” Roan said quietly. “We can’t leave him down there.”

Dex frowned, his eyes turning to me.

“I’m not staying put,” I told him immediately.

His frown deepened, but he only turned to the others and said, “When we get in there, no one say Gwyneira’s name or title, understood? The guards or the Erenlians might recognize her anyway, but let’s not give anyone help in figuring out who she is—just in case.”

Murmured agreement came from all the men around me.

Dex gave me a pointed look. “Stay behind us.”

I scowled, wanting to protest, but I knew it wouldn’t help anything. Roan was right. We needed to go save Niko, not argue about where I would be standing in the battle that lay before us. “I’ll do my best.”

Dex’s expression turned exasperated, and he took my arms, physically moving me back. I couldn’t stop myself from giving a startled and thoroughly undignified squeak of offense, but he didn’t stop until we reached the rear of the group.

One of his hands released my shoulder only to take my chin, tilting my face up toward his. “Your safety matters more than anything to us, do you understand? More than life, more than death, and I promise you, Niko would say it matters more than him. Each of us would die to protect you, so don’t go forcing us to do that by being a brat about this.”

My eyes went wide with indignation. “I am not being a?—”

His thumb landed on my lips, stifling my words. “Enough.” His face tightened. “Please.” When I didn’t protest, his eyes narrowed, a tad distrusting and a tad playful. “And remind me to repay you later for all this worry you’re causing us, princess.” The pad of his thumb tugged briefly at my bottom lip.

My indignation drowned as my insides turned molten. Gods, first Casimir and now him.

I managed a nod.

Dex’s lip twitched. “Good girl.” His hand released my chin. “ Stay. ”

Without waiting to see if I obeyed, he turned and strode back to the front of the group, drawing his sword as he went. “Move out.”

I stared after him, my body and mind reeling from what just happened. When I blinked and finally pulled my gaze away, it only landed on the others.

Clay winked at me, grinning like he could guess what had just transpired, while Ozias growled so low with desire, it was more of a sensation prickling across my skin than a sound. Meanwhile, Casimir gave me a wicked smile, undoubtedly having heard every word.

My mate and my dominant vampire were clearly looking forward to helping my equally dominant giant “repay” me, just as Dex promised.

Taking a breath, I turned away, only for my eyes to catch on Roan. He looked stricken. Pained, almost. But before I could ask what in the world was wrong, he buried the expression and spun to follow Dex.

That was… odd.

Promising myself I’d ask him later, I set the worry aside and ordered myself to focus. I would never ignore Roan’s pain, but we all needed every bit of attention and readiness for what was about to happen.

And I wasn’t a dog, so like hell was I staying anywhere. I wouldn’t let these men die to protect me. I didn’t care what I had to do.

They could repay me all they wanted later— after they survived.

“All right, friends,” Clay chuckled darkly as he drew his sword and started toward the mines. “Here goes nothing.”