“Unless you two plan to invite me, I think we should get what we came for,” he said from behind them.
Olivia felt Ristan tense, and his eyes glowed with a shimmer of silver that reminded her of what he truly was. It still amazed her that she didn’t feel any unease or panic with the knowledge she was being taken by a Demon. No, at the moment, she wanted him to make Adam leave so they could pick up where they’d just left off.
He smiled against her mouth as he claimed it once more, and then whispered against her ear. “I’ll make that fantasy of yours come true, pretty girl,” he promised.
She gasped and looked up at him in surprise, but refused to ask him how he knew of her daydreams, but then he seemed to know an awful lot about her. Like her books, the ones that had been in her home office. He’d also been in her apartment, but how many times?
She tried to gain her balance, only to have her knees threaten to not hold her weight, which Ristan hid from Adam as he held her up and smiled down at her from his impressive height. His hands skimmed her waist until she stepped closer to his body, and turned to continue down the passageway and away from him.
She was so occupied with thoughts of her body’s reaction, as well as her overwhelming emotions for him, that she forgot about the slick walkway and almost fell flat on her ass. Ristan caught her easily and instead of just helping her to stand; he easily picked her up and carried her over the slippery path. She struggled against his hold at first, but it was futile and he only tightened his arms around her.
“Stop fighting me,” he warned playfully as he swatted her bottom and walked deftly on, sure-footed through the slimy, water-covered stone floor of the catacombs.
“I can walk,” she fumed.
How freaking embarrassing? He was carrying her like she was an infant. The indignation of it burned her cheeks while her body burned from his touch.
“I can’t give you directions like this,” she continued, trying to get down before she ended up doing something stupid being this close to him. Like turning her head and smelling his unique scent that fucked with her senses even now. It was like he had some sort of aphrodisiac cologne on that had a direct link to her ovaries.
“You can,” he said softly as his hands tightened around her body protectively.
“I’d rather walk,” she continued.
“I’d rather be buried in your sweet flower,” he mused in a hoarse voice. “I can send Adam away and I can make it happen,” he warned. “My balls are starting to resemble Smurfs, so hold still or I won’t be responsible for my inability to resist fucking you.”
She swallowed and barely managed to hide the smile that formed on her lips at knowing he wasn’t immune to her body, just as she wasn’t to his. She wasn’t sure she should be so excited at having left his balls blue, but she was. It was that simple. He wanted her, and she was beginning to think that either he was having the same issue as she was with being unable to stop the fire between them, or he was just having fun at her expense.
She pointed to the far wall on the left and he moved in that direction until she was able to place her hand on the wall, which would help her read the slightly raised bumps that had been left there by the builders as directions for whoever used the catacombs.
According to some of the things she’d dug through during her tenure as a librarian, this passage had once belonged to one of the original covens and had been abandoned around the turn of the nineteenth century. The Guild had decided that the intertwining catacombs of this passage made it the best place to house anything that the Covens or the Guild wanted to hide because they thought it would confuse any enemies. They’d never even considered the Guild falling from within.
They’d never considered that they could be harboring something like Synthia or Adam, or that one of their own would switch sides. War was ugly, though, and as they made their way through the passage, Ristan explained a little more about why Synthia had been at the Guild. Why Adam had joined her was a little more confusing.
Cyrus, however, was a Mage, or he had been turned to the Mages’ side. How they’d done it was unknown, and it was irrelevant now. She was finally placed on her feet as the flooring became dryer, and she was finally able to think past his touch as they neared the music room, as the kids had often called it.
She stopped cold in her tracks as that night’s event replayed in her mind, and her emotions warred with what she’d assumed had happened. Her first fight and actual kill had happened that night, and so had the days of torture for the man who stood beside her. His hand trailed up her arm and she allowed him in, to feel the warring emotions of guilt, betrayal, and confusion. How it felt to play her part, unwillingly. She allowed him to feel her horror at being asked to betray him and Alden. Then she remembered the coldblooded murder of the child that happened before her eyes and shut it all off. Like a switch, she closed off the emotions and turned to look at him as she tried to fight the tears that threatened to spill from her eyes.
“There’s no one in that room anymore,” Ristan said softly, but to show her he had been telling the truth, he pushed the door open.
She swallowed and moved forward. Her heart pounded as she replayed in her mind everything that had once been in the room. There was nothing out of place. Everything was exactly as it was before she had hidden the children there. There were no small lifeless bodies littered upon the floor, and the only blood was minuscule, from where one or two of the wounded had been.
Her mind processed the remaining items in the room, and then she turned to Ristan. She shook her head in confusion, but it was quickly replaced with hope.
“You got them out,” she whispered brokenly before the heavy sob in her chest exploded and she cried openly with relief.
Ristan was at a loss for what to do, but gently pulled her to his chest and held her as she cried with relief washing through her as she absorbed the truth of what he’d already told her. Those children were alive because she’d fought for them. This tiny slip of a woman had fought against men to save children from being slaughtered, and that gave her bonus points in his score book.
“They’re alive, and they have you to thank for that,” he said as he kissed the top of her head and held her away from his body so he could look down at her. “Now, we’re on a time crunch,” he informed her. “Where are the missing pages to the files that were in the boxes?”
“Down a few more corridors and then down to the bottom floor of the catacombs,” she said. “Basically, we’re going to the pits of this place, where they used to do sacrifices to Hecate,” she said with a shiver in her voice.
Ristan smiled as her bottom lip trembled and had to fight the urge to nip it before he ended up making a scene in front of the silently brooding Adam, who watched them still.
“And the box? Do you know where the key to it is?” he continued.
“I think the box and the key were separated, and I’ve no idea of where it would be. I just know that it is pure evil and Gods help us if it falls into the wrong hands,” she said before she wiped at her eyes and led them out of the room and towards the darkened staircase that led to the deepest part of the catacombs.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was at least a mile or more before the path leveled out and no longer descended. Ristan whispered a spell that lit the huge wooden torches that were affixed high in the stone walls, lighting the entire wide, round room that had an altar in the middle of it. Ristan paused as he took in the handwritten warning runes, which had been carved into the stone columns that ringed the room.
“This wasn’t just used for sacrifices, was it?” he asked as Adam followed his lead and took in the runes. Those were dark runes, once used to summoned beings and creatures that had no business being here.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ve been down here many times; however, each time I was allowed here
, I was escorted by an Elder. They never spoke about the runes and they always said it wasn’t safe to come alone. Some of us thought that it may be haunted.”
“Haunted?” Adam asked, his eyes moved around the room and Ristan felt a twinge of regret. He’d lost Larissa, and she’d come back as a ghost for one night with him. The kid had been through hell, and while he felt for him, he also knew that everything had a reason for happening.
“At least that’s what librarians used to think but I don’t know if it was true for sure,” she replied as she moved to one side of the room and pushed on a stone that made a large creaking noise. Dust exploded from the wall, and as she pushed, another room was revealed.
“A secret passageway?” Ristan asked with a childish smirk.
“They’re all over this place,” she said with an impish grin. “You could literally hide down here forever if you had food and water.”
“The Witches who first lived here created a den, one that no Demons from any plane could enter,” Adam said, citing the teachings of the Guild. “It’s said that this place is blessed by Hecate, and that altar was created from stones that came out of her own gardens. In the Witch community, the stones are sacred, but blessed stones are more so. These ones with the runes, I can’t read them and neither could Synthia. We were taught about them, though, since it was part of our history when we were learning. I’m surprised with how old you are, that you never learned to decipher them.” Ristan shot Adam an annoyed glance.
“You need to practice our teachings a bit more, little prince, if that is what you think. There are many different types of runes in this world as well as in Faery. I only learned what I needed to, and those are not from my world. I did, however, learn to read the runes of the Vikings, mostly because those fuckers loved to party,” he said with a wicked smirk. “Dristan is fascinated by their study, and Ryder had a love of them, as well; he even used some on the fountain outside of the mansion. Even some inside,” he admitted.
“How’d he know which runes he was using?” Olivia asked, her eyes narrowed as they adjusted to the dimly lit passageway.
“He’s Ryder; we don’t ask him how he knows anything,” Ristan answered dismissively and took the lead. He had pulled a torch from the wall so that Olivia wouldn’t be walking in blindly, as he and Adam could see as well in the dark as they could in the light.
He was starting to trust her, but too many things had happened, and at the end of the day, they were on opposing sides in a war. She’d saved those kids when she could have just run. If she’d run, he still would have tracked her down to the ends of the earth, but she hadn’t.
Instead, she’d sacrificed her own freedom to ensure others had survived. His feelings about his torture hadn’t eased, but his feelings about her part in it were.
He continued down the narrow passageway, noting that whoever the hell had built this hadn’t taken into account that not everyone was the same size. Occasionally his head would almost touch the low stone ceiling and he would have to crouch down a little further. Eventually, they walked into an open room, and Ristan felt his skin crawl with the hundreds of Human skulls that littered the shelves that had been carved into the walls. And from the looks of it, they’d been placed there as a warning.
“What the fuck,” he said, and heard Adam grunt behind him.
“Those would be the sacrifices,” Adam said as he moved past him and smiled as he pointed to an exquisitely carved wooden casket. “Meet Jane Doe, unknown female who was left whole. The only one, though. Someone took some time preserving her and creating this beautiful box to entomb her in. It has some sort of preservation charm on it; otherwise the wood would have disintegrated long ago.”
“And you guys keep saying we’re fucked up?” Ristan mused as he shook his head.
“Hey, wasn’t like we did it,” Adam said and winked at Olivia. “I found her when I was fairly young,” Adam explained. “Me, Synthia, and Adrian wanted to scare Larissa. Since it was close to our exams to see who would be finalized and where we would be placed inside the Guild, we wanted to celebrate. No one knew where they would be sent off to, and we could’ve easily been separated. I bet Larissa that she was too chicken-shit to come down here, and she surprised the crap out of me when she took me up on the dare.”
They listened to Adam as he spoke, and Ristan smiled; it was the first time he’d really spoken of his fiancée since she’d been murdered.
“So Synthia, being Syn, decided that we all had to come down together,” he said, lost in the memory. “No man left behind, and all that. Anyway,” he laughed. “We all came down here, and somehow Adrian had stolen a few bottles of Alden’s scotch, and we’d been drinking pretty heavily, and God bless Adrian’s moronic ass, he started running down this hallway because it had been left open. We’d just taken a tour of this place earlier in the week, but we hadn’t been shown this section. We ended up following Adrian until we found her. The runes say she was the beloved of whoever inscribed it. However, if you look at this carving,” he said as he bent down a little and carefully wiped away some dust. “She was sacrificed to save her coven from evil. Or something to that effect,” he finished and turned on his haunches to look up at Ristan. “At least that’s the legend that Alden told us when he busted us down here, and made us promise to never sneak down here again after that,” he recalled.
“That is the legend; there’s a lot more to it than that, all of it contradictory and none of it really makes sense, although many have tried to figure it out over the years. We know that animals were typically sacrificed to Hecate,” Olivia said hesitantly, but at Ristan’s encouraging nod she continued. “However, in the old days, they did use black magic in some rites, which could include Human sacrifices. But Hecate wouldn’t have welcomed it; she prefers the outcasts and animals. There are some ancient tomes that say if a Witch sacrificed her powers to give Hecate strength, she could be reborn. With dark magic, all bets are off when it comes to the actual reason she would have been sacrificed. There are also runes marking her casket that describe several curses. It could be that she was the one who had used black magic, and they wanted her to not be rebirthed again. Or, sometimes those who are murdered are considered too damaged in mind and soul to come back, so a curse could be placed on them to prevent it,” Olivia said, as she caught the hint of melancholy on Adam’s face. “It’s hard to say what really happened here without something to back it up. I can say for sure that she is cursed, but not why. It also has a section that someone scratched out, and it’s not certain who would have done it. Maybe kids who found it or maybe someone from her own time period who tried to remove a certain set of runes,” she explained.
“Murdered ones should be given the right of rebirth too,” Adam growled.
“Larissa was a great girl,” Olivia said gently, her hand touched Adam’s shoulder lightly before she stepped back and pointed to the casket. “I am not sure if that is what happened to her. Those runes,” she pointed to the small ones that wrapped around the casket. “Those say she wasn’t sacrifice per se, she took her own life to protect her coven. Adam, her remains are not the only ones intact,” she said softly as she moved deeper into the next room without waiting to see if they would follow her.
She waited for the torches and the men before she pushed open the heavy wooden doors and pointed. “Same runes are on those ones, and yes, they all seem to have the same preservation charm on them. All of them are Jane Does. Well, most say unknown female, except one. Her name isn’t legible, though. The only thing you can read is my beloved and a single letter M. If you look at these,” she pointed to nine caskets, some more elegant than others, but each crafted with love. “They all say the same thing, except the runes on this one. This one has a divided mark, as if she knew she would die and tried to escape being reborn. We do know that in the old times, if a Witch knew she would sacrifice her life, or would die soon, they would create their
own caskets. Each of these runes signifies something she wanted but couldn’t have in the life she lost. Say children, or a husband. Love was normally a huge one back then because being able to trust a man was harder back then, back when Witches had to hide what they were and couldn’t share it with anyone not of their coven. So if you look here,” she pointed at one of the runes Ristan had spied on several of the caskets, that were similar in styling to the box Lucian had requested. “She wanted to find her love again, meaning she’d found him but she either lost him, or he left her.” She turned around and found both men listening to her with interest.
“So what, they just entombed them here, and forgot about them?” Ristan asked after he’d stared at the beautifully etched wooden casket for a few moments lost in thought. “They’ve been given final rites?”
“No idea,” she said as her hand traced the symbol for beloved. “It’s unclear to the truth of why any of them are here. We can only speculate and go off what is written in the runes.”
“So you don’t know why they are down here, or why they are all women?” Adam asked as he rubbed his temples with his fingers, as if he had a headache.
“No, but if you look at this rune, it is a particular curse. A memory one, which means in her next life, if she is reborn, her memories will come back to her about what happened in this life, or this body per se. Such as dreams, they will remind her of what happened. Since she didn’t create this coffin, I think someone else wanted her to remember. Sometimes people are cursed to remember the past, mostly in dreams or simple things. So something as simple as opening a door can trigger a memory of something that happened in their past life. That is why it’s considered a curse. People are not meant to relive the past because eventually it distorts reality. Each one has the symbol of that curse, just as each one has the symbol of love. If I had to guess, I’d say she wanted to remember something about her love in her past life, maybe to find him again. Or maybe he placed the runes to find her again. There’s no file on any of them, and I’d know because I have searched high and low for them because they intrigue me. It also makes my brain itch about why so many say the same thing, almost to the point that maybe it leads back to one coven.”
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