The Night Realm

by Annette Marie

  Too quiet.

  Where had they taken Lyre?

  Her desire to save him wasn’t merely altruistic. She needed his help to escape. Without knowing where the ley lines near Asphodel were located, she was trapped here without a guide. Saving him was a crucial step in her survival—not that she would have left him behind either way. But how was she supposed to find him in here?

  She rushed into motion—toward the back of the building, up the stairs, and into a familiar hallway. She didn’t know where to find Lyre, but while she figured that out, she would stock up on supplies. Lyre’s magic was severely depleted. He would want to arm himself—meaning he’d need everything from his hidden cache of emergency spells.

  Reaching his workroom without encountering anyone, she found the door open. The room inside was empty, but it didn’t look the same as when she’d left it however many hours ago. All his weavings-in-progress were piled in the middle of the room. His tools and supplies were heaped next to them. His books had been ransacked, his sofa torn open, his cupboards emptied onto the floor. Someone had searched the room.

  She hurried to the table and crouched, then breathed a sigh of relief. The untouched wards on his hidden nook glowed in her asper. He’d concealed the spot well.

  Crawling under the table, she silenced his wards, opened the tile, and emptied it out. The quiver of arrows went over her shoulder, the chains went around her neck, and the pouch of charged lodestones went into the fabric belt around her waist.

  She crawled out from under the table, adjusted the unfamiliar weight of the quiver—it was heavy, the leather case jammed with arrows—and frowned at the corner beside the bookshelves where two bows leaned—one taller than her and almost straight, the other shorter with elegant curves. How many bows did he have? And which should she take?

  With a mental shrug, she grabbed the taller one, figuring that when it came to weapons, bigger was usually better. She hefted it in her hand. It wasn’t strung. That was bad, wasn’t it? He would need to string it. Chewing on her lip with worry, she turned around—and froze.

  An incubus stood in the doorway. Silent, unmoving. Watching her.

  For a second, she thought he was a stranger, but then she realized she’d seen him once before: the level-headed brother who’d joined Lyre in the spell shop back on Earth. His name was … Reed?

  He stared at her, and she stared back, mentally preparing for another fight for her life. Protective weaves glowed over him, and they were as complex as Dulcet’s had been. Hitting him wouldn’t work, and she didn’t have a convenient box of powder to drug him with.

  Reed’s gaze moved from Lyre’s chains around her neck, to the quiver on her shoulder, then to the bow she held.

  “Not that one.”

  She blinked, unsure if she’d heard him correctly. The words made no sense. “Huh?”

  “Not that one,” he repeated.

  He stepped into the room and she jerked back defensively, but he walked right past her. No aphrodesia hazed his aura, and he wasn’t prepping a cast. She backed up another step, confusion battling with suspicion.

  He walked to the corner and picked up the shorter bow, then rooted around the nearby shelves until he found a cloth bag. Retrieving a smooth, heavy string from it, he braced the bow with his legs, bent it slowly with one hand, and hooked the string into place.

  Finally, he turned to her and held up the newly strung bow. “This one. That’s a longbow. This is a recurve. Better for close quarters.”

  Her heart pounded in the back of her throat. Watching with her asper for any tricks or deceptions, she cautiously approached. He extended the bow and she took it. Not knowing what else to do, she handed him the other one. He leaned the longbow back in its spot, then returned to the doorway.

  He paused, glancing back. His amber eyes darkened, and emotion she couldn’t name ghosted across his features.

  “They have him on the lower level,” he whispered.

  Then he was gone, striding away from the room as though desperate to flee her presence.

  She clutched Lyre’s bow. The lower level.

  Was it a trap? An ambush? No, that didn’t make sense. Why waste time and effort on an elaborate ambush when any of the master weavers could easily best her in a confrontation?

  The lower level. Reed could have been referring to the basement where Lyre had shown her Chrysalis’s offensive spell collection during her tour, but she knew that wasn’t what he’d meant.

  She knew exactly what “lower level” the Rysalis weavers would have taken Lyre to for questioning.

  Chapter Thirty

  In the basement—the regular basement—Clio stopped in front of a door. With a quick glance at the familiar sign above it that read OF – AA Explosive 1-5 Surplus, she broke the lock spell, pushed the door open, and hit the light switch. Fluorescent bulbs flickered to life overhead, illuminating rows of shelving laden with small crates.

  Each crate held hundreds of steel balls. And each steel ball held an explosive spell waiting to be triggered.

  She shook open the cloth bag she’d taken from Lyre’s workroom and loaded it with a few handfuls of the lowest-level spells and a scoop of medium-level ones. Then she selected three high-level weavings that would do major damage.

  Smiling grimly, she exited the room, crossed the hall, and opened the door to the workroom where she’d accidentally startled a weaver into blowing himself up. Plucking out a low-level orb, she activated the timed trigger to its maximum delay—what she hoped was at least a few minutes—and tossed it into the room.

  Then she ran. Every hall or two, she broke into a room and threw in an activated spell. Through the corridors and up the stairs to the second level, she tossed around another dozen steel marbles. Then she raced back down to the lobby and activated the three high-level explosives. She threw two in the farthest corners and the last one toward the double doors leading outside.

  She sprinted into the hall with the entrance to the forbidden underground level where she’d first encountered Dulcet. Shooting right past the door, she fled around the corner and cast a shield over herself. She was reasonably sure she hadn’t set any explosives on the floor directly overhead, but the building was a maze.

  She crouched, grimacing as she tore off a third strip of her skirt and tied it around her arm. Adrenaline kept her alert, but wooziness gathered in the corners of her mind. She wished she could heal herself, but that magic couldn’t be used reliably on a daemon’s own body. As long as she didn’t pass out from blood loss, that’s all that mattered. Daemons were much tougher than humans.

  The seconds dragged past and panic chattered in her head. Why was nothing happening? Had she set the delay for too long? Or had the spells failed to—

  The first detonation boomed from the other wing. Then the next blast. Then the next. One after the other, some only seconds apart, the spells exploded throughout the building. The walls shook and the floor bucked until the entire structure was rocking. She clamped her hands over her ears, back braced against the wall, and hoped desperately she hadn’t overdone it.

  Then the spells in the lobby went off, and she knew she’d definitely overdone it.

  Explosions screamed through the reception area and debris blasted down the hall past her hiding spot. The racket of snapping and tearing metal that followed had the building shaking even worse, and it sounded like part of the upper level had collapsed into the lobby—or had the lobby collapsed into the basement?

  She winced at another earsplitting crash. Maybe both.

  All the lights blinked out, and as the sounds quieted, a door slammed. Holding her breath, she peeked around the corner. An incubus flew out of the door to the underground level—Lyceus, the Rysalis family’s patriarch. He headed toward the reception area. Another incubus followed—Andante, the oldest sibling—and then another brother—Ariose, the one she’d met during her tour.

  The three of them disappeared into the clouds of dust filling the lobby. Clio rose to her fee
t but found herself clutching the wall, her legs weak and her head spinning. She leaned forward to check one more time that the coast was clear.

  The door to the underground level swung open, and Dulcet walked out.

  Clio gasped and lurched back, grateful her weakness had kept her in place for those extra seconds. She peeked around again. Dulcet stood outside the door, peering in the direction his brothers had disappeared—then he looked the opposite way.

  She lunged back around the corner and pressed against the wall, trying not to hyperventilate. Had he seen her?

  Knees shaking, she waited as the seconds dragged into a full minute. When he didn’t appear, smiling that crazy, sadistic smile, she braved another peek. The hall was empty, the door closed, and she could just make out his back vanishing into the haze after his brothers.

  Holy crap. She pushed away from the wall and jogged to the door. Swinging it open, she squinted down the dark stairwell. A weaving on the third step glowed in her asper: a tripwire spell to alert the caster when someone passed.

  She allowed herself a moment of smugness as she stepped over the glowing “wire” that a careless daemon would have walked right through, then hurried down the stairs to the landing at the bottom. The lethal ward on the heavy steel door was unchanged, and she disarmed it the same way she had before.

  Another tripwire was set in the hall on the other side, but she stepped over that one too. The door at the end was unlocked, and she cracked it open and peered into the room on the other side. The desk was exactly as she remembered, the lamp dark. The ward on the wall behind it revolved menacingly.

  She slipped into the room, her gaze darting across the signs above the three halls, almost invisible in the darkness. Examination Rooms or Subject Occupancy. Which—

  The murmur of a voice had her ducking for cover behind the desk. When no one appeared, she hitched the bow and quiver higher on her shoulder and crept toward the Examination Rooms corridor.

  “… unfortunate for you that Dulcet recovered from his healing so quickly,” an incubus was saying with mocking sympathy. “He’s eager to persuade you to tell us all about your secret weaving.”

  She was reasonably certain the speaker was Madrigal, though all the brothers sounded alike. The only incubi she could unfailingly identify by voice alone was Lyre. She slunk down the hall toward an open door.

  “You know he can break you,” Madrigal continued. “That’s Dulcet’s specialty. And our father won’t spare you this time. He wants to know what you created. What did you do to bind that taste of shadow into the weave?”

  She snuck a look around the corner. Whatever the room’s purpose, it had been cleared out. Now all it contained was a chain hanging from the ceiling—and the end of that chain was bound around Lyre’s wrists. He was on his knees, a metal collar glinting around his neck, his arms pulled above his head.

  Madrigal stood in front of him, his back to the door. “Tell me, Lyre, and I’ll put you out of your misery.”

  Dried blood streaked Lyre’s face, and a bruise was rising in his left cheek. His eyes, though, showed no sign of fear. That black stare was brutally emotionless.

  “So generous, brother,” he said hoarsely. “Keep talking like that and I might think you actually care.”

  Madrigal made an irritated sound. “No one cares, Lyre. No one outside our family will so much as notice when you’re nothing but a rotting corpse. Not even Reed could be bothered to stand up for you.”

  Clio’s hands clenched. Madrigal was wrong. Reed did care—he’d cared enough to help Clio. And considering the punishment he’d face if his family caught him helping her or Lyre, his small gesture meant a lot.

  She focused her asper on Madrigal. Two robust weaves shielded him—one to deflect magical attacks, one to deflect physical attacks. She had no weapons that could harm him without harming Lyre, who was unprotected. Squinting, she analyzed the constructs, searching … searching …

  There. The weakest point in the weave. If she could damage that one spot, she would destroy the whole thing.

  “You’re nobody, Lyre,” Madrigal taunted. “Absolutely nobody. We’re the only ones who know you exist, and—”

  As he spoke, Clio dashed across the open doorway to the other side. Madrigal didn’t see her, but Lyre did. His jaw fell open.

  “—we’ll be more than happy to forget about you the moment you’re dead,” Madrigal finished triumphantly, misinterpreting Lyre’s shock.

  Pressed against the wall, she slid the quiver and bow off her shoulder and set them on the floor, then pulled out a spare explosive steel marble. She used a dash of magic to shred the weave—she did not want any explosions down here—then she drew her arm back and hurled the ball down the corridor. It bounced off the side of the desk with a loud thunk and clattered noisily across the floor.

  Madrigal broke off in mid-taunt and strode to the doorway. Clio pressed closer to the wall as he stepped out, facing the desk.

  She lunged at his back and slapped her palm against his lower spine. All it took was one cutting dart of magic to shred the weak point in his weave, and the entire thing dissolved, leaving only one shield protecting him.

  As he jerked around to face her, she flung her hand out and cast a raw blast of power right into his chest.

  The force rolled right off him, barely pushing him back a step.

  Her eyes popped wide, and in that horrifying instant, she realized she’d destroyed the wrong weave. He’d layered his magical- and physical-defense shields atop one another, and she’d identified a weakness in the wrong one. He was vulnerable to physical hits now—but not magic.

  He casually flicked his fingers. The return blast sent her flying and she slammed onto her back ten feet from where she’d been standing. Winded, her lungs seizing from the impact, she couldn’t make her limbs so much as twitch as he stalked over, grabbed the front of her shirt, and spun a binding around her arms and legs.

  “Well, fancy seeing you again, princess,” he crooned. “Should I be thanking you for all those explosions? You’ve caused more damage than one little girl should be capable of. My brothers will be very annoyed when they get back and find out it was you.”

  He dragged her into the room where Lyre was chained.

  “Clio!” he half gasped, half snarled. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Escaping,” she wheezed.

  “You—”

  “Shut up, Lyre,” Madrigal snapped. He dropped Clio and slapped his hand over Lyre’s lower face. Light flashed under his palm, and when he turned back to Clio, she could see the weave over Lyre’s mouth and jaw, sealing his voice so he couldn’t speak.

  Madrigal smiled down at her and she writhed, struggling to free her arms and legs. Craning her neck, she examined the binding to figure out how to break it.

  “Isn’t this fortuitous,” Madrigal purred. “Clio is here to tell us what she knows. And this time, you can’t stop me.”

  He glanced at his brother and his smile sharpened with cruelty. Wisps of golden light unraveled around him, spreading through the room, and heat tingled through Clio’s center.

  “I’ll tell you what, brother,” Madrigal whispered. His tongue slid across his upper lip as he stared at Clio with black eyes. “Just for you, I’ll fuck her first. Then, after I take her body, I’ll take her will and make her tell me everything. And you can watch.”

  Aphrodesia clouded the room and Clio panted as the hot yearning inside her built into pain. Her skin ached for stimulation and she couldn’t stop staring at his mouth. He stepped closer, towering over her, and watched her chest heave.

  Lyre jerked his chained arms and the sharp crack jarred through her. She tore her attention away from Madrigal to Lyre. Their eyes met, his as black as his brother’s, but with fear and rage instead of lust.

  She struggled to think through the panic rapidly fading into crazed yearning. Her mouth was dry and she realized she was writhing with discomfort, her body throbbing from head to toe, needing
him to touch her. Needing relief from the ever-building desire.

  He crouched beside her, gaze drifting over her body as he enjoyed the effect his magic was having on her. Her nails dug into her palms, and she used the pain to clear her head. She had to stop him. But how? That damn magic-deflecting shield still protected him. If only she knew a kind of magic that could go right through shields, something like—

  —like aphrodesia.

  She didn’t stop to think if it was a good idea. She didn’t think at all. She focused on his shimmering gold aura, the essence of his power, and mimicked it.

  Her aura flashed to gold, and a sensation both warm and sharp slid through her—a new power waiting to be unleashed. Gritting her teeth, she pushed her energy outward, letting it flood the room the way Madrigal’s aphrodesia had.

  He paused, hand stretched toward her. Confusion scrunched his forehead as his eyes glazed. And suddenly she could feel him there—feel his very presence. It was faint but growing stronger. A strange pull, like she was a magnet drawing him toward her, even though he hadn’t physically moved.

  Her new aphrodesia, infecting him. That’s what she was sensing.

  She could feel a second presence too, almost as strong. Turning her head, she met Lyre’s black stare, blazing with hunger. She hadn’t meant to catch him too, but she didn’t know how to target the seduction magic—or if that was even possible—so she kept flooding the room with her energy as fast as she could.

  A ravenous growl ripped from Madrigal’s throat and he reached for her.

  “Stop!” she cried.

  He stopped, his eyes blank and empty—empty of his own will.

  “Stop using your aphrodesia,” she commanded.

  The haze of gold around him lightened.

  “Take this binding off me.”

  He touched her stomach and the weaving dissolved. Then his fingers curled around her shirt and he lunged at her.

  “Stop! Back up!”

  Fighting the movements, he jerked back on his knees, teeth bared. She was losing control of him. Pushing herself up, she examined his remaining shield, found its weakness, and used a sharp snap of magic to break it apart. Then, before he could assault her again, she cast a sleep spell over him. His eyes dulled and he keeled over, unconscious.