Pulse.
“You’ll be the one to take her to him,” Ava said. “It’s going to work out just like we planned. We just have to wait a bit longer, that’s all.”
Pulse. Pulse. Pulse.
I sucked in a murderous breath that shook my whole body.
I’d been right about Jasper.
The rule of the cards was in place. If he really was loyal to Phantom, he would have learned about my escape from Damianos—not Ava. But it was as clear as tears. Ava had told him everything.
Gritting my teeth, I forced my gaze to turn down the corridor into the darkness.
No time to hurt. No time to kill.
I’ll just leave her to the Prince’s mercy, then.
My eyes started to burn with tears, but I snubbed them and took off down the corridor. The baths were still two wings away and I wasn’t even sure if whoever was waiting for me would still be there.
I had to leave behind the urge to kill them both. Time wasn’t on my side.
I just hoped the Prince did the dirty work for me. And that he would start with Jasper.
15
My gauzy black cloak clung to my body the moment I stepped into the steam. The baths were as misty as morning fog and carried the moisture of one.
The soles of my soft leather boots were silent against the marble floors. Steam swarmed me, shielding me from anyone who might be in the baths, but blocking my view too.
The further I wandered in, the thicker the mist became, like it was clutching every round pool dug into the marble. I reached a row of narrow mud-filled pools when I first saw the shadow. It stretched up a paper screen, like a shadow over white floors.
Slowly, I moved around the paper-screen.
The sack weighed down on my shoulder, blossoming some aches that made my teeth grit. With the steam billowing all around me, my palms grew clammy and I was starting to lose my grip on the sack.
Slumps of relief were already sinking into my muscles as I rounded the screen.
I saw the shadow clear in front of me. Dark hair, plaited. White shirt, dotted with sweat-spots. Black breeches that looked too tight.
Still, I couldn’t quite make out his face. But from the buff shape of the silhouette, I knew it was a man.
The shadow turned to face me.
A chill clutched my spine.
The sack slid out of my grip and thumped to the floor.
Even with his face suddenly shaven, I recognised him instantly.
Adrik.
“And I thought I was late,” he said gruffly. The voice didn’t match the face anymore, not with all that scraggly hair gone from his nostrils-down.
He looked like the handsome arrogant son of a wealthy merchant.
My bleak look matched my voice as I stared at him. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
He shot a glance down at my hand. “Want to put that down?”
I traced his stare to the candlestick in my fist.
I hadn’t realised I was gripping it so tightly that my knuckles paled.
“Not really,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
He levelled my gaze wearily. “You know why I’m here. And we need to leave, now.”
I shook my head, doubts gnawing at my heels. I didn’t know if I was about to lunge at him or run out of the baths as fast as I could. Nothing good ever came with Adrik, and sure as hell didn’t trust him.
It was a set up.
Jasper must have planted him here in case I did exactly what I did—left Ava behind.
Only, I hadn’t told Ava about the baths. I purposely didn’t tell her in case her blood memories were exposed. A precaution that seemed pointless now that Adrik was in the place of whoever was really supposed to meet me here.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” I said.
Adrik nodded once, a look of impatient understanding settled on his face. “He warned me about this. He told me, if you reject my help, that I’ve to tell you…”
He paused and threw a look around the baths, as if he wanted to escape this moment as much as I did.
With a sigh, he finished, “You feel like home.”
I went cold all over. Inside, my veins turned to ice, and my skin prickled.
“How could you know that?”
“Damianos.” The way he said his name was unfamiliar, as if this was the first time he’d ever spoken it. As an aniel, he probably only ever said the God name, Phantom.
Still, I wasn’t entirely convinced.
“You don’t know him,” I said. “You belong to the Prince.”
Adrik pulled a small, scrolled piece of parchment from the pocket of his breeches. It was bound in a silky black ribbon.
He threw it at me.
I fumbled with the scroll, unravelling it, and keeping my suspicion stare on Adrik.
“I don’t belong to any God,” Adrik said.
I frowned at him, then flicked my gaze down at the parchment.
‘Valissa,
Trust him.
D.’
So Damianos knew my suspicions. Well enough to prepare for them, at least. And I had nothing else to go on. I was left with little choice.
“Ok.” I stuffed the letter into the sack, then lifted it up with my dwindling strength. “But betray me, and I’ll drain you of every drop of essence you have until you’re little more than a sickly vilas.”
The threat seemed to strike him, hard.
His eyes flared for a moment, then he fell into a bow deep enough to raise my brows.
“I swear to protect you with my life,” he said.
Before I could even react, the doors to the baths swung open and the sound of bare feet sticking to marble came from the thick clouds of steam.
16
I froze, looking back at Adrik.
He was lunging at me as my gaze landed on him.
His meaty hand gripped my wrist firmly and he threw me behind him.
I stumbled back, tripping over the sack that landed at my feet, then slammed down on the marble floor. A crack ripped up my spine on landing.
I sucked in a hoarse breath.
“Sorry.” Adrik muttered under his breath, and helped me stand.
Once I was on two feet, my head spinning, Adrik was shoving me and my sack behind a thick black curtain.
I sank to the floor behind the curtain, silently catching my breath.
With every breath, my vision came back to me and left the blur. My spine felt like it was on fire, my lungs were filled with achy ice.
Tucked into a nook, I was wedged between privacy curtains and a cosy pool that I suspected had seen a lot of forbidden moments in its time.
I stayed where I was, listening as the sticky footsteps came nearer.
Adrik was still out there.
A voice sounded out, a familiar one that spoke the aniel language. It took me a few moments to place it as Felicks.
The voice grew louder, and so did Adrik’s. It was clear as crystals they were arguing.
I fought the urge to peek around the curtain. If Felicks saw me, the whole plan would be foiled. I had to stay as still as possible.
But that proved harder than I thought when a sudden crack ripped through the baths and shuddered the floor.
I steadied myself, feeling a honey texture on my knees.
I frowned, looking down at the clean floor, then glancing at the curtain.
Essence.
It was power. Power was licking at my skin from the floor, cracking through the baths like lightning.
They were fighting.
Snatching the candlestick from the floor, I scrambled to my legs and whipped the curtain open.
Felicks had Adrik on the ground. And in moments, I realised why.
The black ribbon and the letter lay on the floor. They must have fallen out of the sack when Adrik was shoving me.
Felicks was using his power to keep Adrik down. The air around them shivered wildly, and I thought of infant starbursts.
Felicks’ gaze
snatched up at me.
I stared at him and he stared back.
The moment shattered like broken mirrors all over, and he was running at me. His face was mangled with a ferocious savagery I’d never seen on him.
Just like the aniel who killed my mother.
He looked wild. Ready to hurt, maim, kill. If the Prince didn’t do it for him.
“Oh, you picked the wrong night,” I muttered before I ran at him.
His wild expression flickered—but it was too late. There was no going back now.
He unleashed his monster, so I unleashed mine.
Only, mine was a fucking force.
I slammed into Felicks hard enough to send us both to the marble floor. He took the brunt of the hit.
I was quick to straddle him and, picturing Jasper’s face looking up me, I sank my fingers into his eyes.
The scream was blood-curdling.
I savoured every pitch.
Adrik was at my side sometime during. I didn’t realise he was still there until he was trying to pull me off Felicks.
But it was too late, anyway.
I wore his mashed eyeballs all over my hands, and every scrap of his power flooded me to reach the bracelets.
I bared my teeth down at the motionless body beneath me. Then, with a scream louder than Felicks’, I wrenched my hands out of his face and let Adrik pull me off of him. Blood spattered instantly.
Holding me up, Adrik looked over my head at the corpse on the floor. And there was no doubt in my mind it was a corpse.
“How did you do that?” he whispered, disgust and awe tangled around his words like barbed wire. “He’s … dead.”
I shrugged him off. “I warned him,” I muttered. “It’s not the night to get under my skin.”
I let the dark joke hang between us.
He didn’t laugh.
Adrik let out a heavy breath and grabbed the sack from behind the curtain. “We really should go. More will come.”
I nodded.
Adrik took my arm in his beefy hand and led me through the fog of the baths.
We stopped at a black door.
With his solid shoulder, he shoved it open and revealed a small dark room the size of my privy closet. Only, in this room was a pool whose water was blacker than the Prince’s soul.
I barely had a moment to cry out before Adrik shoved me inside and I went sprawling into the pool.
No bottom rushed up to meet me. The pool was endless.
I sank, deeper and deeper until—
I clawed my way up to the surface and sucked in a deep breath.
Adrik popped up beside me a moment later.
As I tried to stay afloat in this heavy, power-fuelled water, I looked around.
We weren’t in the little dark room anymore. The water had taken us somewhere else. Like a door, leading to another place entirely.
The pool must have been made by Trident. She’d made little pods of water into magical doorways.
Now, we were outside.
We were in the Wild Gardens.
All around us were weeds grown too tall, black-leafy willow trees, and way up on the hill was the sparkling midnight blue palace.
It really did look amazing from outside. But inside, it was a snake’s nest.
A snake’s nest I was finally free of…
17
“Baths to baths,” Adrik muttered as we swam to the mushy shore of the wild lake. “It’s an aniel saying. One decision or another, it all leads to the same place.”
Lily pads got tangled in my sheer cloak, and I had to kick harder to escape the touch of the underwater weeds.
“But if we’d taken a different pool,” I said, already out of breath, “wouldn’t we have ended up in a different water?”
Adrik frowned at me over his shoulder. Then he hummed something short. “I suppose so.”
“So our choices do matter.” I let the smarmy tone take hold as I overtook him in the lake.
I made it to the shore first. Which meant I first to sully my clothes with the soppy mud.
“Damn it,” I mumbled, trying to scoop off the blood and dirt from my cloak.
At Adrik’s questioning look, I said, “It’s a new cloak, all right?”
I got to my feet and, under the moonlight piercing through the trees, saw that we were in the middle of a spring.
Pools of foamy white water were dotted all around this part of the Wild Gardens. Unlike the hot springs, this water was chilly—the kind I’d like to drink, not swim in.
I hugged my arms around myself and suppressed a shudder. Prickles spread over my skin from the bite of the air nipping at my damp body.
“Look down there. You see it?”
Adrik pointed to the bottom of the hill, a good night’s walk away. Beyond the dark leafy trees I could make out some flickering lights. They were too far away to see much clearer than that.
“What is it?”
“The Capital.” He slung my sack over his shoulder and led the way off the muddy shore. “That’s where we’re headed.”
He paused to look back at me. “Phantom’s down there, waiting for you. But he won’t wait past sunrise.”
“Sunrise?” I choked on an incredulous sound and hurried after him. My boots slipped all over. “There’s no way we’ll make it down there before midday tomorrow!”
“Keep your voice down,” he hissed. “We might not be alone out here.”
“What happens when we don’t show?” I stumbled to a steady pace beside him. “Will he just … leave?”
“We’ll be there.” His promise seemed firm, like the pebble-stone path ahead that weaved through springs and ponds before disappearing between the trees.
The closer we got to the trees, the lighter the shadows became, until I thought I saw a tall silhouette take shape between two fat trunks.
I squinted at them. “Horses?”
Adrik threw a smarmy look at me. “We’ll be in the Capital before the sun even touches the sky. Hope you can ride.”
My face was grim. “Not even a little.”
end of book 4
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Syfoner: (A Dark Bully Romance) (Gods and Monsters Book 4) Page 8