Gift of the Darkness (The Gateway Trackers Book 7)

by E. E. Holmes

  20

  Lion and Lamb

  TO GIVE MYSELF CREDIT, I did not go quietly. Even though I knew it was absolutely no use whatsoever, I fought with every ounce of fire I had, and after my encounter with Charlie, I was basically a human inferno. My unlucky captors had to endure biting, scratching, kicking, flailing, and elbow jabbing as they hauled me, like a thing possessed, to the depths of the dungeons. I shouted all the way, too, screaming about the High Priestess’ betrayal until my throat was hoarse and raw. And though we passed several living and many dead inhabitants of the castle, not a single one of them spared me even a passing glance. It was as though I did not exist, as though my struggle, rather than earning their attention, had created a barrier between us that could not be breached. By the time the Caomhnóir hurled me unceremoniously into the cell and slammed the door behind me, it was with a distinct grunt of relief to finally be rid of me.

  I paced the room in an aimless sort of panic, taking in the runes, the bars, the chains on the wall, all without really seeing them at all, already sure I would find no means of escape. My mind was racing out of control, terrified of what Simone and Charlie might be planning, what wheels had already been set in motion, just in the time it had taken me to reach this godforsaken cell. I sank to my knees, every bit of fight finally draining from me, leaving me a sobbing heap upon the filthy stone floor.

  “I’m sorry,” I whimpered over and over again, my face pressed against the cold, damp rock. “I’m sorry, Agnes. I did everything I could. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “Okay, we get it, you’re sorry, but now is not the time to go to pieces. Pull yourself together, sweetness.”

  My head shot up at the sound of the voice. I blinked away the blinding film of tears to see Milo strolling casually through the wall of the cell. He looked exhausted and worried, but his face broke into a wide grin.

  “Milo!” I gasped and flung myself forward onto him, enveloping myself in the shivery comfort of his spectral embrace. If I’d gone to pieces before, it was nothing to what I did now. He didn’t tease me anymore, just shushed me and stroked my hair with the whisper of his touch until I cried myself out.

  “There now,” he said, pulling back to look me in the face. “Are we functioning now?”

  “I have never been so glad to see anyone in my entire life as I am to see you right now,” I laughed in a shaky voice.

  “Oh, I am SO going to hold that over your head for eternity,” he said with a wink before his face fell back into lines of seriousness.

  “I don’t understand. What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

  “I came with Hannah and Celeste. They’re here, Jess, they’re in the castle.”

  “What?!” I cried. “But why didn’t she tell me? I kept trying to open the connection but she’d closed it and I couldn’t get through.”

  “She was blocking you on purpose,” Milo said. “She knew you’d flip out if you knew she was on her way, so she didn’t want to tip you off. Seems like it was a pretty stupid plan in retrospect.”

  “You’re damn right it was a stupid plan, but never mind that now. What are they doing here?”

  “Hannah did what you asked her to do. She went to Celeste and told her everything,” Milo said.

  “Oh, God,” I said, putting my hand over my mouth. “How… how did she take it?”

  “How would you take it?” Milo asked, raising an amused eyebrow.

  “She was pissed, huh?” I asked, feeling the mounting guilt that I’d left Hannah holding the bag.

  “She was furious,” Milo said. “But to be honest, she didn’t have much time to go on about it, because she was immediately making arrangements to come here. Hannah threatened to set out on her own if Celeste didn’t bring her along, so she agreed. They got here even before you did, since they came by helicopter. They brought Seamus and Kiernan for security and, since I wasn’t about to let Hannah out of my sight, I tagged along as well.”

  “But what happened when they got here? Why aren’t you with them now? And how did you find me?”

  “Whoa there, sweetness, one question at a time. Let a girl get a word in,” Milo said, flapping his hands to silence me. “As soon as we got within range of the castle’s Castings, something really strange happened. I started to feel a pull, like a magnet toward the place, and the closer we flew, the stronger it got. And then suddenly, as we approached the landing pad up on the mountaintop, I was just… yanked… right out of the helicopter and through the walls of the castle.”

  “What the hell?” I muttered. “Has anything like that ever happened to you before?”

  Milo shook his head, and I could tell he was shaken. “This place is like a giant spirit magnet. You can’t will yourself out of its influence. If I weren’t Bound to you and Hannah, I honestly think I might be trapped here.”

  “What reason would Havre de Gardiennes have to draw in spirits against their will? Surely enough spirits are drawn here on their own, by the sheer spiritual connection of the place.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. It was unnerving. But then I started interacting with the other spirits around this place and I think I might have figured it out. Have you met any of the spirits here?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I haven’t talked to any of them. But we noticed they seemed very… I’m not sure what the right word is…”

  “Zombie-like?” Milo suggested grimly. “Like, the walking dead… literally?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’d say that’s a pretty apt description.”

  Milo gave a shiver. “Jess, I think there’s something wrong with them. They don’t respond when I try to speak to them. They just sort of… drift aimlessly around. Aimlessly isn’t even the right word—it’s like they’re on tracks, and they’re just following a predetermined pattern over and over again. I watched one spirit—she looked like she might have been a maid when she was alive—who walked up and down this one hallway, dusting the same three portraits over and over again. It was like she was stuck on a loop.”

  “You mean like Blind Summoners?” I asked. I shuddered to remember these spirits that the Necromancers had created, their very essences dragged from their bodies and captured in flame, so that they were merely empty spirit shells, ready to be controlled and ordered around.

  “I guess so, yeah,” Milo said. He gave a delicate shiver. “Anyway, none of them were any help figuring out why I was literally sucked into the place, so I went off in search of Hannah and the others.”

  “Did you find them?”

  “Sure did! Opened the connection right up—you can’t imagine how relieved I was to discover it still worked. Hannah described her surroundings, and I just kept searching until I found a Warded room I could enter, and there they were. Celeste was in a real huff. Seamus and Kiernan had been taken away by the other Caomhnóir upon arrival for a ‘security search’ and never came back. Then I guess Celeste and Hannah had been told the High Priestess would be right with them, and then the Caomhnóir just locked them in that room. Celeste was going on and on about how she had never been treated like this in all the times she’d come here, that something wasn’t right.”

  “Yeah, Ileana mentioned something to that effect, too. So, then what happened?”

  “Hannah suggested I try to find you. She thought you might be locked away somewhere, too.”

  “And how did you find me?” I asked. “I don’t even know where I am right now.”

  Milo chuckled. “It wasn’t exactly difficult. Not two minutes after Hannah sent me to find you, you started screaming like a lunatic. I just followed the dulcet sounds of your hysteria and kept myself out of sight until the guards left. And of course, they haven’t invented the Casting that can keep me out if one of my girls is around, so I just floated on in.”

  “Well, like I said, I’m glad to see you, but unless you can float both of us on out of here, I’m no better off than I was doing the whole shrieking pointlessly thing,” I said.

  Milo’s
smile slipped from his face. “Yeah, I have to admit, I haven’t figured that part out yet.”

  “We need to find the others,” I said. “Finn, Annabelle, Catriona, and Ileana. I was separated from them when Simone agreed to see me, and I have no idea what happened to them.”

  “Isn’t Lucida with you, too?” Milo asked.

  I stiffened. “She’s dead. The Necromancers ambushed us as we were approaching the outpost. They killed her. She was… trying to protect me.”

  “Oh, shit,” Milo whispered. “I… I don’t know what to…”

  “Neither do I,” I said shortly, cutting off the avenue for a conversation I was not ready to have. “So, the others… do you think you could find them?”

  “I can try,” Milo said. “Spirits seem to be able to wander this place pretty freely. If I just stay pale and despondent-looking, I should blend right in. Do you want me to search the dungeon, or… hang on, you haven’t even told me what happened with the High Priestess. Did you get to deliver your message? What the hell are you doing down in the dungeon anyway?”

  As quickly as I could, I explained to Milo what had transpired in my audience with Simone. By the time I had finished, Milo’s hands were so tightly wrapped around his face in horror that his next words were barely distinguishable. “She’s working with the Necromancers?! The most powerful Durupinen in the world is working with the Necromancers?”

  “Yes,” I said, relieved to share the burden of this gut-wrenching knowledge with at least one other person before the weight of it crushed me. “And she doesn’t care what or who she destroys as long as she maintains her position and her ability to Leech her way to immortality. She’s sold us all out, Milo.”

  “What do you think she’s going to do to Celeste and Hannah?” Milo asked, still peeking at me from between his own fingers.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Probably just keep them locked up where they are, so they can’t alert anyone to what’s happening. Unless of course, she decides to just do away with pretense and drag them down here to the dungeons. She may even try to persuade Celeste—to get her on her side. After all, the fewer clans she has to subdue, the better.”

  Milo shook his head. “Celeste has made some poor decisions recently, but there’s no way in hell she’d ever agree to sell out the Northern Clans to the Necromancers.”

  “I agree, which is why we’ve got to warn Celeste and Hannah about what’s happening,” I said.

  “Okay, well should I try to find Finn and the others first? Or go back to Hannah and Celeste? And once I find everyone, how the hell are we going to get out of here?”

  As though in direct answer to his question, a grating, squeal sounded from the hallway and the door to my cell slid partway open. A face, pale and terrified, appeared in the gap.

  “Marguerite!” I cried.

  Marguerite’s eyes widened in fear, and she put her finger up to her lips in a plea for silence. Then she struggled against the door, forcing it a few inches wider so that she could slip inside. A large ring of keys was clutched tightly in her hand, and her chest was rising and falling rapidly.

  “Um, who is this, exactly?” Milo asked backing away from Marguerite in alarm.

  “This is Marguerite de Chastenay, Simone’s sister,” I replied hastily before turning back to Marguerite. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”

  Marguerite’s wide eyes filled with tears. She looked down at the cell keys in her hands and then at me before whispering. “I don’t know. I… Oh, mon Dieu, I just don’t know. I must be out of my mind.” She turned in a circle on the spot, as though trying to decide whether she oughtn’t to just run right back out of the cell again and slam the door shut behind her.

  “No, please,” I whispered, reaching out a hand toward her, but the movement made her flinch, so I hastily retracted it. “You… must have come down here for a reason. You’ve unlocked my cell. Please. Please talk to me.”

  She met my eyes, and I could see that hers were awash with tears and doubt. “My… my sister… the Necromancers… I never dreamed… never once would have believed it of her…”

  “I know,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. “I was betrayed myself once. The Necromancers have always been able to manipulate people. It’s one of the reasons they’ve survived for so many years.”

  “She… they must have lied to her… she must not be thinking clearly. My sister is a wise and judicious ruler,” Marguerite said, flinging the words at me in a sudden burst of anger.

  Somehow, I sincerely doubted this interpretation of events. Simone had seemed to know exactly what she was doing. But if nurturing this delusion of Simone’s innocence was necessary to persuade Marguerite to help me, then so be it. “I’m sure you’re right,” I said soothingly. “My own sister was manipulated into working with them once. They are so persuasive, so unscrupulous. They would say anything, tell any lie.”

  “Yes,” Marguerite muttered, nodding along. “Yes, they’ve tricked her. I’m sure that’s it.”

  “There’s still time,” I said, though I had no idea if this was true. “We might still be able to stop her—I mean, stop the Necromancers. But you’ve got to let me out of here and help me find my friends.”

  “I know where your friends are being held,” Marguerite said. “And I… oh…” she stopped, biting her lip, the tears in her eyes brimming over and spilling down her cheeks. “What have I done? I’m going to be in such trouble.”

  “What is it?” I asked her. “What is it you’ve done? I can help you. We’ll figure it out together if you’ll just tell me.”

  “I… I brought you these,” Marguerite answered. And she reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out the three Keys of the Reckoning.

  I gasped. Even Milo, who had only moments before even learned of the existence of the keys, threw his hands up over his mouth as he realized what he was looking at. I took a very cautious step forward, hardly daring to believe my eyes.

  “Marguerite… how did you get your hands on those?” I squeaked.

  Marguerite shrugged. “It was very simple. I know the codes to the vaults. She often sends me to fetch things for her if she does not want to fetch them herself, but I have never opened one without her permission. After you were escorted out, I asked Simone to please explain what was happening.”

  “And did she?” I asked, when Marguerite did not go on.

  Marguerite’s face twisted strangely, as though she were fighting against feelings she had never felt before—or at the very least, had never allowed herself to acknowledge. “She… she told me to stop crying and go to my chambers. And to speak of this to no one. And then she left with the Necromancer and I was alone.”

  “I… I’m sorry she treated you that way, Marguerite,” I said quietly.

  Marguerite’s head snapped up, a defiant gleam in her eye. “She is not herself. She is hoodwinked.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said quickly.

  “But I knew I must do something,” Marguerite said. “I waited until I was sure she was gone. And then I took the keys from the safe. I… don’t think my sister should have them. Not until she… until she comes back to her senses. Can… can you take them? I think you are meant to have them.” She suddenly looked terrified at the thought of having the keys in her possession a moment longer and practically threw them at me. I fumbled awkwardly but managed to hang on to them, pulling all three chains around my neck and tucking them down the front of my sweater.

  “Thank you, Marguerite,” I said, gripping the keys gratefully through the fabric. “You’ve done the right thing, I promise.”

  Marguerite did not reply but wiped the tears from her face with the backs of her hands.

  “Jess, we’re wasting time,” Milo said, floating up alongside me and speaking into my ear. “Do you think we can we trust her to help find the others?”

  “I don’t think we’ve got a choice,” I replied, and addressed Marguerite again. “Marguerite, we need your help.”

>   “I don’t know,” Marguerite replied, wringing her hands now, her nerves clearly mounting.

  “Please, I’m begging you. We’ve got to find my friends, the ones I came with. My sister and the High Priestess of the Northern Clans are here too, and they’re being detained. Please, can you help me to get them out? There’s no telling what the Necromancers will do to us if you don’t help us.”

  Marguerite’s face twisted in an agony of doubt. And then suddenly, she seemed to come to a decision. She took a deep breath, and said, “Very well. Follow me and keep very quiet.”

  The cellblock in which I had been imprisoned seemed completely deserted. I heard no moans or clinking from the other cells, no cries for mercy or freedom. And because there were no other prisoners, there were no other guards. We slipped from one cellblock up a staircase to a second without encountering a single person except for the occasional spirit, each of whom drifted past with the same empty, expressionless demeanor as the others we had encountered, taking as little notice of us as they did of each other.

  Marguerite crept along until we reached the very last stretch of cells before the wall curved and disappeared up another flight of stairs. I could hear shifting and coughing in the cell closest to us, and stretched up onto my tiptoes to see Catriona sitting inside it.

  “Cat!”

  “Jess! Oh my God, how did you… what in the bollocking blazes is going on?” she cried, jumping to her feet at the sound of my voice.

  “Jess?”

  “Did you say Jess? Is Jess out there?”

  The voices echoed from the other cells as Marguerite scurried around and opened them with her ring of keys. One by one, Catriona, Ileana, and Annabelle stumbled frantically from their cells, falling upon me in a torrent of questions.

  “What happened to you?”

  “The moment you were gone, the Caomhnóir arrived and arrested us!”

  “No explanations! Just told us we had to come with them.”

  Finn was the last to be released. He opened his mouth, probably to ask me if I was okay, but instead, his eyes fell on Milo and he gasped.