Blackbird Broken (The Witch King's Crown #2) - Keri Arthur Page 0,105

and that meant we’d be tackling that small, damp tunnel.

I took a deep breath, then, as Mo started down, shifted Nex to illuminate the stairs.

“Discover anything?” she said.

“A tunnel. How far away is the ley line?”

“A few hundred feet at the very least.”

I frowned. “Why would they make the main entrance to their altar so far away? There’d surely be houses far closer to it than this.”

“Undoubtedly,” Mo said, voice grim. “But perhaps it simply came down to the point that there was a greater chance of the occupants in the other houses being missed.”

My gaze returned to the tunnel. “There’s no magic protecting the entrance.”

She stopped beside me. “There’s definitely magic somewhere deeper in, though.”

“Could it be shoring up the passage? The thing doesn’t look particularly safe from here.”

“It feels reactive rather than protective, but without getting closer, I can’t say for sure.”

“Great,” I muttered. I drew Vita and felt a little bit safer with the weight of both daggers in my hands.

The narrowness of the tunnel meant having to slide in sideways, but even then, it was tight. Moving with any sort of speed was impossible; defensively, the position sucked.

Thankfully, Nex’s pulse didn’t alter; there might be Darksiders down here, but they were still some distance away.

Progress was slow but steady. As the tunnel began to slope downward, the caress of the ley line’s energy grew stronger and the air decidedly hotter.

I swiped at the sweat trickling down my face. “It feels like there’s a damn furnace up ahead.”

“That’s because we’re getting closer to the ley line.”

I glanced at her. In Nex’s pale light, the golden rings around the blue of her eyes glowed so brightly, it put the rest of her face into shadows. It was an eerie sight. “I wasn’t aware the ley lines held heat. It certainly wasn’t mentioned in any of the books I’ve read about them.”

“That’s because most witches use the lines at a surface level. Very few go underground.”

“Then why do dark witches? Is it just a matter of being safer?”

“No. It’s easier to tap directly into the energy of the lines from underground. Of course, with that ease comes greater danger.”

“Because of the closeness?”

“Because to fully tap into a line—as most dark altars do—you must first step into its flow. The unprepared can be washed away.”

Unease stirred. “Does that mean you’ll have to step into the flow to disentangle it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you done it before?”

“Once. It was a most unpleasant experience, I can tell you.”

Given her habit of understating dangers when she was tackling them, that no doubt meant she’d come close to losing her life. “And is the flow ahead stronger or weaker than that one?”

“It’s about the same.” There was a smile in her voice, even if I couldn’t see it. “Stop worrying. It’ll be fine.”

“You keep saying that, and half the time it never is.”

She chuckled softly. “You really do have your father’s pessimistic streak. He was always worrying about things and situations he couldn’t control.”

Which only made me wonder if he’d worried about the trip that had killed both him and my mother. I didn’t ask, because I really didn’t want to know. The sad fact was, most of my memories of my mom came from when she was dying in the hospital; I didn’t even have that much of my father.

The tunnel eventually widened enough to allow us to walk normally, though we remained in single file. The damp smell of earth got stronger, and from somewhere up ahead came a steady dripping sound. Water now seeped down the walls and the floor was slick with moisture.

Then, from not too far up ahead, came a soft shimmer.

The threads of magic.

I stopped abruptly. Mo stepped to one side and peered over my shoulder.

“It’s a perimeter alarm,” she said eventually. “I might be able to divert it—it’d be safer than disconnecting.”

Because disconnecting the spell was likely to have the same result as tripping the damn thing. I swung sideways and sucked in a breath, giving her the room to slip past. Once she had, I raised Nex to provide light. The last thing I needed was her slipping and breaking her leg again.

The perimeter alarm was a fairly simple spell, and it didn’t take Mo long to tuck the lower strings into the upper, allowing us room to duck through it without disturbing or tripping the spell.

After a dozen or so more steps, the tunnel opened into a surprisingly large cavern. The water tumbling past our feet ran down