He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t lift more. Already the strain was like nothing I’d ever felt before. Almost like the lid was getting heavier. I blinked and looked at it. “Ethan, can things be spelled to get heavier?”
“Yes,” he growled the word.
I tucked my shoulder under the edge. “Gregory, can you pull Orin out?”
Ethan mimicked me, setting the lid on his shoulder. “Pete, help him! I can’t do anything about this spell, but if we let go now, it will shut for good. We won’t have another chance!”
“Seriously?” I yelped as the lid pushed down on me. “You could have said that earlier!”
“I didn’t know until I felt it get heavy,” he snapped.
Breathing through the shaking of my muscles and the protesting of my body in general, I watched as Gregory climbed into the coffin and pulled Orin partway out. The lid pushed downward, narrowing the gap.
“Hurry,” I said. I was saying that word a lot, but there was no other choice.
Monsters behind us.
Monsters ahead.
And we still had to find Wally and fight our way back out to the alicorns. Preferably without coming across Frost herself.
Pete grabbed Orin under the arms and pulled. “Why isn’t he awake? Orin, wake up!”
A terrible thought rippled through me. What if Orin had been killed? Was a truly dead vampire more controllable?
Pete and Gregory all but fell backward, pulling Orin with them. Ethan and I stepped away at the same time, and the lid clanged shut, shuddering the coffin and the ground around us. I went to my knees, breathing hard. “Has he got a pulse?”
Pete slid his fingers to Orin’s neck and then nodded. “Weak, but it’s there. What are you thinking?”
I slid closer to Orin so I could see his very pale face up close. “He needs blood. That’s my guess.”
“Blood?” Pete tipped his head. “You think that he’s—”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, I just . . . it makes sense.” I mean, I had enough scratches and cuts that giving Orin a little of my blood was no big deal. Not really.
The cut across my left forearm from the car crash had partially scabbed over, and it took just a flick of my fingernails to open it back up again. I squeezed the edges of the cut while I held it over Orin’s mouth.
The thing was, I didn’t know if it would work. But it was kind of like Orin’s version of a Snickers bar, so why not?
A drop fell right in, and his eyes bugged open the second it touched his tongue. He gasped, his eyes looking straight at me. “Wild. It’s a trap!”
I leaned back as Orin sat up. “I figured as much. We have to get Wally, though. We can’t leave her.”
His long, thin fingers grabbed at my arms. “No, we have to leave her.”
I shook my head. “Not going to happen, Orin. Any more than I would have left you, or Ethan, or Gregory, or Pete.”
Orin slumped and slowly let go of me. “Sorry. That . . . that was some of the instructions they left in me. Like they wanted me to drag you out.” He ran a hand over his eyes. “I don’t even know exactly, but I was supposed to stop you somehow.”
“They?” Now it was my turn to grab a hold of him. “Who is they?”
“The master vampires,” he said. “They want Wally. They think they can double cross Frost.”
Around us the sound of groaning hinges sent a river of frustration through me. I stood, wobbled and then offered my hand to Orin. “Talk while we run. Unless you can stop an old, starving vampire?”
Orin shook his head. “Not yet. I don’t think.”
I pointed at Pete. “Keep a nose out for anything that will want to kill us. I’ll lead. Everyone on their toes.”
I locked onto the feeling of Wally in my head and twisted around until I found a doorway leading out. A simple doorway.
I ran toward it, hoping it was open like so many of them had been. The knob was firm in my hand. Without even asking, Gregory and Ethan took a look at it. Both shook their heads.
“Not a spell,” Ethan said.
“And not a metal I can deal with,” Gregory said.
I swallowed hard. “Wally is on the other side, not far.”
While I fumbled with the lock, Orin began to speak.
“They didn’t want just you, Wild. Though you are the one that Frost wants for sure. They want . . . they want all of us, I think. And in order to get us all together, to show off our abilities they put us in here.”
Part of my mind was on what he was saying, the other part on the door in front of me. “They didn’t get enough at the Culling Trials?”
“The Culling Trials—as dangerous as it became, it was never the real world. This is. The Culling Trials was like an entry test to see who sparked the magic around them. We all sparked. A great deal if the efforts they are going to here are any indication.”
I was on my knees, my good hand on the doorknob, the sounds of coffins opening behind me. “Orin, you have to slow them down!”
“I’ll try.” He did not sound confident.
I stared at the door. “What I wouldn’t give for a key right about now.”
Ethan crouched beside me and held out his hand. “I mean, the chances of it working are . . . well, Wally would know. But I’d say pretty bad in general.”
The key in Ethan’s hand was my key. Tommy’s key. I scooped it up and gave him a look.
“Wally dropped it on the pier,” he said. “I picked it up and meant to give it back to her.”
“It won’t work, there’s no way,” I said.
“Wally said it was a death key,” Gregory pointed out. “That is something special in the House of Night, apparently. Why wouldn’t it work?”
I looked over my shoulder to see three vampires standing still next to their coffins—apparently their lids hadn’t been the heavy sort. I did a double blink. One of the vampires was Jared.
Jared was Orin’s previous trainer.
“Orin?”
He had his hands out to the sides of his body and I could have sworn that a dark green mist rolled around him. “They can’t see us right now. I’m blocking them.”
“Badass,” Pete said. “We are a bunch of badass cats!”
I turned back to the door even as a wave of panic hit me. I felt the others gasp and bit back on the urge to run.
“The same as before,” Ethan grunted. “Like they are trying to scare us forward.”
I flipped the key over.
“He’s holding them back still, but I think you should move faster,” Pete said.
Really, the worst that could happen was that we’d stuff the key in, and it wouldn’t work. Right?
Deep breath in, pushing back the fear that crawled all over me, I shoved the key into the lock. The resistance was immediate.
“Won’t work,” I said.
Ethan put his hand on mine and his magic crawled over my skin and into the key. It went in a little further. “Gregory, Pete, we need you.”
Gregory was next and when his magic slid over us the key sunk in further yet. The same with Pete. Each layer of magic helped the key fit better.
“Orin!” I looked over my shoulder and he met my eyes.