Chapter 17

Ilaid in my bed in Terra House looking up at the skylight above me and watching the branches of the trees which were drenched in the golden morning light. They swept back and forth in the furious wind that was currently battering the academy as winter took it into its clutches.

The tree closest to my room was an oak, an ancient, wizened tree with a trunk so thick it could have easily held a room or three inside it. Most of its leaves had already dropped, the acorns scattering the ground and gathered up by squirrels over the last few months. But one leaf remained, clinging to the tip of a spindly branch that lashed back and forth above my underground retreat from the world.

My eyes tracked the movement of that leaf while my fingers toyed with the long strands of Seth's hair and I listened to the rise and fall of his breathing.

I could still taste him on my lips, still feel the ache of claiming him in my flesh, and yet I felt like that leaf; barely holding on while the wind tried to tear me away.

We'd stolen this for ourselves. Us. Stolen it and made it ours and I feared what would come of that choice in the end. I feared what this war might take from us and who, if any of us, would remain to see the other side of it.

The wind gusted harder and I sucked in a sharp breath as the leaf was torn free, my eyes tracking it as it was tossed back and forth before it was propelled out of sight.

A vice tightened around my chest for a moment as it disappeared and I found myself lost in the memory of grieving for Darius, of how broken I'd been by his loss and the knowledge that there would be no second chances again. This was it. The war would only have one winning side and even then, not all who fought for it would survive.

My Atlas buzzed and I hooked it out from under my pillow, clicking on the notification for my Horoscope.

Good morning, Taurus.

The stars have spoken about your day!

A daring love affair is in full swing, and your mind has found a cloud of peace to perch upon in the sky. But be warned, more courage will be required to fulfil the yearnings of your heart, and this fragile desire could shatter as easily as it could be made whole. With Mars in your chart, you're feeling brave, and that will serve you well in the coming day, for a quest lies on the horizon, one you will need to face with strength if you are to seize what you seek. Beware the rising tide of hunger in your soul when your fate tangles with that of a Libra between the boughs of destiny. Blood may spill, and old mistakes may be made twice if you do not tread this rocky path with caution.

The crinkle of a wrapper drew my attention and I looked to Seth in surprise, finding him awake and pushing a square of chocolate into his mouth. He gave me a grin as I caught him, tossing the empty packet aside, and I placed down my Atlas.

"Tory left that out for me yesterday," he explained. "In the bottom of her sock drawer under three concealment spells and a decoy bar which she'd laced with laxatives – I ate that too but I'm fine now. This one was the one she meant for me to have."

I breathed a laugh, tugging him closer so I could kiss him and tasting the sweetness of the chocolate on his lips.

He pulled back, looking down at me with an intensity blazing in his earth brown eyes that set my heart thumping harder and made my fear slide away to the corners of my mind once more. The war didn't seem so impossible to survive when he was looking at me like that.

"You're stressed," he said, a crease forming between his brows.

"We're at war," I said by way of explanation. My eyes slid to the clock on the wall which told me it was eight thirty-five. "And we're late."

"You can just shoot us there in thirty seconds flat," Seth pointed out, his hand trailing down my abs, tracing the lines of my muscles and making my dick harden.

"Oh, can I? Am I your preferred mode of transport now?" I teased, my words falling to a groan as he wrapped his fist around my cock and started stroking it.

"Yeah. You're my little transport bitch," he agreed, his eyes on mine while he drank in the sight of me beneath him.

I had more complaints to make about us being late, but I forgot all of them as he dropped his mouth to my cock and drew the full length of me to the back of his throat.

I cursed, fisting his hair in my hand and pushing him down harder, watching him take every inch, growling his name as desire took me captive.

Seth groaned hungrily, licking and sucking, his fist moving to his own dick as he got himself off too. I watched him with my heart pounding and my muscles tensing.

He was so fucking good with his mouth that I was coming within minutes, watching him swallow with a feral desire that was rewarded by him finishing himself too, his cum spilling over my stomach and marking me as his.

We exchanged a heated look which promised more later but as I glanced at the clock, I knew we were out of time. I yanked Seth into my arms and shot us both into the shower, flipping the water on and washing us at high speed before shooting us back into my room, drying us off with a towel and dressing us both for good measure. It was all done in less than a minute and Seth stumbled back, adjusting to the feeling of his feet suddenly being in his sneakers with a grin.

"That was-" he began, but I swept him into my arms and shot from the room before he could finish that thought.

I sped out of Terra House and across campus as fast as I could move, the cold wind whipping Seth's wet hair into my face and making him whoop a laugh before I ran through the door of The Orb and shot us into place on our red couch.

I looked around at our inner circle in surprise, taking in Max, Darius, the twins, and Orion, unsure where everyone else was.

"I thought this was a war council?" I asked in surprise, wondering where my mom and the other Councillors were - plus the extended group of Fae who were running other parts of the army's tasks like hitting the Nebula Inquisition Centres and making sure everyone was fed, scouting for information on Lionel, and overseeing training.

"It was," Geraldine called from behind me, and I looked around to find her approaching with a huge stack of books in her arms. The titles included a mixture of fairy tales and bedtime stories which made no real sense. "Two hours ago. Tasks have been assigned and information gleaned, yet where were the lowly mutt and the biting brute?"

"Hunting," I replied, just as Seth said, "Gathering berries in the forest."

Everyone looked at him in surprise, and I wondered why the fuck he'd gone for that as a cover story. I also noticed the clock on the wall which said it was close to eleven am, which probably meant my clock had stopped.

"How were the berries, Seth?" Darius asked curiously. "Did you find a lot of them?"

"Erm…yes. Yes, I did," Seth confirmed, sticking with his ridiculous lie.

"I wanna learn," Darius went on.

"Learn what?" Seth asked.

"I wanna learn from the big, bad Wolf. Can you give me a really thorough lesson, like you did for Cal?"

I fell utterly still, my gaze narrowing on Darius while I maintained an entirely expressionless face, but those words…those fucking words were a near echo of what Seth had said to me the night we'd had sex for the first time.

"A lesson in…" Seth exchanged a panicked look with me, but Darius finished the sentence for him.

"Hunting for berries like you two have been for the last two hours. You must have found some really good ones with all that time," Darius pushed.

"Oh…yeah. Any time, man. I didn't know you liked berries so much," Seth said, giving me a relieved look, but I wasn't buying it.

I narrowed my eyes at Darius as he picked up his mug of coffee and he gave me a taunting grin over the rim of it before taking a long sip.

"If you late lampoons are quite done bragging about your bush diving skills then I should like to present my findings to the group," Geraldine said loudly, dropping the stack of books onto the table between us and gesturing to them with a triumphant flourish.

"The tale of Gilbert the Gallant," Darcy said with interest, plucking a book from the top of the pile that was decorated with bright illustrations intended for children.

"Indeed. I have been giving much thought to our quest for the Guild Stones," Geraldine said seriously.

"I have some thoughts on where the final stone might be concealed," Orion began, but Geraldine waved him off.

"Thank you, dear professor of the past, but your inane ramblings won't be required here. I have watched you ponder this question and seen how you flounder and fail to find an answer as to where the final stone was secreted away many a moon ago-"

"I've spent countless hours researching-" Orion began but she threw a silencing bubble over him, making Tory laugh loudly and causing me to snort with amusement too.

"The endless whiffling of our dear fanged friend will not be required, for I believe that I have found the answer we seek. As I mentioned previously, as a child, I was somewhat obsessed with the stories of the Gems of Lariom, and I went through a four-year stage where I planned on being the one to finally find them. I read every tale and scoured every source there was. At the time, my young and carefree mind did not grasp what I now see so plainly, but as I began to muse upon this question once more, something stood out and slapped me in the chops like a tuna on a Tuesday."

"What?" Tory asked keenly.

Geraldine plucked the book back out of Darcy's hands before opening it to a page towards the end and pointing at an illustration of a blood red wall.

She grabbed another book from the stack next, opening that to a marked page and thrusting it into Tory's hands. She opened another and gave it to Max, then another and another until we all held one of the books and several more lay open on the table between us.

I looked down at the one she'd given me, finding a single word underlined.

Herithé.

I frowned at it, reading the sentence in full.

All who enter Herithé shall find themselves lost to the curse which claimed it, wasting away into nothing and becoming one with the ash of its former residents.

"Herithé is a myth," I said dismissively. "Just some creepy place that parents use to threaten their kids when they're bad. I can remember my mom saying she'd ship me off to live with the lost souls in Herithé if I didn't start tidying my room more often."

"Yes," Geraldine said, her hands slamming down on the coffee table, her eyes alight with some thought which was so far alluding me. "Herithé is in every one of these books about the Gems of Lariom. Sometimes a passing mention, sometimes a feature of the story itself. The legends that surround it are muddled and yet when you read every account you can find that, be it in legend, myth, or tale, there are some glaring similarities. An object of brutal power was stolen and hidden away in the city. But the object – sometimes a crown, sometimes a staff, sometimes a child with eyes as dark as night – whatever it may be, it always brings a curse down upon Herithé. The city was said to have fallen to a plague, a war, a glut of magic, an explosion of power – but always it is said that its inhabitants were trapped inside and any who tried to enter thereafter were trapped too, succumbing to the curse and the power of the object."

We all stared at her blankly while she puffed her chest up in victory.

"You think the object is the final Guild Stone?" Tory asked curiously.

"I do believe it is, my lady."

"Then…how do we find a city lost in legend?" Tory mused.

"I have thought of that." Geraldine ducked down and grabbed a large cannister from the floor, taking the map of Espial from it and throwing it over the table with a flourish. "I wondered if perhaps we might coax the map to reveal its location to us."

"So what facts do the legends mostly agree on?" I asked, leaning closer as the landscape of Solaria blossomed across the map, mountains pushing their way out of the page, tiny trees sprouting in a forest and miniature cities building themselves across the canvas in a true likeness of the way they were in the world at this time.

I reached out to skim my fingers through a heavy cluster of clouds over the Baruvian Jungle and smiled as the magic reformed the moment I removed my hand. If only the map revealed the locations of people and armies, we might have been able to use it to locate Lionel's forces.

Geraldine gripped the edges of the map, connecting her magic to that which had been imbued within the powerful item and asked it to reveal the lost location of Herithé.

For several seconds nothing much happened, but then a wind seemed to gust across the entire landscape and my focus was drawn to a mountainous stretch of land to the far west of the continent where thick forests gave way to stony peaks. Slowly, between the boughs of the clustered trees, a formation of blood-red brick appeared.

I sucked in a breath as I took in the tiny details emerging from the trees. There wasn't much to see; a glimpse of red stone and what might have been the spire of a tower that protruded minimally from the tree line, but that was all.

"It's going to be dangerous," Darcy said with a glint of exhilaration in her eyes.

"There might be monsters," Seth added with equal fervour.

"Off to the wandering wilds we go," Geraldine announced ominously.

She started to coil the map up, and I got to my feet.

"We're all going?" I confirmed, glancing between the others.

"It's a cursed city where all who enter are known to die," Tory said with a shrug. "Of course we're all going."

Seth howled in excitement and I couldn't help but grin too, my fangs on show and my pulse thumping wildly. The worst thing about this war was the quiet between the action, the time between battles where you couldn't be certain how long the fragile peace might last. So I was all for heading into the unknown and testing my mettle against an ancient curse.

Stardust could only be used to transport a Fae to a place they had been before, and as none of us had ever gone hiking in the Tanai Forest which we hoped hid the city of Herithé, the best we'd been able to do was get ourselves to a ski lodge Max had once come to on vacation.

I wore fighting leathers with a plate of shining armour over my chest, my Phoenix fire daggers sheathed at my belt. All of us had come to this place dressed for war.

The trek through the trees felt endless and after six hours of searching for the cursed city, I was beginning to think the fucking map had lied to us.

I was tired from shooting back and forth between the trees with Orion, the two of us using our speed to scout while Darius and the twins flew far and wide, hunting for any sign of that spire.

Seth, Max, Geraldine, Xavier, Sofia, Tyler and Washer had it easy, waiting on our reports and moving in the most likely direction while trying to use the map to narrow our hunt down. The problem was, the map covered the entire kingdom and the area it depicted across a few inches spanned hundreds of miles.

I was close to giving up on the entire thing when I finally came across a blood red brick in the dirt on my way back down the curving slope at the foot of one of the smaller mountains.

I skidded to a halt and shot back to the brick, lifting it into my hand and inspecting it curiously. The stone wasn't painted or stained that colour in any way that I could see. It simply was red.

I had never seen anything quite like it before, and I closed my eyes as I analysed it with my earth magic, feeling for its composition, trying to figure out if it was natural or tainted by magic.

My stomach roiled as I inspected the core of it, something definitively wrong about the material setting bile rolling across my tongue.

I dropped to one knee and pressed my free hand to the dirt of the damp forest floor. It was quiet here. More so than I had truly realised before coming to a halt like this. There was no birdsong, no sound of distant water, no indication of wind in the trees or beasts lurking beneath their boughs.

I pushed my magic into the dirt and instantly felt the wrongness again, though it was more muted than it had been in the brick itself. I pushed out with my power, seeking more of that feeling, more of what I was beginning to suspect was the power of the curse that had seen Herithé fall. And suddenly, I felt it. Not a single brick tainted with dark energy but many of them, one piled atop another and another, a wall growing up between the trees and barring all passage beyond it.

I stood, my eyes opening as I oriented myself towards the wall, then shot through the trees to seek it out.

It was further away than it had seemed while I felt through the dirt for it, but there was no mistaking it when I came upon it.

Between the trunks of ancient trees, reaching up towards the canopy far above my head was a wall of deepest, blood red, set like a barrier between this world and another.

It didn't look aged or touched by time, nor did it look welcoming or at all weathered. It simply was.

I took my Atlas from my pocket and shot a message to the group, dropping them my location and telling them to come quickly.

While I waited for them to arrive, I started moving along the wall. The sickly feeling of decay was heavier here and I didn't need to touch the stone to feel it. Whatever power had been used to create such a curse was still very much active.

A flash of somewhere else sprang through my mind as Orion raced to meet me, the trees blurring around him while he ran, the urge to hunt this place down filling him as the connection between us formed.

I turned and saw myself through his eyes just as I saw him with my own.

He collided with me at speed, his arms wrapping around me and a feral snarl spilling from his lips which I echoed without thought. We began to tussle playfully, yet there was more to it, an intensity that got my heart pumping wildly and made my fangs snap out on instinct.

The sound of someone else arriving had us shoving away from each other and the snarls that rang from us were deeper as we locked our gazes on Max who was leaping down from the back of a white Wolf.

"Whoa!" he yelled as we shot at him together, fangs bared and bloodlust thrashing between us. We split apart, coming at him from both sides, the rush of the game filling me with exhilaration before I slammed into an air shield and was knocked onto my ass.

I blinked as the desperate need for blood slid from me and I looked between Orion who was sprawled on the floor to my right, and Max who looked somewhere between amused and pissed off.

"Bite your damn Sources if you're hungry," he said, and my gaze moved to Seth just as he shifted back into his Fae form.

I growled as I lunged at him, pushing him back against a tree and sinking my fangs into his throat roughly.

"Fuck," Seth cursed as Orion's teeth sank into the other side of his throat a heartbeat later, and I groaned in satisfaction as I felt not only my bloodlust but Orion's finding relief as one.

Orion snarled ferociously and the sound lit the hunger in me on fire, stoking my bloodlust and urging me to take more and more.

Seth moved a little between us, unable to do much at all with our venom immobilising him two-fold and Max shouted something. But the words seemed distant and indistinct, paling to insignificance in the face of the thirst.

It was a whimper that dragged me back to myself, a soft, pained sound falling from Seth's lips which had me jerking back and ripping Orion away too.

Orion lunged forward again but I shot into his path, a snarl escaping me as I bared my teeth and glared at his bloodstained face. He snarled right back, tension crackling between us for several heady seconds before finally, he blinked, remembering himself at last.

I felt the rush of the hunt fading from him, the connection between us shattering once more. I whirled back to face Seth, gripping his throat between my hands and pressing healing magic into his skin as I fought off the pull of the coven bond and looked into his dark eyes.

Seth was grinning at me like it was all some game he'd been a part of, and I frowned back at him, an apology on my lips which felt utterly inadequate.

"Seth," I began, but he rolled his eyes, knocking my hands from his neck before swiping a splash of blood from my chin with his thumb and pushing it into my mouth.

"Next time, you won't catch me off guard so easily," he taunted before swaggering away butt naked towards Max who held the bag filled with his clothes.

"He's my Source," I growled at Orion, my gaze narrowing as I tried to figure out what had just happened and why the rage I should have felt at him sinking his teeth into my claimant wasn't fully present.

"I know. I didn't want to…I haven't been that caught up in the hunt since I first Emerged. I don't know why I even bit him. I was hunting for this place, not blood."

We exchanged a dark look, neither of us able to deny the power of the bloodlust and the urge to hunt which had just driven us after our prey as one.

"There's a reason why we shouldn't have formed a coven," I murmured.

"Too late to do much about that now," he replied. "I've found some books on the subject – we should discuss it more when this is done."

I nodded in agreement, trying to push off the uncomfortable feeling which was mixing with the surge of satisfaction simmering in my blood following that hunt.

The ground shuddered as Darius landed in his Dragon form and I met Orion's gaze with a faint frown while the rest of our friends all moved closer in the clearing.

"That was…intense," I said in a voice low enough for only a Vampire to hear.

"I got caught up in the search for this place and my magic was running low," he said softly. "I didn't mean to turn it into an actual hunt."

"Is everything okay?" Darcy asked, banishing her wings as she moved over to Orion and looked at the blood staining his mouth.

"Yeah, beautiful," he replied, though he sounded as uncertain as I felt. "I just got a bit thirsty and the mutt got in my way before I could claim a taste of the good stuff." He wiped a hand coated in water magic across his face, cleaning the blood off before drawing her closer to him for a kiss.

The sound of heavy paws stalking through the trees carried to us as Geraldine approached the blood-red wall in her Cerberus form. Her three giant heads lifted as one and released a trio of victorious howls which pierced the unearthly silence of the place before she shifted back into her Fae form and placed her fists on her hips.

"By golly, there it is," Geraldine cooed as Xavier, Tyler, Sofia and Washer followed her through the trees.

"Gosh those are some stiff-looking bricks," Washer commented, starting up some lunges, and Xavier took a pointed step away from him.

"At least this place isn't creepy as fuck and rumoured to kill everyone who enters its walls," Tory said dryly as she moved to stand beside me, and my lips twitched with amusement. I wondered if she realised how she held herself these days, with her chin up and defiance sparkling in her gaze that seemed to dare the stars to try their luck with her again. She wore her Phoenix armour and her sword was sheathed at her belt. Looking between her and Darcy, there was no denying that they were monarchs even without crowns on their heads.

"It is…magnificent," Geraldine declared, her bare ass staring back at all of us where we'd gathered behind her.

Darius shifted into his Fae form and Max tossed him his clothes on his way to coax Geraldine back into hers.

When everyone was dressed again and Darius had slung his axe over his back, we started to walk along the length of the wall.

Tory stayed at my side, making snide remarks about whoever had decided to hide a Guild Stone in this hellish place, and the knot of discomfort in my chest slowly eased in her company. She said nothing about me going feral and losing my mind to the hunt with Orion. That wasn't her style. She just walked with me, cracked bad jokes, and arched an eyebrow whenever I fell silent for too long.

"Behold!" Geraldine cried as we rounded a corner and found ourselves before an enormous stone archway beneath which hung two impossibly large wooden doors. The one on the right was ajar, allowing us a peek at a deep red street beyond and nothing more. "And so we step into the clutches of a death curse, ready to face down doom in pursuit of a single stone," Geraldine boomed.

She didn't so much as hesitate as she slipped through the door, Max hot on her heels.

"Don't look so sad, moon friend. You can be rough with me sometimes, it's okay. I'm irresistible, so I know how hard it must be for you to try and hold back all the time," Seth said to a scowling Orion, wrapping an arm around his shoulders and guiding him through the gates next.

"Yeah, Caleb finds it almost impossible to resist Seth too," Darius agreed as he followed them with Darcy right beside him. "I've seen him pouncing on him and pinning him down, doing anything he can think of to get his mouth all over-"

His words fell away as they disappeared through the gate and I frowned slightly, exchanging a look with Tory.

"Why did he say it like that?" I muttered.

"Like what?" she asked innocently. Too innocently. Tory didn't do innocent.

"Like me biting Seth is…" I trailed off, the truth of what it was sticking my tongue to the roof of my mouth as I realised I was probably only going to dig myself a hole by saying anything more on this.

Xavier, Tyler, Sofia, and Washer slipped through the doors ahead, leaving us to bring up the rear.

"Like it's kinda hot when you pin him to a tree and drag your mouth all over his body?" she asked, smirking at me.

I stumbled a step as I made it to the gate, frowning back at her as I wondered what she'd seen, what she'd figured out. Or if she was just remembering the way it had been for us once upon a time and making a comment on that.

But whatever I'd thought I was going to say in reply to that taunt fell to nothing on my lips as I found myself inside the city of Herithé, because the courtyard of blood red stone we stepped into was entirely abandoned.

"Darius?" I called, my voice echoing back to me a thousand times from walls which gleamed as though wet and streets which were endlessly empty. Our friends had vanished without a trace, and the pressing silence drove a sliver of dread into my heart.

There was no reply from within the warren of abandoned masonry. And as Tory drew her sword at my side, the gate to Herithé slammed closed at our backs.