“I’m okay,” Kandy called up the dark shaft beneath my dangling feet. Her voice echoed, and her words sounded mangled by her three-inch incisors. “But yuck. I’m not the first one down here.”
The creaky gears of the open door behind us started to turn. The door slammed shut.
Warner set me on my feet, a step away from the trapdoor that had swallowed Kandy. I weighed nothing to him. And while the idea of being petite to anyone was utterly intoxicating, I was seriously pissed. Pissed enough to completely ignore him as I knelt on the stone at the edge of the opening, peering down into the darkness.
The sides of the stone shaft that had just swallowed my best friend appeared to be coated in blue sorcerer magic.
“I can’t climb back up,” Kandy called.
“Sorcerer magic on the walls,” I yelled down at her.
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice sounded like she’d reversed her transformation and was once again in her human form. “Plus, you know, nothing to hold on to.”
“We’ll find you a rope.”
Warner snorted. I continued to ignore him.
Something crashed and splintered below. “Kandy!?”
“Never mind the rope,” she yelled. “I made a door. I can see a corridor. I’ll come to you. Plus, you know, I kind of have the key.”
I glanced up at the green-runed door before me. The indentation in the center was empty.
Warner laughed quietly as he continued to search the three skeletons against the wall. There was nothing snarky about the laugh, but I wasn’t amused by his amusement. I glared at his back as I strained to hear the sounds of Kandy breaking through something else, God-knows-how-far below me.
“Stairs,” Kandy yelled, her voice faint and echoing now. “It’s slimy and wet. No more spiked corpses, though.”
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine her progress back … a hall, some stairs … obviously, the sorcerers who’d built the fortress wanted multiple ways to move behind and through their magical traps. If we knew where we were going, we could probably just use Kandy’s cuffs to demolish the magic-depleted walls and avoid the doors altogether.
I pulled the map out of my satchel. Maybe I could trigger it to reveal more detail, getting it to zoom in again until I could see the passages and actual rooms. Then I remembered that Kandy had the key. And this wasn’t a video game.
“You’re mad at me,” Warner said without looking at me.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“You wish I’d let you fling yourself to certain death.”
“Uncertain death, but yes.”
Warner tugged the pendant off the skeleton he was crouched in front of. The bones shifted to the side, but they didn’t crumble into dust as they had in the entrance. “I understand you care for the wolf,” he said. “But you can aid her alive far more than you can dead.”
“That’s your opinion.”
“That’s fact, warrior’s daughter. Your petulance aside.” Warner straightened from his crouch. I mimicked his movement. The trapdoor slid shut behind me. Its magic settled until I couldn’t distinguish it from the runes surrounding the doors. I briefly wondered if my presence had held it open, but I was too busy being pissy with Warner to think about it too long.
“You’re such a sweet talker, sentinel.”
“Is that what ‘Sherlock’ means?”
“No.”
He shrugged his shoulders and turned to look at the final corpse. Apparently, dead sorcerers interested him more than I did.
“How many of the silver runes do you need to collect to confirm your suspicions, sixteenth century?” I was attempting to be sarcastic — my default comfort blanket — but I wasn’t pulling it off. The fact that Warner seemed impervious to it didn’t help.
“None,” he answered. “What do you think happened here, alchemist?”
“Well, obviously they didn’t have a key. Unless there are two.”
“Doubtful.”
“So they used magic to get through the doors.” Yeah, so I was being drawn into his ancient mystery against my will. I guess I wasn’t exactly known for my outstanding willpower.
“Sacrificial magic.”
Blood magic. I couldn’t pick up any residual. Though that was odd. Terrible spells normally came with a terrible taste, which usually made me puke my guts out. Maybe magic faded over time, just like the bones of mortal sorcerers. The idea of the skeletons being connected to blood magic should have probably already occurred to me. Except I actively ignored such possibilities. Just as I actively ignored the ability to perform such dark magic myself. Ever since the events of London, and then Tofino, I could feel that darkness dwelling contentedly within me. Hell, it more than dwelled. It manifested the second I was under extreme stress. I had the sacrificial knife as evidence, tucked into my ruined satchel right now.
“It appears so,” I said, aware that enough time had passed that Warner would know I was uncomfortable. But then, he already knew that, didn’t he? He’d offered to relieve me of the burden of the sacrificial knife. “But the magic on the doors either regenerated or reset. The other magic — the path, the stairs — not so much.”
“The builders of the fortress put more energy into the doors.”
“Makes sense.”
“Six corpses in the first room. Three here.”
“You think they sacrificed themselves willingly. And were more efficient with the casting the second time.”
“Yes.”
“Who does that? I thought they were immortality seekers?”
Warner shook his head, but didn’t answer. He straightened to gaze at the three doors blocking our forward progress.
“Don’t step between me and a friend again,” I told Warner’s broad shoulders.
He turned to look at me. “I’ll step between you and whatever I perceive as dangerous, any and every time.”
“Because I’m a weak half-blood.”
“Because you’re valuable. Unique.”
He held out the nine silver runes he’d collected. I offered my open palm to him and he dropped them into my hand. I instantly tasted their residual magic.
“Sorcerer,” I said. “Different than whoever built the fortress, though.”
“Yes? That makes sense.”
“No key.”
Warner nodded his agreement. “I couldn’t feel any magic on the runes.”
“Residual.” I tucked the pendants into my satchel. My fingers brushed the bundle of my wet T-shirt, which I’d wrapped around the sacrificial knife. Yes, over the tea towel I’d already wrapped it with, so maybe I was a little OCD about it. The touch of its magic made me instantly uneasy. Of course, standing around hoping Kandy showed up soon might have contributed to the feeling.
“I haven’t done anything particularly unique in your presence,” I said, bringing the conversation back around to my being pissed at him. Or, rather, my attempt to be pissed at him.
“You walk the earth, warrior’s daughter.”
I wasn’t sure how to take that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know how to take that.
Jesus, I was afraid.
I was practically running scared, yet desperately trying to keep from moving. I was scared Kandy wasn’t going to make it back. I was afraid I had no idea what was going on … or where life was taking me … or who I was becoming.
Yeah, I was lumping everything together and mixing everything up. I’m a baker and an alchemist, I do that. A lot. Normally, when things got this amped up in my head, I’d dig into my satchel for a bar of 70 percent single-origin cocoa from Madagascar to distract myself, but I didn’t have any.
I did, however, have black forest cake.
Yeah, Warner suddenly looked … delectable. He’d stepped forward into a pool of sunlight still filtering into the chamber through the high, narrow windows, and the warmth of it colored him with a welcoming sort of light. Especially his green eyes. Though, again, that might have had mor
e to do with him wearing the perfect color of T-shirt rather than the light. Kandy obviously had a previously unknown flair for color combinations.
“I’ve got this thing for kissing inappropriate men in inappropriate situations … and places. You game?”
“I don’t like games of chance. I like to know I’ll be keeping the spoils.”
“I can’t figure out if that’s a yes or a no.”
Warner reached for me, wrapping one arm around my back and pressing between my shoulder blades to pull me forward to meet his lips. Nothing the least bit gentle in his touch, though his lips were soft as they closed over mine.
I swayed into him, burying myself in the kiss but not touching him further. I luxuriated in the moment. I gave myself the tiny gift of the warmth of his skin, of the strength of his limbs. He brought his hand up against the back of my neck, as if he was worried I would pull away. But I already wasn’t close enough, and I wasn’t even ten seconds into the lip lock.
And his magic … the taste of his magic. Oh, God. He was all deep, smoky cocoa, and sweet, sweet cherries, delivered with a creamy smooth finish. I parted my lips underneath his, just ever so slightly to taste him better. And I swear I actually breathed in his magic. It went straight to my head, making me instantly, delightfully tipsy.
It had been a long time since I’d gotten drunk on magic. It had been a long time since I’d felt safe enough to do so.
Warner brushed his fingers through the curls at the side of my head, teasing the tip of his tongue against mine. The touch of his magic lingered across my cheek, ear, and neck even longer than the warmth of his hand.
It had been a long time since I’d felt I deserved to feel this way … wanted, maybe even adored.
Yeah, Warner packed a lot into a simple kiss.
Behind us, the gears of the yellow-runed door clicked and then turned. Warner didn’t break the kiss, so neither did I.
“Christ,” Kandy said. “I almost get my ass skewered and the two of you are standing around macking on each other.”
“Macking?” Warner mumbled the word against my lips in a way that sounded as if maybe he hadn’t heard Kandy return at all.
I laughed and stepped back from the embrace. Warner’s arms stretched between us, his fingers brushing against my shoulders before they fell to his sides. He wasn’t smiling, and he hadn’t taken his eyes off me yet. I couldn’t help but grin at him, pleased that he was obviously into me as much as I was into him.
“Took you long enough,” Kandy muttered as she attempted to brush by me. Attempted, because she had to suffer a one-armed hug around her neck before I’d let her pass. “I’ve been deliberately leaving you two alone since he showed up.”
“Don’t even try to pretend you deliberately went through the wrong door, taking the key with you.”
Kandy offered me her patented nonsmile as an answer. Then she tossed the key up into the air, caught it, and sauntered toward the violet door. She inserted the key into the indentation there without any other preamble.
“Wait!” I cried. The warm cocoon I’d found while in Warner’s arms stripped away instantly. I really couldn’t bear to watch Kandy fall a second time. “How do you know it’s the purple door?”
“Violet,” Kandy corrected. “It’s how the colors line up. Red and blue make violet.”
“But you just thought yellow and blue made green.”
“They do,” Kandy smirked. “I assumed green, because that was what worked the first two times, with the map and the first door. But the second key, the second almost-a-rainbow on the tattoo, wasn’t the same. It was missing violet, remember? I just didn’t get the connection between the second door and the second tattoo. Both sets have to line up. Tricky.”
Warner grunted like maybe he thought it wasn’t so tricky. I was pretty much lost, though I couldn’t dispute Kandy’s logic. There was a second key on the tattooed map that we hadn’t utilized in any way yet. Questions of how Pulou-who-was knew to tattoo any of this on his back arose in my mind, but I tamped them down. Now wasn’t the time to try to untangle that mystery, if I could even hope to understand the ways of a guardian at all.
Kandy turned the key, then quickly stepped to the side. Just in case she was wrong a second time and the floor was about to drop out from underneath her. The gears in the door creaked and the door opened, all the way this time. A long hallway appeared beyond it.
“No lights,” I murmured.
“No problem,” Kandy said. With her shapeshifter magic glowing in her eyes, she stepped through into the stone-walled corridor — which was suddenly uncomfortably reminiscent of a tunnel.
“Maybe I should lead?” I asked. “Last time we were in a tunnel, you got swallowed by the wall.”
“The wall swallowed you?” Warner asked as we both followed Kandy through the violet-runed door.
“Yeah,” Kandy answered. “Asshole sorcerer.”
“Different lifetime,” I murmured.
“I don’t know, Jade,” Kandy said. “Blackwell’s got it pretty bad for you. According to Audrey, he pays thousands to get his hands on any or all of Rochelle’s charcoals.”
“Audrey?” Warner repeated. “Rochelle? Charcoals?”
“Audrey is the beta werewolf of Kandy’s pack,” I said, attempting to quickly fill in the blanks for Warner. “Rochelle is an oracle, under the far seer’s mentorship, who presents her visions in charcoal on paper. She has some peace treaty with the sorcerer Blackwell, who’s a pain in our collective asses. But who’s also deemed by the treasure keeper as not worth our time.”
“He is undoubtedly correct.”
“Yeah,” Kandy snarled. “He still dislocated my shoulder with that tunnel trap and directly contributed to the death of a pack mate.”
I ran into Kandy in the dark because I hadn’t realized she’d stopped. I whacked my chin on her head and bit my tongue.
“Ow!” she cried.
“Jesus, your skull is like a freaking brick!”
She chortled a laugh, but then said, “I can’t actually see any farther. A light spell or a flashlight would help.”
“I’m not that kind of witch … or girl scout,” I muttered. “Though I excelled at selling cookies.” I reached sideways until I could touch the stone wall to my right. When no magic instantly leaped out and attempted to eat my arm, I pressed my palm fully to the wall and tried to dowse for any magic nearby.
“This would be perfect timing for one of those shadow demons to attack,” Kandy said. Her tone was far too gleeful.
“It’s odd that they have left us alone,” Warner said.
“It isn’t after sunset here yet.” Yeah, I could add two plus two. It was only when the numbers went into double digits that I got into trouble. “The magic feels stripped all along here.”
“Not just weak or muted?” Warner asked.
“Yeah, I’m not really sure how I can tell the difference, but it’s diminished somehow.”
“Someone’s been here before us, like in the other rooms,” Kandy said.
“And left no magic behind? If they didn’t have the key and used some powerful magic to get through the doors, that should have left a trace.”
“We should’ve brought the reconstructionist,” Warner said. His voice was warm comfort at my back, but my arm felt exposed and vulnerable pressed against the wall.
“She doesn’t like us much,” Kandy said.
“Me. She doesn’t like me,” I said.
“She’s afraid of you, warrior’s daughter,” Warner interjected. “That’s not the same thing.”
I reached out to the magic I’d been searching for in the stone wall. Then, ever so carefully, I added a little bit of my power to it. Pale blue lights glimmered along the edge of the ceiling, and then all along the tunnel in front of us — glowing brighter the closer they were to me. Then they dimmed and we were plunged into darkness again. I pushed another pulse of magic into the wall, following its path in
my mind to the light I’d seen nearest to me. I twined my magic into the glimmer of the magic I’d found that triggered the lights.
The light over my head glowed pale blue again. Then a few more glowed farther along the windowless hall.
“See? You are that kind of witch.” Kandy started walking again along the corridor.
Something clanked in the wall ahead of us. Next thing I saw was Warner holding a steel arrow about an inch away from Kandy’s heart. He’d gotten in front of the werewolf and me in the blink of an eye. As I stared, the sentinel snapped the arrow in half and dropped the pieces to the ground.
“Apparently, you woke up more than just the lights,” he said. “Shall I go first?”
“With reflexes like that, hell yeah,” Kandy answered.
Warner stepped ahead of us. My legs felt numb, shaky, but they seemed to still function as I followed. I really wasn’t sure that a werewolf could survive getting skewered through the heart.
“It’s just like Indiana Jones,” Kandy said, grinning back over her shoulder at me.
“Sure. Great,” I answered.
No more arrows attempted to pierce our hearts as we continued forward until the corridor dead-ended at a stone door. Some complicated-looking runes were etched into the stone tiles that encircled the door. A few of those tiles appeared to be depressed, as if they’d been pushed farther into the wall.
“The magic, alchemist?” Warner prompted.
I shook my rekindled fear for Kandy out of my head and peered at the door. And the runes. “Diminished as before.”
“We could trigger it, just to see what it does,” Kandy mused.
“No,” Warner and I said in unison.
“Spoilsports,” the green-haired werewolf said gleefully. At least one of us was having a ball. “It’s broken anyway.” She pressed her fingers to the stone door, which opened farther but bumped against something. I hadn’t seen that it was open at all. Despite my half-dragon DNA, my eyes still weren’t as sharp as a werewolf’s. I assumed that made me prey, in the dark at least.
Through the door, stone stairs dropped off sharply to the left.
Kandy stepped through the door and down the first couple of steps, then turned to look behind it. “Another body,” she said.
Shadows, Maps, and Other Ancient Magic (Dowser Series Book 4) Page 17