“The Seal was fighting the idol’s influence,” Zane said.
“And neither one could win. The stress on her body just wore it out. And then—”
She broke off, for the first time realizing the enormity of what her mother had done for her. She’d resisted the idol’s influence for years with the help of the Seal. And then, when she’d realized she could neither recover, nor fight Silas and the others, she’d passed it on to Blaze.
“Then she gave the Seal to you.” Zane was beside her, his hand covering hers. She could feel his understanding, his realization of her mother’s last gift.
To keep Blaze safe, she’d sacrificed her only protection. And then she’d given in to physical death, to keep the evil taint from taking over her soul.
Oh, Mom. Grief overtook her, and she buried her head in Zane’s shoulder.
Thorne said, “How exactly did she give it to you? Could you give it to Zane the same way?”
“Fuck, Thorne, give her a minute,” Zane said.
Blaze shook her head, swallowing hard. “No,” she forced out.
“We just tried a little while ago,” Zane said. “It didn’t work.” He described the white light and the feeling, giving Blaze time to pull herself together.
“But nothing else happened,” said Blaze when he finished. “I still have it.”
Thorne spun back and forth in his chair, frowning in thought. “Maybe she’s not literally supposed to give it to her mate. What if she tried to transfer it directly onto the tomb, where the Seal originally was?”
“That would make the most sense,” Tyr conceded. “But I don’t like the idea of her in there with Vyrkos. What if her transfer attracts his attention and starts to wake him?”
“If it’s going to put her in danger, then hell no,” Zane said.
Blaze didn’t like the idea either, but it seemed like the most obvious thing to try. The Seal was supposed to get back to the tomb; that was the whole point of the prophecy. “I think we should do it.”
It took some coaxing for her to get Zane on board, but finally he agreed. Thorne led the group out of the Batcave, striding through the huge domed foyer and into the warren of tunnels.
Blaze glanced at Zane, and he slipped his hand around hers. That safe, protected feeling stole over her again. His touch said he had her back—he’d always have her back.
She was still astounded by that, at the realization that she was no longer alone.
They turned down another corridor, this one human-sized. They passed a couple of closed doors, and then stopped at what looked like a dead end.
Thorne reached out to put his hand on a flat place to the right of the featureless wall in front of them.
“Hold up,” Zane said. He pushed Blaze gently past Thorne, and lifted her hand to put her palm where Thorne’s had been about to go.
Zane put his on top of it. Blue light glowed around their hands, and Blaze felt a tingle of magic.
Thorne was scowling. “What did you do that for?” he asked.
Zane scowled back. “I gave her access,” he said, “because she’s a Keeper of the Seals. If this doesn’t work, and all hell breaks loose at some future point in time, don’t you think she should be able to get the Seal inside?”
Thorne made a reluctant gesture of acknowledgement. Blaze realized that he, too, was used to going it alone, with only his brothers for help.
It was hard for him to let other people in.
Zane turned to Blaze. “Take your hand off the sensor, and then put it back.”
She did what she was told. The blank wall slid aside, revealing a small room with a stone worktop built into the far wall, a frosted glass mirror in a gold frame above it. Two ornately carved wooden chairs on casters were tucked underneath. The whole place was covered in a layer of dust, as though it had never seen a zefir.
Thorne went forward and touched a button concealed on the bottom right corner of the mirror frame. The glass cleared like a windshield with the defroster turned on, becoming transparent.
It was the same view of Vyrkos’ tomb she’d seen on the monitor, the first night she’d come to the Batcave. Such a short time ago, but it seemed like a lifetime.
Now she was going inside—and it scared the hell out of her.
“This is a portal chamber,” Tyr said. “The Guardians’ shortcut to Mount Hood. Once the portal is activated, it can take us straight to the tomb.”
“When there was a full complement of Guardians here, there were two of them on watch in this room 24/7,” Zane added. “This lever over here activates the portal.”
It was a brass rod about three feet high set into a half-circle of gears on the floor, so that you had to shove it from one side of the circle to the other. It looked like the lever a cartoon supervillain would use to open a trapdoor to drop his enemies into a dungeon.
The lever was canted to one side, obviously in the “off” position. Thorne went over and shoved it to the other side.
There was a grinding of gears, and a circle of darkness appeared in the wall to one side of the lever. The circle spiraled out like a camera lens, and suddenly a dark shimmering doorway appeared in the wall.
They stepped through—Thorne first, then Blaze with Zane following, his hand reassuringly on her back. Tyr brought up the rear.
Blaze felt something cool and clammy brush over her skin, like walking through damp clothing hanging from a clothesline. She felt a sense of vertigo, and then she took another step and she was inside the cavern.
She sucked in her breath. Seeing the tomb on the viewing screen was nothing to seeing it in real life.
The cavern spread out into the distance, so vast she couldn’t even see where it ended in the dim light. On the far side was a tunnel opening—she guessed that was the original entrance. The roof soared above her, at least forty feet high. The stalagmites growing out of the floor were as big around as her whole body.
And then there was the Draken.
Zane, in dragon form, was as big as a good-sized RV. Thorne had filled the backyard of a small house.
Vyrkos could fill a football field.
He lay on his side, encased in that glassy lake like an insect caught in clear amber. His head was the size of a school bus, his giant closed eye the size of a truck tire.
Blaze had faced down a lot of scary things in her life, and she wasn’t easily spooked. But Vyrkos terrified her. It was as if she knew, down to her DNA, that this creature here was her greatest enemy.
Maybe even her doom.
Then she felt Zane’s hand resting on the back of her neck. Whatever happens, we’ll be together. We’ll fight together. Win together.
Die together. The words weren’t spoken, but they hovered in the air between them.
She moved closer, leaning her head briefly on his shoulder.
Then she followed Thorne over to one side of the chamber.
Set in the wall was a six-pointed star about three feet across, made of brass engraved with symbols and letters, most of which she didn’t understand. Three of the points had gold symbols inlaid in them.
The other three—the top point, and the bottom ones on either side—had rounded depressions about three inches deep and as big around as her palm, going through the brass into the stone wall. The top one had a dragonfly carved inside it. The one on the bottom left was carved with a dolphin, and the one on the bottom right with a phoenix.
This was where the Seals went. She ran her fingers over the place where the Dragonfly Seal would go, feeling the tingle of magic.
This brass star was by far the most powerful magical artifact she’d ever touched. Somehow, she was supposed to transfer the energy of the Seal from inside her to this container, so that it meshed with the star’s power.
She just had no idea how.
She started with the simple transfer spell her mother had used, placing her hands on the empty space in the brass star where the Seal was supposed to go.
She wasn’t surprised when it didn
’t work. That spell was designed to transfer energy between living people, not between people and artifacts.
After that, she tried various spells she knew that transferred magical energy into artifacts. None of them had any effect on the Seal.
As a last resort, she tried a rare spell used to transfer a portion of a person’s life energy into an artifact, focusing it on the Seal.
Instead, it tried to transfer her own energy, which almost made her pass out. Zane moved in behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist. “That’s enough,” he said angrily to Thorne. “She’s barely recovered from the last few days. She—”
The rest of what he was about to say was drowned in a deep rumble. The floor shook as though they were having an earthquake, and a large crack snaked across the thick glassy surface of Vyrkos’ tomb.
Chapter 41
“Out! Now!” The words snapped out of Thorne’s mouth like a whip crack.
They ran for the portal, Zane still supporting Blaze. Thorne slapped his palm on a flat stone plate above an identical lever to the one they’d used to get in here, shoved the lever across, and the portal appeared. They dashed through it. Tyr closed it behind them, and they crowded around the viewer.
They could still see the cavern shaking. Small chunks of rock dropped from the ceiling and skittered across the surface of the tomb. Another, smaller crack appeared near the first.
After a moment the shaking subsided. They waited, holding their breath, watching Vyrkos.
Nothing happened.
After a few minutes they all let out their breath in a collective sigh of relief. Thorne and Tyr took off for the Batcave to check the readings, while Zane and Blaze followed more slowly. The spells had worn her out more than she wanted to admit; she still wasn’t a hundred percent.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried everything I could think of. Why the hell were the Seals even given to us, if there’s no way to put them back in the tomb?”
“It’s not your fault.” Zane dropped a kiss on top of her head. “We’ll think of something else.”
Four days later, they still hadn’t.
The tomb’s magical field had been further weakened by the reaction to Blaze trying to reinstate the Seal, and after stabilizing for a short time, was starting to inch downward once more. They still had a bit more time—but not much.
Blaze longed to spend time with Zane, just getting to know each other, but nearly every waking moment was devoted to hunting for a solution to at least one of their problems. Blaze spent hours poring through her spell books, looking for anything that might help, while the others hunted through the Draken archives.
Blaze wished that she had the other two Keepers to help her, although she wasn’t sure what they could do. They didn’t know where their Seals were, and they weren’t witches, so they couldn’t help her look for spells.
At least, they weren’t trained witches. Blaze suspected they had some latent power; after all, the Seals had originally been entrusted to sorceresses, to be passed down their lineage. And Blaze hadn’t forgotten the rush of power Tempest had displayed when she’d unexpectedly made the dragons obey her.
Rebel she wasn’t sure of, but she’d always wondered how Rebel had gotten through her magical wards the first night she broke into the vault. If she had some kind of ability to avoid or transmute energy fields—like magical wards or electronic alarm systems, rendering herself invisible to them—it would explain why she was such a successful thief.
Unfortunately, the two women were avoiding Blaze and the dragons. It seemed that Blaze’s attempt to get Rebel on their side had failed miserably. Thorne had also tried talking to Rebel, asking—or rather, demanding—that she and Tempest come and stay at the lair. That had gone about as well as you’d expect. And Tempest, despite her fascination for dragons, had sided with her sister.
Tyr had resorted to taking his books to the coffee shop next to Tempest’s store and lurking there for most of the day; Blaze wasn’t sure if he was guarding her or stalking her. Probably both.
Silas had dropped out of sight. He hadn’t contacted Rebel about the idol, or tried to come after Blaze at her house. That should have been good news, but the longer Rebel went without hearing from Silas, the more she seemed to convince herself that she and Tempest were out of danger and didn’t need the dragons’ protection.
Blaze knew in her bones they hadn’t seen the last of Silas. He’d worked and schemed for ten years to get the idol back. Now that he knew where it was—and where Blaze was—she knew he would keep coming for it until he got his hands on it, or died trying.
He was biding his time. Building his strength.
Which was what they were discussing that evening in the Batcave. Tempest had closed her shop and gone home for the night, and Tyr had been persuaded to come back to the lair rather than lurking outside her house.
Thorne was at one of his computers, running down leads on the other two Seals. Now that he knew who the Keepers were, he was sifting through Rebel’s and Tempest’s backgrounds, trying to get some idea what form the Seals had taken and where they might be.
Zane, Tyr and Blaze were talking about Silas.
“It seems to me that the extra stress on the tomb might be increasing due to his proximity to the idol, and his focus of attention on it,” Tyr was saying. “I believe Corwyn and Vyrkos are pulling power from him and the coven, through the idol. It’s allowing them to break down the tomb’s protections bit by bit.”
Zane was eating his second helping of chocolate raspberry torte, which he claimed helped him think better. Blaze was doing nothing more than toying with hers, scraping the icing away from the cake and licking it off her fork.
“I still think you’re wrong,” Zane said to Tyr. “There’s been incremental weakening, yes. But the biggest hits we’ve taken to the tomb’s protections were at specific points when the idol was responding directly to Silas, or the first time, when it was activated by Blaze’s spell. I don’t think he can have a continuous effect on it.”
“I disagree. I believe that now that it’s reconnected with Silas, it’s leaching power from the tomb itself,” Tyr said.
Zane sighed. “The idol’s in the spell cage,” he said. “How can any of them still be pulling power through it?”
Zane had taken to going in and checking the spell cage every day. It made Blaze antsy; even inside the cage, the artifact gave her the chills.
“I don’t know,” Tyr said. “Both the idol and the spell cage were created with Draken magic, after all. Some sources say that Draken Lords can manipulate and nullify Draken magic, since they’re the original source of it. Maybe because the idol is linked to Vyrkos, the cage doesn’t completely block his magic.”
“God, I hope it’s not that,” Blaze muttered. She licked more frosting off her fork.
“All I’m saying is, I think it’s worth a shot to try to sever Silas’s connection to the idol,” Tyr said. “By cutting off their conduit to the outside world, I think it’s likely we could send Corwyn and Vyrkos back to sleep. That would buy us time to find the other two Seals.”
“Or it could send the tomb magic into the critical zone, and they could break free,” Thorne said, without turning around. “We can’t risk it.”
“Better now than later,” Tyr argued. “The danger just keeps growing, the longer we wait.”
Zane interrupted the argument. “You can’t sever anything from Silas until you find the bastard,” he pointed out.
It was true. They’d spent some of their time the last few days trying to track down Silas, starting with the small enclave where the coven had lived during Blaze’s childhood. They’d found it in ruins; it seemed no one had lived there for years.
Dead? Or moved on? Blaze hadn’t been ready to know, though one day she would have to face it. How many had died, destroyed by the dark magic of the idol? How many still lived, still followed Silas? Was her father still alive?
But Silas had covered his tracks, and there was no
trace of where he or the coven might be.
“There must be a reason he hasn’t faced us directly,” Blaze said now. “He sent Liriel and Jerome to fetch the idol, but he didn’t come himself. He worked through Jack—first as a projection, according to Rebel, and then with that puppet spell.”
That still gave her nightmares. That kind of magic burned up the host, sapping their life energy until they died. It was some of the worst of the dark magics.
Blaze had learned the theory, though she’d only tried it once—a few brief moments with a volunteer, under the tutelage of one of her less scrupulous teachers—before she realized where the energy for the spell was drawn from. He’d taught her other spells, too—spells where the backlash would kill you, unless you passed it on to some unwilling dupe to be killed in your place, or you’d bonded your soul to a demon willing to absorb it for you.
You had to be truly evil—or truly desperate—to work that kind of magic. She hoped she was never that desperate. Like she’d told Zane, just learning the spells had darkened her soul. She almost regretted learning them.
But not quite. Not if she could avenge her family. Or save them.
Thorne turned to her. “Why do you think he didn’t come himself?”
Blaze had been turning this over in her mind. “I can only think of two reasons,” she said. “One, is that he’s too weak. It’s possible that being without the idol this long weakened him to the point where he physically can’t leave wherever he is. At least, not until he has it.”
“And the second reason?”
“He’s so powerful that he doesn’t think he needs to come himself. He’s so sure of the coven’s superiority—his superiority—that he thinks he can afford to send minions to do this part of the job.”
“Which do you think it is?”
Blaze drummed her fingers on the table. She knew what she wanted it to be—weakness. But she had to be realistic.
“There’s no way to tell. And that being the case, we have to assume that it’s option number two. Power, not weakness. And that he’s going to be coming after us with everything he’s got.”
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