“Only if I could actually connect with your face, you bastard. I want to get out of here.”
“Then focus on the light, darkling. It’s that simple.”
“And that hard,” she muttered, looking back at the light.
She could practically hear his smug smile as he said, “If you would stop wasting so much of our time, you would get out of here sooner.”
“What exactly am I supposed to do!” she snapped again. She’d been staring at the speck of light for so long that she felt like it’d burned itself directly into her retina.
If she blinked she’d see spots.
“Relax.”
“Oh my gosh. Grrr,” she growled, and it was totally unintimidating she knew. “I am relaxed!”
“You sound like it.”
Curling her lip, she looked away from the spot, and just as she suspected, there were dancing lights behind her eyelids every time she blinked. “Well, maybe if you had warned me that you were planning to trap me in an alternate reality I could have relaxed a little more.”
He sighed. “What am I doing here, halfling?”
Pursing her lips, she debated whether to answer him or not, but finally gritted out, “Training me. Though I think you’re secretly trying to kill me.”
He snorted. “The idea has merit.”
Her mouth dropped open. The dork had made a joke. At her expense. And she was rather partial to living, but he’d made a joke. Hanging suspended in air as long as she had was starting to feel a little passé at this point. And since she’d been dangling there like a worm on a hook with nothing major or serious happening, the panic was finally starting to dissipate.
She’d rolled with the guy yesterday. If he wanted to kill her, there were easier ways than death by boredom.
Rubbing her brow, she sighed. “I don’t like this place, Idris. It’s disturbing on so many levels.”
“This is your speed challenge, Flint. This is where The Ciardah will thrust you.”
Looking around, she wrinkled her nose. “There’s not much speedy about any of this.”
“That’s because we haven’t even gotten to the speed portion. Right now all I want you to do is break through the transdimensional barrier.”
Well, now that she totally felt like a balloon that’d just been popped, she shook her head. “Not to the speed portion yet, eh?”
“I know what you’re thinking, but you can do this.”
Rolling her neck from side to side, she took several deep and calming breaths, getting herself mentally prepared for this challenge the way she would when she’d been a walker.
There was always an element of danger involved to most everything she’d done as a human. Or at least when she thought she wasn’t anything other than human.
A little transmajiggy thing should be cake. Flint missed her mom. Every time before a walk, Mom would make her count to ten and then list all the things that could go wrong.
Foot placement.
Faulty rigging.
Weak wiring.
Et cetera.
Then Mom would tell her, Now that you know what could happen, you know what to watch out for. Eyes open and chin up, DeLuca… You got this.
“I might never leave.” She stuttered out the first sentence. But as she continued, Flint began to relax the way she would when her mom had done it. “I could be sliced in half by that white light. I might look like an idiotic fool running in place.”
But instead of just focusing on this problem, she thought about the bigger one too.
“Abel’s counting on you. Cain needs you back home. You need to be back home. Now that you know what can happen, you know what to watch out for… Eyes open and chin up, DeLuca. You got this.”
By the time she looked back up, she was focused.
“Tell me again how to do this, Idris.”
“Look at the light. Focus your mind on it. And go. Want to be there.”
Clearing all the junk out of her head, Flint looked at that light and she thought hard. Focused every ounce of her being into one fixed desire.
Getting the hell out of here.
“Take me to the light,” she chanted over and over. “Take me to the light.”
But focusing was much harder than she’d expected. Time moved differently in that place. There was a total absence of it, and yet she felt the lapse of it keenly.
Felt the seconds, minutes, hours, and then days scroll past. Felt like she’d been trapped in there for half an eternity already. And a strange thing began to happen to her as she did nothing but feel.
She lost track of what it felt like to be tangible.
After a while she could no longer feel herself inside her own skin. Soon she became nothing but free-floating matter. A thought. An idea.
But even so she didn’t panic, she focused. Focused her entire being on getting to that light.
And finally, an eternity later, Flint wasn’t just at the light, but barreling through it.
62
Flint
She trembled as she landed in a heap on the library floor of her bedroom.
Idris knelt beside her with a proud-parent sort of a smile on his face.
“Oh God, I’m gonna vom.”
And unlike all the other times that she swore she was gonna hurl, this time she barely managed to scrape herself off the floor and drop to her knees in the bathroom to hug the porcelain throne.
It took her a while to get over the uneasy rocking motion of the world around her.
When she finally walked out of there a long while later (after thoroughly brushing her teeth five times at least), she noted Idris sitting at a table piled high with food.
She shouldn’t have felt hungry, but she did. She was ravenous.
After sitting down, she attacked the roast chicken and thyme-dusted root vegetables with gusto while zombie boy merely raised an eyebrow over the rim of his wineglass as he watched her inhale her food like a starving elephant probably would.
“You did it, darkling. You traveled. And each time it will only get easier. The first time is always the worst. You should never experience the nausea again.”
Glaring evilly at him, even though she was thrilled at the fact that she’d actually managed to pull off the impossible, she asked around a mouthful of food, “So how long did I take? Speed challenge and all.”
Hopefully that was within the time parameters, that even as slow as she’d been, she’d still pass.
“The equivalent of fifty years, give or take.”
She inhaled deeply and then swiftly regretted it when a piece of meat got caught in her windpipe.
Choking was even less fun with him suddenly whacking her on the back to help her dislodge the chunk of food and clear her passageway. Fingers shaking, she reached for her glass of water and guzzled it down. When she could finally breathe again, she shook her head.
“Fifty years. I’m so dead. I’m so effing dead.”
The only thing keeping her from totally losing her head was the fact that he’d told her that outside that place, it would be like no time had gone by at all.
Which meant, by some miracle, she hadn’t just lost fifty years with Cain. Crossing her fingers, she could only pray that was true.
His lips curled. “It’s why I took you into the dead space, darkling. A day would not have been long enough for you to learn the skill. You were not raised on fae land, this is a baptism by fire for you. What you did was an amazing feat.”
“You sound shocked. I thought you said I could totally do it.” She finger quoted. “Sounds like to me you were exaggerating a bit, weren’t you?”
“It would hardly have been fair of me to tell you what I really thought.”
She groaned. “You suck, zombie boy. I mean really suck.” Frowning, she worried her bottom lip. “You swear no time passed out here?”
If it had, that would mean Abel was gone. Cain would be—
“None. I swear it. Although you failed the speed portion miserably.”
>
She briefly considered snapping at him but instead decided it was too much effort to be angry. So she laughed instead. A miserable, sad laugh that was fraught with tons of pain. “I’m never going to be able to free him.”
He shook his head. “I have no doubt that with the right motivation, you can move mountains, darkling. Now you really need to rest. Tomorrow is a big day.” Standing, he looked like he was going to leave, but instead he said softly, “I believe you can do this, halfling. Only believe it yourself.”
Then he was gone and she was alone with a mountain of food and a mirror.
For a second Flint wanted to time-jump over to Cain. Go to him, hold him, have him hold her and be comforted by the fact that she’d not lost fifty years with him. Of course, she wasn’t even sure she could time travel out of Aduaal, since technically she was still The Ciardah’s prisoner.
But it wouldn’t have changed anything even if she could time-jump, because she was physically drained to the point of wanting to black out. She was dizzy, her head was pounding, and her body felt like mush.
And even though Idris had assured her she’d lost no time whatsoever out here, she had to know for sure. Cleaning her mouth with a napkin, she decided to try to mind-walk to him instead.
There was no way she’d be able to hold the connection long, but she needed the comfort of him, even if only for a few seconds.
Closing her eyes, she focused on Cain, on his room, his bed… And like a giant puzzle, all the pieces began to click into place, forming an image of him, and it was to that image that she went.
When she opened her eyes, she was there with him.
Cain was just coming out of the bathroom, wearing only a towel around his hips, and his skin glistened with a sheen of water. His jaw dropped when he saw her. “Princess?”
And she sobbed. Because he was still her Cain. Still her gorgeous, beautiful Cain.
He grabbed his chest as his own eyes began to shimmer. “Don’t do that, Flint. Don’t cry—it kills me.”
“Tomorrow, Cain. Tomorrow I fight to save him. I will save him. I promise.”
But he must have heard the fear and doubt in her words, because he shook his head. “You save yourself too. Come back home to me.”
There was so much more she wanted to say, but Flint could no longer hold on to the connection. Returning to the library in her room, she stared at the rows and rows of books and curled her feet underneath herself before laying her head on the armrest and crying herself to sleep.
Cain
* * *
Cain sat in his room throughout the rest of the night, his head in his hands.
She hadn’t told him so, but he knew something major was about to go down wherever Flint and Abel were. Something that would impact the rest of his life, their lives.
A knock sounded on the door. He couldn’t even bother to look up.
The room was cloaked in shadow and darkness. After his talk with Grace, he realized she hadn’t exaggerated any of what was happening outside this small haven they’d created for themselves.
Major forces were coming into play again. Forces that’d been dormant for centuries. Cain had come to the conclusion, as much as he wanted to deny it, that finding Layla was low on the list of priorities.
Pandora was still out of touch. Adam and he had run a few scouting missions but had finally declared any potential leads to be exhausted at this point in time.
They’d even tried contacting Luc—head of their sister carnival and his aunt’s boss—though none of them cared for him. But even he was MIA.
Wherever Flint was, she was safer than here. Cain felt the stirrings of evil pervade his very bones. A nightmare was coming, and he wasn’t sure if any of them could survive this.
The door opened a crack, and he finally glanced up to see Seth and Eli’s worried countenances staring back at him.
He didn’t even need to ask to know his cousins had found nothing.
Voice rusty, Cain asked, “How’s Janet?”
Seth slid his hands into his pockets and mumbled, “In stasis. She sleeps peacefully though. She’s safe, Cain.”
Leaning back on his hands, he took a deep breath. “It’s the end of days, Seth. Who’s really safe at this point?”
Eli frowned and shook his head. “It’s not the end, Cain. You’ve got to keep fighting. Remember that she’s coming back.”
They thought he was messed up because Flint was gone. But he wasn’t. He hadn’t thought this clearly in years.
“Can’t you feel it? The awakening?”
In the week since his midnight conversation with Grace, Cain had decided to stop worrying and just listen. Listen to the world around him, listen to the tremors of that other world—the world of demons and angels. And finally he’d heard it.
The murmurings of a great evil coming to life. Even the winds heard Sin’s call.
She was coming, and she was going to take the world down in flames with her.
The Triad was an organization built to open the gates of Hell, to unleash the worst of evils into the world. And Layla had played her role in it; she’d kept them so preoccupied looking for Abel that they’d not been there to follow the other bread crumbs, the trail leading straight to Hell.
But Grace knew. She’d found the bread crumb last night. That’s where Pandora was right now, why Death was such a constant presence in this world. Sin—also known as the Scarlet Woman—was coming back to life.
“How can we stop the inevitable?” His voice was dead, cold.
The twins looked at each other, and Cain would have had to have been blind not to see the flash of worry glimmer in their mercurial eyes.
Eli licked his lips. “Life is full of ripples, Cain. Small ones that grow into larger concentric rings, on and on and on. Each one vital to maintaining the integrity of the other, each seemingly insignificant event an important cornerstone to building that solid foundation. To giving us a chance at success.”
He guessed what his cousin meant. “And you think Flint is that cornerstone?”
Shrugging, Eli said, “If I had to hazard a guess, yes. It’s no coincidence that everything has happened as it has. That she came to us when she did. The games the immortals play… There are rules, laws in place. Things we can’t understand but that have to happen. Occam’s razor, man.”
“Simplest explanation is usually the right one,” Cain finished.
Seth and Eli both nodded.
“Yeah,” Seth said softly. “It’s only when things are darkest that the light is right around the corner. Our people have been fighting this battle a millennia, and we haven’t lost yet. And it won’t happen on our watch. Whatever role Flint plays in these events is vital. And when she comes back to us, and she will, that’s when we get to roll.”
His voice rang with sincerity, and Cain wanted to believe it. Theoretically, he understood exactly where they were coming from, even agreed to a certain extent.
But so much could happen to a theory to change the entire course of events. It would be a lie to say the silence wasn’t killing him though. The not knowing was even worse than knowing they’d ultimately die at the end of this.
Because there was no assurance of anything.
No assurance of them finding Layla. Of them bringing Abel back. Of preventing the unleashing of three of the major deadly sins—Wrath, Lust, and Envy.
Seeing Flint when she’d come to him, the hopelessness in her eyes… She was no safer where she was either.
Cain closed his eyes lest he be drowned by the darkness choking him and tried to focus on the only positive there was.
Janet still lived.
As long as she lived, so did his brother, and if Abel lived then Flint did too. And that was a hope worth clinging to.
Clenching his jaw, he looked up at his cousins. “Then if we’re going to be stuck here, we do the next best thing. We keep researching. We do whatever we can to try to figure out a way to survive this.”
The assigned task ga
ve them all a purpose they’d desperately needed. Eli and Seth were being strong, but Cain could see through the chinks. Could see the fear.
This was more than just bringing down a few bad guys. What they were dealing with now could mean the extinction of everyone. Cain would trust Flint to win her battle, and now it was time for him to do his part and make sure that when she returned, he’d be able to keep her safe.
He followed his cousins out the door and to the library where he was sure Grace and Adam already were. This wouldn’t be easy, but he’d never been one to shrink away from mountains, and he wouldn’t start now.
“Come back to me, Flint,” he whispered beneath his breath, pushing a little power into the words. And even though time and distance separated them, he felt the fluttering pulse of her warmth in return.
63
Flint
Flint looked around at the hundreds, if not thousands, of faces all gazing down on her.
It was like the Roman Colosseum come to life. She was the gladiator sent in naked to kill the lion with only her hands and a prayer to save her.
Faces, the likes of which she could never have imagined ever, stared down on her from high above. She stood in an empty stone chamber with stadium-style seating above her.
Winging through the air with graceful skill and deadly intent was a host of dragons. Every so often, Flint would spot Crystal’s lavender wings tearing through the sky as she glided along.
Most of the fae were humanoid and easy enough to take in, but some of them were the stuff of nightmares, horrific images of ghouls and monsters that made her want to cry out in terror from just one glance at them.
Things with tentacles, and fuzzy limbs, melting faces covered in dozens of eyes, beasts that dripped a constant stream of blood from every orifice, or creatures with no face at all save for slits around the spots where the nose and mouth should be.
But there were also more recognizable fae too—brownies in rat-drawn carts, will-o’-the-wisps she recognized from drawings in her mother’s book, and faerie hounds, their white coats glistening like freshly fallen snow, their only color being the bright red tips of their ears and eyes. Every time one of them howled, Flint wanted to scream out in agony.
The Complete Tempted Series Page 73