40. Clay

40

CLAY

A mong the ways my day could have gone, none of this shit would’ve made the list.

Hell, none of it had even been in consideration.

Niko was king. Possibly king. Of fucking Erenelle, no less, that piece of shit nation that’d kicked out half my friends and tried to kill most of the others.

And now we were trooping through magic-ridden tunnels in Erenelle with relatives I’d really hoped were deader than Erenelle itself, all to decide whether my friend or our good ol’ uncle Deter would get the throne.

“This is insane,” my brother muttered under his breath.

I scoffed in agreement as I side-stepped a fallen boulder. “Hi-ho, hi-ho, down into the earth with a bunch of assholes we go.”

He gave me a tired look. “That’s not helping.”

I returned the glare with a wry expression. “It’s true, though.”

His tired look deepened, but he didn’t respond.

Up ahead, Brock’s head turned like he overheard us, though of course the bastard didn’t meet our eyes.

But then, that guy always had been a fucking coward. Nice to know some things hadn’t changed.

We continued deeper into the tunnel, the seven of us sticking close together in case the bastards tried anything. I wouldn’t put it past them, now that they’d had their shiny little bracelets taken off. Dex and the others were equally on edge, though a grin hovered around Casimir’s lips, almost as if—after hours of playing politics with these bastards—he was looking forward to the giants trying to make a move.

Damn, I’d love to see that, at least where a few of these giants were concerned. I mean, shit. Giant blood was one of the best ways to keep a vampire from going insane, and here we were surrounded by a bunch who I wouldn’t mind inviting to leave this life—especially considering they’d spent years doing their best to make sure Lars and I left it first.

So hey, that worked out fine.

“Your expression is damn near macabre, brother,” Lars murmured under his breath.

I didn’t take my attention from Brock and Norbert. “Oh, is it now?”

Lars sighed. “Play nice. For Niko’s sake, okay?”

My eyes cut to him, but I knew he had a point.

Gods, king. Possibly king. Never mind that, honestly, he’d make a great one. He was a dwarf. A dwarf whose treluria was the fucking rightful queen of Aneira, of all things. Everyone and their damned dog would be trying to kill both of them for the rest of their lives, just for that alone.

I didn’t think I’d been this angry in years.

Gwyneira and Niko were the fucking best of us. The idea that they would be the ones with the target on their backs… all because giants and humans were total assholes about anything that didn’t fit in their little boxes…

Gods, pure fucking rage didn’t come close to describing how that made me feel.

The floor beneath us began to descend at a sharper angle, and I scowled, working to keep from slipping on the steep declination.

This was the problem with giant-made tunnels. To them, this slope was nothing. To us, it made it all the more likely we’d fall on our asses.

To say nothing of the way the place was crumbling all around us.

Scowling, I veered around another fallen boulder, eyeing the crevice in the ceiling where it used to live. Whatever had happened to the lake above us, the magic in the earth beneath Syloria was like soggy, swirled mud caked on the stone. The gods only knew what the original purpose had been for all these spells. Now they were just a mess.

But setting aside the trouble-waiting-to-happen that was, I could admit the tunnel itself was impressive. Giants were something of architectural geniuses when it came to the manipulation of stone. Hell, Syloria itself proved that, and it was hardly the extent of what they’d made. Throughout Erenelle, there were cities and villages with half their structures built underground in tunnels and caverns, while others were fashioned straight out of the sides of mountains or grown up from the earth itself. We’d managed something similar with our cabin, but we’d also always built that to be able to be torn down if needed.

When it came to using stone, giants built shit to last.

But it wasn’t just the structures themselves that Erenlians had perfected. Generations of giants had created fairly ingenious ways of making the water supply work too.

Big as it was, this tunnel was actually more like a service access. The aqueducts to hold the water for Syloria were inside the walls around us. Initially carved like channels in the stone, they were then sealed away to be completely watertight except for small access ports along the length of this central tunnel.

Except without anyone here to maintain them…

Shivers crept over my skin. The lakebed above us wasn’t the only mystery. The sodden, swirling mud of magic I could feel around us muffled my senses like twenty layers of wet fucking blankets, but the deeper we walked, the more I began to pick up on things.

Thin streams of water still trickled along the bottom of the aqueducts inside the walls, so there was still a water source somewhere here. Admittedly, not much of one, given that those little threads of moisture should be flowing like calm, controlled rivers, their erosive qualities offset by the efforts of the giants in charge of their maintenance. But still, that was a start.

Keeping an eye to the bastards up ahead, I concentrated on pushing my magic farther through the muddy magic. While the larger giants probably had heightened skills with various aspects of the natural world, same as the seven of us, one of the few advantages fate had given me and my friends was that we were actually pretty damn powerful when it came to our various affinities.

But it didn’t mean that those assholes wouldn’t pick up on what I was doing.

None of them turned while I stretched out my power. From the way they were muttering with each other, they didn’t seem to notice what I was doing at all.

Which was just as well, because I definitely didn’t have enough self-control to stop my face from giving away how I choked in horror when the murky truth slowly presented itself past the fucked-up magic.

“Oh… shit,” I whispered.

Lars glanced at me. “What?”

I couldn’t find the words. The aqueducts were blocked, yes. Chances were, they had been for years. And while that had been a problem at first, now it was a damn good thing.

Because even I couldn’t breathe underwater.

Ozias gave a quiet rumble of misgiving, and my eyes snapped to him. “You picking something up, Oz?” I asked under my breath, praying he had a better answer than we need to run like hell , which was all that was going through my head right now.

Except that wouldn’t help Gwyneira or Niko or Roan or…

Gods-fucking-dammit.

“You conspiring back there, dwarves?” one of Norbert’s buddies snapped.

Norbert scoffed. “Probably. Shut up, runts. Nobody needs your opinions on how to do real giant work.”

“Need I remind you,” Casimir called before I could tell that bastard to go to hell, “that you are addressing the royal advisors of the king of Zenirya? Unless you wish me to inform your duke that you decided to start a war because you thought yourself wiser than him, you will cease speaking immediately.”

The two asshole giants glared, while that cowardly bastard Brock didn’t say a damned word.

And Ignatius studied us like we were all a math problem he was trying to solve.

Fuck them all. I turned my attention back to my friends. “Oz, what are you feeling?”

A low grunt of discontent left Ozias. “A hundred more yards to the problem.”

Problem . Right. That was one way of putting it.

Holy-fucking-shit-we’re-dead was another.

“You have an exceptionally strong gift, do you not?” Ignatius asked Ozias thoughtfully.

Not answering, Ozias started walking again. My friends and the larger giants did too, leaving Ignatius to follow.

“You good?” Lars asked me softly.

I huffed out an incredulous breath. Good? Fuck no. I wanted Ozias to tell me I was wrong. To say he had a plan.

Fucking something .

But of course he hadn’t said more. On a good day, the guy rationed words like my parents used to ration our food.

Greedy brats. Dwarves don’t need to eat three times a day. Give it to Brock. He’s the only real giant here.

My teeth ground at the memory of ducking their hands when they swung to hit us. Sometimes that’d even worked.

Other times, Lars or I had to hide yet another broken bone.

Because our wounds only proved one more way in which we weren’t good enough, and no one in my parents’ circle would’ve helped or been sympathetic to how our family treated us. After all, nobility didn’t suffer such petty, common injuries.

“Breathe,” my twin brother murmured.

“You breathe.”

I didn’t need to look at him to feel his exasperated expression. And fine, yes, my response was childish.

But surely he could understand why?

“Gwyneira needs us to get through this,” Lars pressed, his voice still low. “She’s our future, brother. So don’t fuck that up over the past.”

He met my eyes firmly. Anyone else would have believed his expression was the calm counterpoint to my simmering fury.

But I could read the pain and anger tightly controlled behind his blue eyes, and more than anything else, that caused my own rage to drain.

Forget childish. I was being selfish. He was struggling with this too, and I wasn’t helping him. “Sorry.”

He nodded, accepting the apology. “Now tell me, what are you picking up on?”

I hesitated.

“I know you, Clay. Something’s up. What is it?”

My heart pounding, I lowered my voice to a whisper. “We’ve got more than a problem on our hands.”

His eyes turned wary.

“Something went wrong with the water supply. Maybe a collapse inside the mountain or because of that avalanche that took out part of the temple. I don’t know. But after that happened and the magic here started fucking up because no one was around to fix things, it trapped the water. All of it.”

“Shit,” Lars whispered.

I nodded. “But the water still had to go somewhere, right? So the pressure of the magic pushed way more groundwater into the surrounding rock than it could naturally hold.”

My brother looked sick.

“I’m not Oz, but from what I can tell, the water weakened the stone around us, and now if we try to draw the water out or fucking touch this rock the wrong way…” I swallowed hard. “The ground will collapse, the tunnels won’t hold, and the destruction could take down everything above us—including the temple.”

Casimir’s head snapped back toward us with shock. Ignatius paused, seeing our reactions even if he hadn’t heard our words, while Ozias didn’t turn, though his shoulders pulled up with tension.

So the big guy did feel how this place was basically a fucking death trap. Great. Why the hell hadn’t he said anything?

“Can you do something?” Lars asked me quietly.

Gods, it grated to admit the answer was fuck no . Not when we were talking about a sinkhole big enough to turn this whole place into a crater.

He saw the truth on my face anyway.

“Do what you can,” he said with a short glance at Dex, as if reading the guy’s mind. After all, the words were probably what our fearless leader would have said too. “And if it comes down to it, you focus on a way to stop it from hurting Gwyneira and the folks above us. Nothing else. Okay?”

My mouth tightened, everything in me fighting what I knew I had to say.

“Clay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Gods, that hurt. So did the way he nodded.

But not as much as the way I knew he was right. Gwyneira was up there. Roan and Niko too, and they’d be on board with this. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind that they would.

We’d all sacrificed for each other over the years. And gods, we’d do anything for her.

Even drown if it meant our treluria survived.