I swallowed, nodding.
Watching the candlelight flicker on the stone walls, which had grown green with moss in this part of the tunnel, I nodded again, to myself that time.
“If she’s here,” I said at last. “We’ll find her, Donal.”
When I glanced up at him that time, he was looking at me too, his dark eyes reflecting candlelight like volcanic glass. He scarcely hesitated before he leaned towards me, kissing me on the mouth.
Like on the roof, the kiss caught me off guard.
Unlike that time, Donal’s second kiss was more than friendly. He paused us on the steps to finish it, his mouth unexpectedly soft as he held my face in his hands. He didn’t use his tongue, but his skin and breath still exuded enough heat to catch my breath.
By the end of it, I found myself gripping the candle tightly in my hand, holding it away from us both. I fought to control bursts of heated, liquid sparks that started somewhere in my chest, sending electric-feeling energy coursing through my veins and limbs. Those hot, current-like charges sparked in my throat and fingers, making it difficult to see.
It struggled to hold it back, but I had no idea what it was, or even what it wanted to do, other than reach for him.
Eventually, Donal ended the kiss.
When he looked down at me that time, he smiled. His smile held more of that dangerous glint I remembered, but it was warmer now too, holding affection as he studied my face. His face was bathed in a reddish glow, but I couldn’t see the source of the illumination. It seemed to come from all around us––a dark, deep red that overpowered the candle’s flame.
“There it is,” he murmured. “Can you feel it, Maia? Can you feel your true self? Can you feel me?”
Before I could come up with a coherent answer, he kissed me again, deeper that time.
By the end of that kiss, I couldn’t breathe at all.
I had to make myself pull away.
“We have to go,” I managed, gripping his arm in my free hand. My voice trembled, holding a thread of near-panic. “We have to go, Donal... we don’t have time for this.”
He nodded to my words, but I saw his pupils flash a brighter red right before he released me.
I wondered if that was the same thing he saw in me. I wondered what his words meant, why he’d told me so much about his sister. I wondered what it was he still wouldn’t tell me. I wondered what that look on his face meant after he’d kissed me.
I wondered if he knew it was my first kiss.
We didn’t speak again until we reached the bottom of the stairs.
I hadn’t counted those stairs, or the time we’d spent walking, but we’d been down there long enough for the wax to run down the sides of the candle and burn my hand. I’d begun to think the tunnel went on endlessly into that dark. I wondered how we’d ever climb back out in time to avoid being found... when, out of nowhere, the stairs’ end appeared.
A wide, stone landing grew visible under the candle’s guttering flame.
Donal and I were holding hands again.
He released me the instant he saw the level floor. The candle’s flame didn’t shine far; we stopped only a half-dozen steps from where that floor started. Holding up a hand to indicate I should be quiet, he made a separate few hand gestures to indicate I should wait for him.
Then, without leaving any time for my answer, he moved.
I watched him descend swiftly down the remaining stone stairs, moving as quiet as a cat. Reaching the landing before I’d fully wrapped my head around his intent, he walked forward into the pitch black beyond the candle’s glow, still moving silent as a ghost. He moved so differently than I’d seen him do up until then, I wondered if that was part of his mask too, to pretend himself less athletic than he really was.
Either way, it was torture, waiting for him in the near dark.
I bit my lip, standing there, trying to decide if I should follow. I heard nothing indicating where he might be; he disappeared into that darkness without so much as a scrape of shoe on stone. I couldn’t see anything at all past where yellow glow of the candle ended.
Once he was really gone, I had nothing. Only the sound of my breath.
He was gone too long.
After another handful of minutes, I took the remaining steps to the bottom of the stairs. There, I waited again, but it took every ounce of my self-restraint to do so.
The wait grew unbearable.
I’d already made it to where the tunnel turned sharply to the left, when Donal reappeared, silent at the edge of my candle’s light. His sudden appearance made me jump––nearly yelp––my heart in my throat.
He didn’t hesitate, despite whatever expression must have come to my face. He walked directly up to me, clasping me warmly about the waist with his arms.
His ease with touching me should have been strange for me.
Perhaps it even should have offended me.
At the very least, it should have been highly uncomfortable for me, since it wasn’t something I was at all accustomed to.
Yet I found myself clasping him back without thought, without any sense of awkwardness or unease. Relief flooded through me as soon as we were close to one another again. I wanted his hands on me, and I’d never had anyone’s hands on me much, much less a male warlock’s... or a male’s of any kind, really. I couldn’t explain it... nor did I care to.
Rather, I let myself the luxury of not thinking about it at all, relaxing into his arms like a person dying of thirst. In turn, he enveloped me easily, holding me against the length of his muscular body as if we’d known one another for years instead of hours.
His voice was softer than a whisper when he leaned his mouth by my ear.
I could feel the excitement on him, though, and hear it in his voice. That warm red glow spilled out of his hands and arms and into me, bringing my heart to a harder thud inside my ribs.
“They are here,” he murmured, holding me close. “They are here, Maia... I can feel them. There’s a metal door on the other end of a long, stone room. We might need to use magic to get through the door itself. But I am thinking we should leave through the other entrance, in any case. The one you told me of on the lawn.”
Feeling me tense, he held me tighter, even as his voice grew a trifle more fierce.
“We should not go through the living quarters of the Regent’s Blood ever again,” he murmured, kissing my cheek. “We should not go anywhere near that witch’s lair, Maia.”
The anger in his voice puzzled me slightly, but I brushed it off.
“There are guards,” I reminded him, still letting him hold me as I murmured back. “There will be at least three guards on that outer door, Donal. And it is locked.”
“There are at least ten witches in there,” he murmured back, kissing my cheek lingeringly that time before pressing his face to mine. “If they are willing to come with us, it will be enough.” His voice held a thread of excitement again. “We can break free of this. We can at least surprise them enough to get a head start. They won’t be expecting us. And breaking out in the public view of the entire palace will shield us. Far more than the residence will, where they could do whatever they liked with us, and no one would be the wiser.”
I thought about his words.
The worry of violence, of loss of life, hit me again.
At the same time, I knew Donal was right.
Appearances mattered here. They mattered inside the palace walls most of all. Mother and her ilk would not risk committing murder here, not in full view of so many witnesses.
They might send the human Palace Guard to do so, however.
That meant Garet.
It meant other friends of mine too, human males and females I knew from growing up inside these walls. They would be duty-bound to do as the Regent ordered, and the white witches would enforce that duty, by taking the lives of those who faltered.
Mother would not stop it. Not for me.
She wouldn’t need to have them kill me, anyway.
She need only have them kill Donal, and then they could make up any story they wanted and do with me whatever they wished. No one would listen to me if I was thought to be harboring a terrorist, especially if it was said that the two of us had been intimate.
They would claim he seduced and brainwashed me, most likely.
Moreover, I couldn’t help thinking it would solve my mother’s “me” problem more generally. She would be pitied, yes, and my actions would still bring shame on the family, but I suspected the shame of me being gullible and corrupted by a powerful warlock would sting less than the shame of her having given birth to an imbecile of a witch.
As for the Guard themselves, they’d surely be rewarded for their loyalty by a big show of absolution of their sins, likely involving public fire rituals and whatever else.
If it came down to it, the palace and the Regent could disavow the action altogether. They could pretend the Guard acted of their own volition.
I knew such a fiction was not beyond them.
“It will be all right, Maia,” Donal murmured.
Kissing me a last time, he released his hold on my waist.
Taking hold of my hand instead, he led me around the stone wall and into the room beyond, which was so large I could only dimly make out the walls on either side. Iron sconces decorated the stone at intervals, obviously for holding torches, but they all stood empty now. The room felt damp and silent and abandoned. I saw mold growing on part of one wall, and wondered again at the source of all this water. Was it coming from the river, somehow?
Or did this chamber truly stand above an underground lake?
Again we walked for an interminable-feeling time. I began to understand why Donal had disappeared for so long.
“It is empty down here,” he murmured to me. “I feel no one. Not on this side of the door.”
“But you know they are here?” I said. “You felt them?”
“Yes. They are here.”
His sureness should have calmed me. Somehow, it only made my unease worse.
As if feeling this through my fingers, Donal spoke to me again softly.
“They must use the other entrance only in the day-to-day.” He glanced at me, half his face in shadow behind his long hair. We hadn’t the time to braid it to make him look like one of the Guard, and he’d let the hood drop at some point after he left me at the stairs. “...This entrance is likely only for emergencies. If the palace walls were breached, they would need a way down here from the residences. One that did not expose the royals to danger.”
I nodded. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to leave the same way we came, then?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Maia... I’m telling ye. We are not going back up through that witch’s house.”
I frowned, staring up at him. “You know her?” I said. “Lady Annika?”
“I’m not deaf, Maia. I know she is your mother.”
I felt myself tense, but Donal gripped my hand tighter, exuding reassurance.
“We’re not going up that way, Maia. We’re not. It’s not safe.” Lifting my hand, he kissed my fingers, pressing them briefly against his face. “Trust me, huntress. Please. I will get us out of here, but you must trust me on this. We will go that way only as a last resort.”
That time, I nodded. But my heart continued to thud loudly in my chest.
Even so, a harder anger rose in me as well.
Not at Donal, but at my mother, and at my aunt, the Regent.
If the tunnel from my mother’s house truly was a final defense, it obviously was meant only for a select few––unless they planned on telling the rest of us that it existed only in the necessity of using it. I had my doubts. The midst of a crisis was hardly conducive to collecting people from different sides of the palace grounds, and I certainly had no awareness of a “final defense” involving underground tunnels and secret red witches.
Those of us living on the other side of the compound were told only to trust in the Guard, in the event of any calamity.
I wondered, if I had been a better witch, would I be part of that elite few, as well?
The thought angered me. It angered me enough that I didn’t speak again as we crossed that endless stone hallway under the palace grounds.
Eventually, it did end, though.
When it did, I saw a door.
Without asking, I knew it was the door Donal had spoken of.
Donal took me straight up to it, and the two of us stared at it.
Made of a dark, dense-looking wood, it was bound by thick, iron bands. The panel itself looked heavy; it also looked as though it hadn’t been opened in many years.
One of the iron bands around the middle also functioned as a gudgeon or pivot. It extended out past the edge of the wood, merging into the stone wall to form a flat, square piece of metal with no markings.
I saw no keyhole anywhere in either the iron or the wood, but it appeared as though the gudgeon was meant to serve to lock the wood to the stone. The heavy iron hinges on the other side of the door didn’t strike me as easy to remove, being nearly welded together with rust and weathering from the moisture in the air.
“Now we’ve come to the rub,” Donal murmured.
I turned, looking up at him. “The rub?” The candle was down to only a few inches, and while I’d managed to get the wax to drip in such a way that it didn’t burn me often, I knew we would lose it relatively soon “What does that mean? How does it open?”
“Magic,” he said. “It must be... they would trust nothing else, and I can’t fathom opening it without it.” He frowned as he stared back at the door. “I feel the red witches behind that, but I don’t know how to get through it, Maia. This may be a problem,” he admitted. “They must have used white magic... a high kind, since I can’t feel a trace of its leavings. I see nothing when I try to feel what the door holds. I sense nothing when I touch any part of it.”
I stared back at the door, too.
I now understood why he’d taken so long to return to me by the stairs.
He’d been trying to figure a way through the door before he brought me here.
Tilting my head, I frowned, seeing the door suddenly from a different angle.
“No,” I pronounced after another beat. “I don’t think it’s magic, Donal.”
I’d said it more or less without thinking, but once I had, I found myself even more sure. Releasing his fingers from mine, I handed him the candle, which he took readily enough, even though his eyes showed confusion.
I stepped right up to the heavy door.
Rather than doing anything to the part of the iron that sank into the stone, I grasped hold of the other side of the same iron rod, to the far right side of the door. I’d noticed it wasn’t wrapped all the way around the wood there. Rather, the metal curved outward, just enough that it cleared the hinge.
Again without thinking, I lifted.
With a low, pained screech, the bar raised.
I continued to force it up when it stuck. Donal came to my side to help me, but I managed to get it moving again on my own, shoving the bar harder until it stood straight up in the air, perpendicular with the floor and off the door altogether. I heard a louder click once it fell into place, and knew it no longer held the door to the wall.
When I glanced up at Donal that time, he was staring at me, wide-eyed. I saw from his chest that he was breathing harder.
“How in the underworld did you know to do that?” he breathed.
“It is only a latch,” I whispered back. “I glimpsed the mechanics of it, that’s all.”
Donal looked at me strangely. “It is not only a latch.” His voice was still low, but now sharper, more insistent. “I tried that very thing myself before I brought you here, Maia.”
“You must have pulled on the wrong place,” I suggested. “It was dark.”
“I can see in the dark,” he said. “Just fine, Maia.”
I stared at him in curiosity, but he didn’t smile; he
was dead serious.
Shrugging, I took the candle back from his fingers. “Then it was stuck, and you loosened it enough for me to do it,” I said.
Donal didn’t answer, but I could see from his face he didn’t find that explanation plausible either. I could see him also doubting that I could pull up an iron bar that he couldn’t, no matter how much he might have “loosened” it for me. Looking at his thick arms, I found myself agreeing, but I had no other explanation.
I hadn’t done any magic. Besides, I didn’t know white magic any better than he did, as my studies could readily attest.
Neither of us voiced our thoughts aloud, however.
Made nervous by something living in his silence, I tried to break the moment.
“Do you think they heard that inside?” I said.
He shook his head, but not wholly in a no. “It doesn’t matter, Maia.” He sounded decisive again. “We have to go in now, regardless. We have been down here too long already. There could be magical alarms attached to this door.”
Feeling my heart clutch at his words, I nodded.
In that nod, however, I had another moment of crystalline clarity.
We were under the palace grounds.
Far under them, from the length of those stairs.
From the direction of the hall-like room before the door, we were now somewhere on the great lawn, although perhaps not so far as the temple itself. We were about to break into a secret vault, one I doubted the vast majority of those in the palace even knew existed. We might be confronted by the Palace Guard. We might be confronted by white witches guarding over their captives inside the Fire Temple. We might be confronted by what Donal called “Defenders.”
Hopefully, we would discover the red witches themselves––strangers to me, but also my kin––although, granted, possibly insane from a lifetime of captivity and magical brainwashing that told them their mistreatment was divine will.
My kin. Witches and warlocks like me.
But I didn’t have time to run through the gamut of my emotions on this.
“Are you ready?” Donal said.
His hand already rested on the wooden door.
Red Magic: an Adult Dystopian Paranormal Romance: Sector 6 (The Othala Witch Collection) Page 11