It was her turn to smile. “You didn’t fail me. Sacrifices need to be made in dire situations—situations that threaten the balance of things. I did what I did gladly, and I would do it again.”
I squeezed her hand. “Well, this time you won’t need to. Just sit tight.”
“We must go,” Merc said. Without further preamble, he stormed toward the tunnel of doom and snatched a torch from the wall. Knox followed on his heels and took the other. Foust, Brunton, and Jagger filed in behind them. Kat nudged me forward, taking up position behind me, while Grizz tried to figure out how he could cram himself through the narrow pass at my side. Everyone else fell in line in behind us.
The darkness was oppressive, and I would have sworn on my life that the tunnel narrowed the farther we went. I pressed my hand to the wall to steady myself when Grizz knocked me over, and I could feel the magic of Etherian pulsating through the walls.
Not pulsating—pulsing. Like a heartbeat. Like the rush of blood through veins.
Like a living being.
“Knox?” I called.
“Yeah?”
“Tell me what you know about Etherian.” His hesitation inspired my own, and I wondered if maybe I didn’t really want to know—but I needed to. “What is he? Or what was he?”
Silence surrounded us, with only the shuffling of shoes on rock to fill the void.
“Not a what, Piper. A who.”
Ice slid down my back and I shivered. “What do you mean ‘a who’?”
“There were rumors among the fey,” he said, caution in his voice, as though he were worried he’d say the wrong thing and the tunnel would implode. In fairness, it was a valid concern. “Rumors that had started long before we ever came to be.”
“About what?”
Another long pause.
“A child,” Foust finally said.
Nothing about this story sounded promising.
“A child made in the king’s image,” Knox clarified, “but not born of him. One made to be as powerful as the king himself, but complacent…easy to control.”
I slammed to a stop, creating a twenty-car pile-up behind me. Grizz was in my face, sniffing wildly to see if I was all right. But I wasn’t. How could I be—especially when I knew where this story was headed?
“Tick tock, children,” Etherian said, his tone full of mocking. “You don’t have long before your journey grows more perilous. I would encourage you to keep soldiering on, or you may find that those pulling up the rear won’t make it to the end.”
“Move!” Knox’s order rang out, and everyone obeyed. We tried to run, but it was far too difficult to manage in the darkness and maintain our pacing with one another. We had to settle on a jog and hope that it would suffice.
“So, what happened to the child?” I dared to ask.
“He grew up,” Brunton answered, “and he wasn’t as easily controlled as Phineas had planned.”
“And there is only one thing to do with a being powerful enough to challenge you for the throne,” Foust added.
I swallowed hard. “He killed him?”
Knox shook his head. “Worse…”
“Worse?”
“Think about what you unwittingly did to Kingston and imagine doing it with the intention of trapping him in an eternal tomb, to suffer and fade but never die. That is what Phineas did—or so the stories say.”
“The stories left out much.” Etherian’s voice echoed around us, and the tunnel began to narrow further, choking off our path. “Phineas underestimated me—I suggest you not do the same.”
“Yeah,” I wheezed, picking up the pace, “the fey king is really good at that. Arrogant assholes usually are.” The rock stopped moving. “Etherian,” I called as I kept up with Jagger in front of me, “I’m sorry for what was done to you. I understand what it’s like to have a parent hunt you—want you dead. To have them fear what they’ve created because they know that child is the one thing that can destroy them.”
“Says the spawn who still breathes—”
“She tried to have me killed, too! I told you that.”
“She didn’t try very hard, then, did she? For here you are in your corporeal state, and I am…this.”
“We’ve undone the magic that bound her from killing me and me from killing her. That bitch can die by my hand now.”
“And if you survive my test, you will prove yourself worthy of the chance.”
“Why are you doing this? We want the same thing!”
A terrible rumbling sounded deep down the tunnel behind us, followed by screams.
“Because I am jealous of you, and a jealous fey is a dangerous one indeed.”
Before I could argue any further, a male voice tore through the air from behind us. Then a bloodcurdling shriek rattled my bones. I looked back at the infinite darkness; then I saw it shift and move as another cry echoed off the stony walls.
Etherian’s real test had finally arrived.
Chapter Twelve
I felt the immediate press of bodies as they surged forward from the back of the group like the wave of panic it was. Unlike the trouble we’d faced the first time we’d returned from Faerie, when the secret passageway’s walls had crumbled and forced us out, this wasn’t a structural matter.
Structural problems didn’t screech like a banshee caught in a trap.
“What is it?” Jase shouted from the back, his voice barely audible above the din.
I grabbed Knox’s hand and prayed that whatever connection I had to Faerie or Etherian would grant me a shred of my power. “Light the way,” I said softly, begging my magic to oblige.
A tiny orb of light grew in my hand, though it flickered like a bulb on the brink of burning out. With a silent prayer, I threw it at the low ceiling. Like iridescent roots, it spread through the cracks and crevices, creating track lighting of a sort—like the kind leading the way toward an emergency exit, which was precisely what we needed. But with that light came the realization of what hunted us.
A terrible wall of darkness scaled the ceiling, sucking up my light as it grew nearer; an inky wall with bright red eyes and long sharp teeth that seemed to glow of their own accord. Teeth that could shred through flesh without resistance.
“You’d better run, bastard princess,” Etherian said with a laugh. “Or show me all of this power you hold—power you boast can kill the royals.”
“What the fuck is that?” Kat cried from behind me.
Then the press of bodies ceased, each of them stopping to face the beast stalking us from above.
“Nothing good,” Brunton replied.
I heard blades unsheathe, claws spring forth, and the collective growl of the wolves fill the corridor. Jagger pushed himself in front of me to join them—to keep me safe, as though he’d forgotten who and what I was. But why wouldn’t he? I’d all but forgotten in that moment, too, the memories of the king’s land having rendered me all but useless before.
But we weren’t in the king’s land. Or the queen’s. We were in a rogue part of Faerie cunning enough to spare a being that had been betrayed by the king and turn him into a weapon. That was energy I could understand.