Thief (Rebel Heart Book 5), page 14
The tower was quiet. Peaceful almost. I could see the entire town below from where I stood. It made me a little dizzy to see it from so high up.
The marketplace stretched from where the castle walls ended to where we’d entered town. Tiny bodies milled about within. Demons. They looked so small from here. Weird.
Despite the two red suns that moved toward one another, and the strange glow they cast over the land, this place had a strange beauty to it. An eerie, skin-crawling beauty.
Far off on the north side of town, adjacent to where we’d entered, lay a body of water. A river it seemed. I squinted, trying to better make out the pale-green hue of the water.
Those purple trees grew everywhere. Near the river a small forest of them grew. Thick and daunting, likely a place where many had entered never to exit. Just looking at the forest made me shudder. It was a bad place.
A few minutes had passed, and nobody had yet stormed the tower. Maybe they didn’t know I was here. I could hope. With a small sigh, I tucked my wings in and focused on making them disappear. They were always there in an unseen magic sense. But physically I couldn’t be carting them around all the time. They weren’t light by any means.
Drawing the Midnight Star, I held it ready and started forward. Time to enter the tower. No big deal. Just on my way to steal from a demon freaking dragon king. Alone.
One last time I allowed myself to glance back over the horizon. A figure made his way toward the castle, hasty and sloppy in flight. Rowen. Injured. It had to be.
Holding my breath, I clung to the stone ledge of the tower’s balcony, watching as he dipped low. He fought hard to recover. As he drew closer I saw that his face was blood smeared. How much had happened in the precious few minutes since I left him?
The closer he drew the weaker his wing beats became. Lower he dropped with each one. He was going to miss the ledge completely.
No. I reached out my hand to him, somehow refraining from shouting his name in panic. He thrust his good arm toward me. So close. Our fingers almost touched. Then his wings gave out and he fell. Without thinking I dropped my sword and lunged for him, tossing myself over the edge to snatch his hand before he dropped out of reach. My tired wings flared wide once again, and I clenched my teeth, struggling to haul us both back up.
“You’ve got this, Spike.” Rowen clutched my hand in a bone-crushing grip. Blood dripped from a gash near his temple.
The fatigue in limbs that didn’t get used nearly often enough was crippling. Slowly I inched my way back up to the balcony with each beat.
With a frustrated cry, heat rippled through me, and my wings lit up with fire. A surge of renewed strength filled me. I found the will and the way to drag us both up and over the ledge. We tumbled onto the hard stone balcony and collapsed. My fire promptly went out.
Groaning, Rowen clutched his shoulder and sat up. “I don’t think it will be long before those guys catch up with us. I managed to hold them off with a few white-light arrows. They didn’t seem to expect me to be able to do that.”
“I get the feeling most of them don’t know what to make of us,” I gasped for air, filling my lungs. “I was about to go inside, but I was afraid. Do you think the others are ok?”
Standing up, Rowen gazed down at me with warm amber eyes and held out a hand to help me up. “I’m sure of it. Those two are stubborn as hell, and they know how to fight. We better get moving if we’re going to find the library before someone catches us.”
The adrenaline crash left me light headed, and I stumbled as Rowen pulled me up. Losing my balance, I fell into him.
Automatically his arms went around me. He held on for just a moment before letting go with a murmured, “Sorry.” He started ahead, toward the darkened doorway that led inside.
I stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Rowen, I’m glad you’re here with me.”
There was nothing else I could say, and no reply he could give. We just shared a brief but poignant moment. We would always have feelings for each other. I would never not care for Rowen. I wanted him to know.
He forced a small smile that appeared genuine but pained. “I wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world.”
Ok, so he did have a reply. One that caused me to trip over my own tongue. Just as well. We very much needed to focus on not dying right now, not on the parts of us that already had.
Wings now absent from sight, bow slung on his back, Rowen marched toward the arched entry. His injured shoulder sagged, and though it had to be paining him, he moved like it was nothing. The gash on his temple had stopped bleeding. Seemed to be a surface wound.
Right on his heels, I stuck close, ready to have his back should anything jump out at us. I didn’t know what to expect. Sneaking through a demon’s castle on the other side was a first for me.
We stepped into the tower itself, revealing another mesmerizing display. The stone floor was made up of several broken emerald shards, laid out in an erratic pattern. It was beautiful. Eye catching. A little hypnotic.
It brought to mind what Cinder had said about the dragon’s eyes. I tore my gaze from the gleaming floor and drank in the sight of the tower’s peak stretched high above us. The walls were covered in orange moss and a vine that wove itself into knots in various places.
A fountain in the center of the room was overgrown with moss. Dried out and forgotten, water hadn’t run through it in a long time. So sad it looked. Unloved. It tugged at my heart, touching on my empathy.
Empathy? For what? A demon’s forgotten fountain? If anything it was a sign of the poor upkeep around this place.
“I don’t like the way this place makes me feel,” I said, lowering my voice when it echoed up into the tower peak. “Like it’s getting in my head. Hypnotic. Like Cinder said.”
A short, sharp nod of his pink head, Rowen turned in a slow circle. “Which way do you think we should take?”
I followed his lead, surveying the many archways and stairways leading out of the tower. There were six exits we could select. And no way of knowing where any of them led.
“Son of a bitch.” I had no idea where to begin. Worried that we were about to get lost in an otherworld castle, I turned in a slow circle, taking in every option. “There’s no way of knowing. I guess we choose at random and hope for the best.”
Nodding, Rowen extended a hand. “Feel free to do the honors.”
Because I didn’t know how to choose, I closed my eyes and turned, coming to a stop at random. “This one.”
I opened my eyes to find myself pointed at one of the archways that led directly into a stairway. We approached slowly, wary of every step we took. It was so silent. Too silent.
The stairway was narrow and dark. We could see nothing beyond the first few steps. Raising a palm, a small fireball bloomed like a tiny flower to light the way.
“Ready?” I asked, steeling myself for whatever lay ahead.
Rowen held up his own hand where a small white light glowed. With an encouraging smile, he nodded and took the lead. “I hope like hell this gets us to the library.”
“Keep in mind that it was a demon who told us about the library. He may have been trying to throw us off.” As we stepped into the dark stairwell, my voice fell to a hushed whisper.
“We don’t have any other leads. If Artem really did owe your father a favor, if he’s telling the truth, then the library is our destination. Either way, we’ll know when we get there.” Rowen disappeared around a tight spiral in the staircase. If he got more than a step ahead of me, the darkness threatened to swallow him.
The entire stairway seemed to be just a tight coil that went on forever. After a time it began to feel too closed in. Too tight. Holding in the scream that slowly built as we descended, I wondered if perhaps this was a stairway to nowhere. And we would forever be trapped here, walking down these never-ending stairs.
I was grateful to be there with Rowen. Despite everything, I trusted him to have my back. Yet as I followed him down into potential oblivion, I longed desperately for Arrow.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Right around the time I started to believe we really were stuck in an endless descent of stairs that went absolutely nowhere, the narrow corridor began to widen. Above us the ceiling stretched gradually higher. The dry, thready air grew damper. The demons could talk all the shit they wanted about how humans had ruined the earth, but their air quality wasn’t so outstanding either.
Confidence began to creep slowly back in. Ok, maybe we were getting somewhere after all. I brushed a stray hair back from my face. It had escaped my ponytail and insisted on clinging to the slight perspiration on my cheek.
Ahead of me Rowen gasped and jerked to a stop so fast I walked right into his back. With a grunt I held his good shoulder to rebalance myself on the stair above. Then I saw what had stopped him so suddenly.
In the dark bend ahead shone four pairs of glowing, yellow eyes. One by one they blinked at us. They grew brighter as the owners of those eyes grew closer. There was nowhere to run. We’d never make it back up all those stairs.
All we could do was fight.
I fed the fire in my palm, making it burn bigger and brighter. We needed to see what we were up against. And it was both better and worse than I’d been imagining. Four skeletal creatures advanced on us. All bones, even their wings. Just bones. With yellow eyes glowing in their otherwise hollow sockets. Taller than us, they held daggers in bony grips and chattered something to one another with a clatter of jaw bones.
I backed up a few steps, giving Rowen space to fight. He moved to one side of the stairwell, I moved to the other. We filled the entire six feet of space. Tight.
Rowen didn’t wait for them to reach us. He lunged ahead, creating a shield of bright light which he used to ram into two of them. One of them crumpled on impact, a clatter of bones on stone. The other lost only a leg but somehow continued to push forward.
With the Midnight Star I easily got the blade between the ribs of one of them. It didn’t seem to achieve much though. So I pulled it free and began hacking away. As I lopped off its head, it managed to graze me with its dagger. Sharp and sudden, the cut burned.
I brought a foot up and kicked the headless skeleton in the sternum. It went down on the steps, breaking apart further. One hand continued to clutch blindly in my direction. Whatever these things were, they didn’t seem to have any real thought process. Just blind, programmed offense.
“I think these guys are just a distraction.” I brought my boot down on the groping hand and turned to smash my sword into the remaining skeleton soldier. “Can’t imagine any demon who wouldn’t make it past these things.”
I glanced up to find half a dozen more charging up the stairs with Rowen in their path. They were coming too fast. He didn’t have the time to prepare to face so many.
In a small panic, I threw my hands up. A fireball burst forth. Rowen ducked, and the fiery orb smashed into the creatures. It blew them into smithereens. Bone fragments rained down all around us. The sound alone as the pieces hit the stone sent chills through my own bones.
The fireball continued on down the stairs where it found no escape, ricocheting back at us. I had mere seconds to put myself in its path to absorb the blast before it could scorch Rowen. I fell back onto a bone-littered step and sucked in a deep breath of muggy air.
“Well, that was interesting. I think we’re almost at the bottom.” After a brief moment to adjust to the renewed and constant flood of adrenaline in my veins, I stood up and we continued downward. “But I’m not sure why the fireball ricocheted back. That would mean the bottom is closed. But those things had to have come from somewhere.”
“There’s probably a door,” Rowen mused, walking a step behind me now.
The stairs dead ended, but there was no door. My moment of yay was crushed. “It’s just a wall.”
I ran my fingers over the stone while Rowen created enough light to illuminate the area where we stood. The ceiling had grown above us, stretching high, though just how high we couldn’t tell in the dark. We stood on the bottom step gaping at the stone wall in front of us.
“Demon fuckery,” Rowen remarked, scrutinizing the barrier before us. “There has to be a way out.”
After slapping and pawing at the stone to no avail, I gave up and stepped back up a few steps, viewing it from a higher vantage point. My gaze traveled up, though the light would only reach so far.
“Rowen, I think there’s something up there.” Though it was hard to make out, there appeared to be something cut into the stone.
With a burst of wings he was off the ground, albeit with some struggle. The light traveled up with him, illuminating the stairwell until I could see how high it stretched. “There’s a door here, Spike.”
Relief gave me a much-needed resurgence of strength. I joined him to find another arched doorway cut into the stone, this one with an actual door.
“Is it locked?” I worried about what might be on the other side, knowing we had no other choice but to find out.
The iron handle turned in his grasp. “Nope.” He flashed me a mischievous grin, like he knew how on edge I was and that I needed him not to be. “Let’s see what’s behind door number two.”
Because it took great effort to hover outside the door, Rowen shoved it open. It was a bedroom. And it appeared to be empty. We stepped inside and did our best to quietly close the door without somehow alerting anyone to our presence.
The bedroom smelled musty. Like it hadn’t been occupied in a long time. A strange powder-like dust covered the bedding and furniture. It smelled a little like… brimstone?
“Strange that the door wasn’t locked.” Quickly I surveyed the room, afraid to let my gaze linger too long on any one thing. Any moment someone could find us. “It’s got to be warded. We probably tripped a dozen of them already.”
“Then where’s the welcoming party?” Rowen didn’t pause to give the room more than a cursory once over. He headed straight for the door on the other side.
A rich green garment, laid over a chair near the vanity in the corner, caught my eye. It seemed to be a lady’s garment. A flowing skirt hung to the floor, dusty and forgotten.
Whose room was this? Where were they now? A tug on my heartstring had me envisioning a woman with raven hair wearing this flowing gown as she sat at the vanity, brushing those dark tresses. Peering into the mirror.
At the thought, I happened to glance into the mirror, finding myself and Rowen reflected back. The mirror was positioned so it reflected the majority of the room. Dust also covered its surface.
That didn’t stop me from getting the ever-so-certain feeling that through that mirror, we were being watched.
By the dragon himself? Most likely.
Shrugging off the filmy layer of false emotion the room had evoked, I hurried after Rowen as he opened the door to the hall and the castle beyond.
We’d made it. Sort of.
Entering a corridor lined with old, tattered red carpet, we hesitated before emerging fully. We appeared to be alone. However, appearances were always deceiving with demons. It was kind of their MO. The hallway was lined with doors on either side, all of them closed. Broken and crumbling statues stood watch as we took stock of our new surroundings. To the left we could see the hallway ended in yet another old, lonely fountain.
So we went right.
Windows high above on either side allowed the twin suns’ red haze to shine in. It didn’t boast a lot in the way of illumination, but it was a vast improvement over the gloomy dark tower stairwell. The suns seemed to have dropped since we arrived. I didn’t want to be in this realm after dark.
Dust floated in the air. Breathing it made me cough. As we moved quietly down the empty hall, the air improved. So did the castle itself.
The hall opened into a massive foyer. We must have reached the front of the castle. So where was everybody? Overhead hung the hugest chandelier I’d ever seen. It wasn’t lit by electricity of any sort but fire. Hundreds of small, individual flames. The glow they created together lit the entire entryway.
“This doesn’t feel right,” I said when Rowen strode into the middle of the marble floor. “Nobody leaves the front door unwatched like this.”
Beneath that big chandelier stretched a double staircase, each one winding away from the other, up and away to opposite wings. Under and behind the sprawling staircases were two hallways leading away from each other. I couldn’t wrap my head around living in such a place. Although so far it didn’t appear that anyone did live here. Other than maybe Flint. Did Lore even live here? Strange.
“I can assure you that the front door is always under surveillance.” A husky voice drew our gazes to the woman who stood at the top of one of the grand staircases. She stared down at us with a smile that was both amused and sultry.
Not waiting for us to respond, she began to descend. Long red waves of hair cascaded down her back, tumbling over the black wings tucked against her. Black eyes gleamed as she eyed us with cat-like curiosity. She looked so much like Lore, they had to be sisters. She walked with a predator’s gait. There was a prowl to her step. As she drew closer the atmosphere grew charged with her sultry energy. Succubus.
Alarmed, my gaze darted to Rowen. Already he reacted to her, his stance softened as he watched.
“Rowen,” I hissed, slapping his hand. “Don’t go soft on me now. I need you.”
The demoness chuckled. Her laughter was so smooth, so damn rich and buttery. I wanted to roll around in that laugh. But not as much as Rowen did. He watched her with an intensity I hadn’t seen on his face since he used to look at me that way.
“Soft is about the farthest from what he’ll be. Don’t worry, flame bearer. I’ll take good care of him.” Suddenly she was just there in front of us. Her red lips formed a seductive smirk, and she hit Rowen with it full on. “I like them young and fresh. It’s been some time since I’ve had the pleasure of one so delightfully virile.”
