I wonder why that is, Maggot? he taunted. If I hadn’t expended my power to save your worthless life, I’d be free right now. As it is, you have only hours left.
We’d see about that.
A roar sounded from the far end of the hall, bellowing down to us across the stone. Something pounded in response, each hit booming loud enough that I felt the echo of it in my bones.
Prosperity, Alastor said quietly. I think we’d best leave this level of the prison. . . .
Zachariah stopped a few hundred feet ahead of us, lingering beside a massive wall of dark metal. The door and all its chains rattled, exploding their thick coat of dust over them into the air. I slapped my hands over my ears as whatever was inside howled again.
“Holy crap,” I breathed out. What could be big and heavy enough to move the cell door an inch, never mind leave an indentation in the sheet of metal, near where Zachariah floated? The door squealed again as the prisoner rammed itself into that same spot—as if it could tear through it by will alone. The shade stared at the warped metal, emotionless.
Nightlock cowered behind Nell as he said, “There are things here older than memory, and darker than the deepest night. Many hobs have been sent to clean these deep levels. Few have ever returned.”
As his name indicated, he’d been born to serve here, in this terrible place. No wonder . . . no wonder he’d tried so hard to avoid coming back.
I felt Nell’s gaze land on me again, but refused to meet it.
The next door we found led to stairs. I pushed it open a few inches against the protests of its rusted hinges. We just had to keep going up, didn’t we? Eventually we’d reach the right tower.
Prue, I thought, rubbing the scar our grandmother had given my left arm. That night in the dungeon felt like a lifetime ago. I’m coming. I’m almost there.
She would be in for the surprise of her life when none other than her unremarkable tragedy of a twin materialized out of the darkness to save her from the mess the centuries-old fiend inside him had created.
Oh, please. As if you bear no responsibility. She was your sister to care for. I merely took advantage of your carelessness with the lying Bellegraves.
I set my jaw. The way you cared for Pyra, letting your family lock her up in that tower?
How ironic that his sister had imprisoned mine in the same place.
Ironic . . . or intentionally baiting.
“I think your sister is trolling us again,” I said quietly.
My sister is many terrible things, but a troll is not one of them, Alastor said, disgusted.
“What should we do about the hob?” Flora whispered to Nell, clutching her cloak tighter. “Won’t he reveal us?”
“I shall not,” the hob said. “I made my vow.”
We’d passed a few empty cells. Maybe we could just . . . leave him down here.
I concur. A wise plan.
A bolt of irritation shot through me. Stop agreeing with me!
“Eleanor? Will you make sure he keeps his word?” Nell asked. Ogre Eleanor nodded, trying to scurry the way a spider would with her new, lumbering legs. Nightlock let out a gasp as he was scooped up.
“There is nothing a hob takes more seriously than a life debt—” he began, only to be cut off as Eleanor seized him again, pressing the hob to her chest, and covering his mouth. “Mmmh! Unmand me!”
“I read the fine print in Goody Elderflower’s chapter on life debts, you tricky little worm,” Nell said. “It said that you only owe a debt to me, which means you could happily let the others die.”
Nightlock slumped in defeat, glaring at the back of Nell’s head as she turned and continued on.
I took the stairs up to the next level two at a time, up and up and up through the levels of the prison, until finally, the voices drifting down like raven feathers were just on the other side of another door. This time, when I peered through the bars, I didn’t see a set of stairs—I saw fiends. Everywhere.
The room was massive, divided by a staircase that itself split as it went up in either direction. There had to be at least two hundred fiends sitting together on the soot-covered floor. Stacks of their possessions were spread around them.
Many clutched armfuls of robes, their shoulders shaking as they wept or growled loudly into the plush fabrics. A few goblins tried to stack a series of portraits on top of hastily assembled piles of clothing. Beside them, a lady ogre lay stretched out on bedding, a baby ogre nestled against her chest. I looked away, only to quickly look back.
The ogre wasn’t sleeping. Another fiend, this one with two necks and two heads, leaned over her, wrapping a long pale bandage around her bleeding forehead.
She wasn’t the only one injured either. With what dimly burning light the non-magic lanterns around the entrance provided, I finally noticed the fiends helping the wounded, or clearing out the rubble and debris that had fallen from the nearby statue and walls.
At the very center of what once must have been a dark, cavernous space was a statue of a snarling lion. The upper half of its body had cracked and fallen off, leaving only four legs behind for small fiends to cower beneath.
The despair . . . Alastor said, his voice hollow. A storm of barbed pain and featherlight wonder moved through me like winds shoving at each other. Whatever Alastor was feeling at the sight of the fiends around us, it was many things at once. The suffering I tasted in the sewers, the same I gladly fed upon . . . it wasn’t from the prisoners.
“I hate fiends, and this is even horrible to me,” Nell whispered.
“Why?” Zachariah asked. “Why would it bother you? Witches and fiends are mortal enemies, are they not?”
Nell whipped her head around, quietly snarling, “Witches are also in possession of hearts. Not every fiend goes after humans, or tries to enter our realm.”
I shushed them, just as a voice beyond the door began a deep-throated wail of misery.
“It won’t stop,” a goblin said to everyone and no one. A few of the nearby fiends looked over, nodding in agreement. The goblin, his pewter robe matching the glimmering of his silver skin, clutched a hand to his bleeding ear—half of which seemed to be missing. “The Void won’t ever stop.”
“Don’t say that!” another hissed back. “The queen will save us all!”
Inside me, something began to quiver. The depth of Alastor’s pain took on a unique texture, one I’d never felt before. It sliced at me, leaving thousands of shallow cuts on my heart.
They help each other, he said, his voice small. They encourage one another. I did not think it was possible for beings such as us.
It’s always possible to help others, I told him, the inside of my skin prickling with his barbed pain. In that moment, with Alastor caught in the surge of his feelings at the undeniable evidence around us, I actually felt sorry for him.
“Long may she rage,” another fiend called back. “She will push back the Void. She will!”
But could she do that without Alastor’s powers—without killing me?
How do I get to the Tower of No Return? I asked Alastor.
He was silent.
Alastor! I barked out in my head. Up those stairs?
The malefactor spoke after another unbearable stretch of silence. Yes. Up those stairs and countless more.
There were hundreds of fiends between the tower and me, but I could make it. I could.
“Okay,” I whispered, crouching down under the doorway. I lifted my hood over my head and repeated that same word again, both to myself and to the others, “Okay . . . Al, you’re going to have to guide me there, but the rest of you should stay here—”
“Prosper,” Nell began.
“No, don’t try to argue,” I said. “I can do this.”
“Prosper,” Nell said again, this time a little louder.
Ogre Toad turned me toward the door’s window again.
“If you’re done being a stubborn idiot, look at the guard at the base of the stairs,” Nell whispered.
&nbs
p; I peered through the fiends milling around, and knew exactly when I found the guard she was referring to. The dark scaled armor seemed to swallow its small form, and each time it turned, its helmet slid crookedly on its head.
The guard turned, scanning the room. In one hand it clutched a short sword, and in the other, a candle lantern. Its frail light was more than enough to highlight the long curl of bright red hair that had escaped from under the helmet.
Relief burst inside of me like a sparkler. And yet in the moment that followed, a very small, very ugly feeling crept in. I felt myself, and my vision of being the hero, deflate.
“She returned from the Tower of No Return,” Flora said, her eyes wide and glowing.
Of course she had. She was Prudence Fidelia Redding.
She had rescued herself.
“What do we do?” Nell asked, taking a step back from the door. I leaned against the wall, thinking. “We can’t call her over here without someone hearing. . . .”
“If we can’t get her attention,” I said, “I’ll go grab her and bring her back. There have to be enough fiends moving around that no one will notice a cloaked figure, right?”
No. Lurking, cloaked figures are never suspicious.
Nell did not look convinced, either.
Before anyone could offer an alternative idea, Ogre Toad linked his massive arm through mine and marched us through the door and into the entrance hall to the prison.
Oh—oh. Nice, Toad. He was providing the cover I needed—literally with his massive body, and figuratively by giving us a story for being there. We were just a guard and his prisoner. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something long, silky, and black stroke the air.
“Tail,” I reminded him. He shuffled back a few steps and, with a second, quieter pop, the cat tail disappeared.
The sobs and moans of the fiends accompanied us as we made our way through the piles of salvaged belongings. They were distracted by their grief, but each step I took rattled through me. So many eyes. So, so many opportunities to be seen. I mentally willed Prue to turn toward us, but she kept her face angled stubbornly away.
And then, without warning, she turned and hurried up the stairwell, not down.
My mouth fell open, ready to call out to her, but there was no way to do it without signing my own death certificate. I spun toward where we had left the others, but they must have seen what had happened and were already on the move.
Ogre Eleanor led the way, holding a squirming and likely gagged Nightlock under a cloak. The other changelings trailed after them, still looking uncomfortable in their fiend forms. The second they reached the stairs, we were all running. Zachariah blew past us in a streak of light.
At the top of the grand staircase was a long hall of empty prison cells. Waiting for us at the far end were three massive metal doors, the middle one left slightly ajar.
“Is that the door to the Tower of No Return?” I asked Alastor.
He didn’t answer.
“Al,” I whispered again. “Which one?”
I don’t know, he said faintly.
“Which one is it, Nightlock?” Nell said.
The hob released a heavy sigh and confirmed, “The middle door.”
I stepped forward only for Nell’s voice to stop me.
“Wait,” she said, swinging her pack forward and untying the laces. It took her only a moment to find the familiar dark vial. Its silver contents shimmered at me.
“Our emergency exit?” I said.
“Just in case,” she whispered, still not elaborating.
I lifted the door’s heavy latch and, with Nell’s help, dragged it open. Beyond it, the staircase looked like a twisted spine, its steps as white as bleached bone.
“Prue?” I called. “Prue!”
Nell hushed me. “Where are the guards? And now that I’m thinking about it, why did she come here?”
“That is weird,” I agreed, glancing back to make sure we hadn’t been followed. “Al, should we be worried?”
The malefactor’s silence vibrated in my ears, tempered only by the sound of everyone’s panting breaths. It nipped at my senses and stirred up a warning at the center of my chest.
By the time we reached the top of the tower, my legs felt like they were on the verge of melting into mush. Nell and I leaned against either wall of the stairwell, dangerously close to rolling back down all those steps we’d just climbed.
Flora breezed by us, practically skipping up the last few steps.
“This is so . . . creepy,” Nell said, glancing around.
“Prue?” I called again. “It’s me—we’ve got to get out of here—”
The only response to my words was the screech of a rat as it ran back into a hole in the wall. Overhead, thousands of tiny spiders swarmed the ceiling, crawling over each other to slip in through the doorframe to get into the cell.
Strange crimson light filtered down from a hatch in the ceiling. Nell held out a hand under one particularly strong beam of it, as if she could catch it in her palm like a stream of water. As high as we were in the dark sky, the air around us was sweltering with the heat of what I recognized was magic.
A rickety metal ladder leaned against the metal hatch overhead, inviting us into the tower’s only prison cell. I gripped a rung and started climbing.
“Are you sure you want to . . .” Nell began. “Never mind.”
As strange as it had been to find no guards posted along the tower’s stairs, some part of my mind recognized that it was even stranger that there was no lock on the door. With one last surge of strength, I drove my shoulder against it and almost crowed in triumph as it slammed open.
I shielded my eyes with my hand, trying to give them a moment to adjust to the flood of bloodred light. Crawling off the top rung of the ladder and onto the floor, I drew onto my knees. And froze.
“What . . . is that?” Nell whispered from the ladder, her face lit by the crackling power above us.
Alastor gasped. The sound of his shock whirled in my ears, tightening fear’s clawed grip on me. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or to himself as he said, The pain here is immense. The stain of it echoes through the centuries.
The cell was the largest of any we’d seen, but it was filled with lightning bolts of that same unsettling crimson power. They raced over our heads, firing toward the orb hovering like a small sun below the tower’s turreted roof. The mass of magic throbbed like it had a pulse of its own, flashing dangerously with each shudder.
“Prue?” I called, searching for her. “Where are you?”
This power is that of malefactors. . . . It feels familiar, almost as if . . .
“Prue?” I called out. “Where are you?” We must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, or there had to be another hidden exit. She just wasn’t here.
I crossed the room to look out through the lone window, searching for Prue’s shape on the edges below.
From up here, the effects of the Void were even more pronounced. But, at one point in time, Pyra must have been able to see far and wide.
It would have been the worst kind of torment, wouldn’t it? To have your whole realm spread out beneath you, and still be too distant to touch any of it. To look down at everything you could never have, every single day. Of course she was the way she was—this cell was her villain origin story.
She is not a villain, Alastor said coldly. She is . . . she is . . .
“Where is she?” Nell asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, frustrated. “Everyone spread out. There must be an escape route somewhere.”
Behind me, Flora and the changelings followed Nell as she climbed the ladder. Seeing them all bathed in the eerie light made me feel like my skin was crawling. That feeling only intensified as I watched Zachariah shoot into the air, toward a narrow stone platform that ringed the room. The shade went still, and for the first time I saw something other than disdain on his face.
I saw horror.
I took step after step bac
k, trying to adjust my line of sight to see what he was staring at. “What’s wrong?”
Four statues loomed on the platform like gargoyles. Their faces were carved with agonized expressions. Even the shapes of their bodies looked tortured, as if the stone had once been alive and had felt every chip of the chisel. They were horrifying to look at, but even stranger were the streaks of magic that seemed to drain from them. Each glowing wisp sizzled as it passed overhead and fed into the orb.
Those are not statues, Alastor said hoarsely. Those are my brothers.
“Your brothers?” I repeated. “No, they’ve clearly been—”
Nell rushed over to my side. I only pointed up at the walkway, too horrified to speak.
“Mmmpf!” A muffled sound rang out from the other side of the room. “Promper! Promper!”
I turned slowly, my eyes following the curve of the tower’s upper level until, finally, they landed on Prue.
Prue wore the same clothing from Salem. Her face was streaked with sweat and dirt, and she had been bound and gagged.
But that was impossible. . . . We had seen her. . . .
The smoldering orb throbbed in earnest, squealing like metal being cooled too quickly. It folded down onto itself, wrapping one of its layers over another, and another, and another—
A sharp, blinding pain cracked my skull. I staggered back against the nearest wall, jamming the heel of my palm against my forehead. The girls kept their backs to me, staring at the show of light and power. I stumbled toward the opening in the floor, frantically trying to pull the ladder up through it. I had to get to Prue—
“It’s hardening into stone,” Nell said, looking up at the orb.
“Like a diamond,” Flora said solemnly. “Heat and pressure shaping it into something new. The blood key.”
“How is this a key?” Nell asked, turning to the elf. “How could she use this to enter the realm of Ancients?”
There was a hard tug at my core. My feet slid across the floor as some invisible force dragged me toward the calcifying orb. When I held up my hands, their edges seemed runny, as if I had painted them with watercolors.
We must . . . get out . . . of here . . . Alastor panted. She wanted us here. She knew we would come. My power—I feel it draining—
The Last Life of Prince Alastor Page 20