Demon's Vengeance The Complete - Jocelynn Drake Page 0,65
dragged across the concrete. I never thought I’d find myself back here. And when Simon had been killed, I’d hoped I would never have to think about him or my past again. It’s amazing how fucking wrong I can be at times.
Clearing my throat, I took a step forward and then another one, relieved to find that it grew easier as long as I kept my mind on the task at hand. Getting into Simon’s rooms meant my getting into the library, which meant that I was closer to finding the killer and finding a way to keep Trixie and our baby safe. Now I just had to enter Simon’s rooms without having my organs pulled out through my belly button.
Gideon wordlessly commanded the massive double doors to open and we stepped inside the Tower, escaping the bitter cold for something that felt so much worse—a heart-sickening familiarity that was almost comforting. Ten years had passed and it all looked the same. The floor was covered in cold gray marble and the walls were a deep charcoal gray, while smoky white globes of light dotted the walls at regular intervals. There was a hint of burnt heather in the air along with a whiff of lavender, both of which just barely failed to mask the coppery tang of old blood.
But it wasn’t the scents or sights that nearly had me gagging. It was the fact that something in my body relaxed upon returning. I had lived here for nine years—longer than I ever lived with my real family, who loved and treated me with kindness. This Tower had become my life, my future, and my entire world. No matter the horrors I survived, the people I had killed, or the times I had nearly died myself, something in my psyche called this place home.
“I can go up to Thorn’s door with you, but I can’t help you beyond that,” Gideon said, breaking the silence after allowing me a couple of minutes to merely stare at my stark surroundings.
“No. I’ll meet you in the library after I’m done,” I said once I felt that I had a firm handle on my emotions.
“Gage, you don’t—”
“Yeah, I do.” Glancing over my shoulder at his, I flashed him a twisted grin. “Don’t worry. I remember the way.”
Striding across the open main hall, I stopped before a quartet of large black openings along the wall. They were like car-less elevators that could take you to any location within the Towers. You just had to have the balls to use them. Or maybe you had to be a little insane.
I sucked in a deep breath and forced myself to step into the open black pit. My heart clenched as my foot fell a couple inches, pulling my entire body down before it hit a solid floor. I stepped the rest of the way into the opening, so that it looked as if I were hovering in open air. Without needing to close my eyes, I thought of the location of Simon’s old rooms and my body was thrust upward at a startling rate by an unseen force. The openings for the other floors flashed by in a splash of white light before I suddenly stopped just a couple floors from the top.
As I stepped off into the foyer of the floor, a terrified scream echoed up through the empty chamber, sending all the hairs on my neck to standing on end. The scream came from a child, likely a new apprentice who had yet to grow accustomed to this mode of travel through the Tower. I’d seen too many warlocks and witches push their new wards into the tunnels so that they could wring a scream out of them. Travelling up wasn’t so bad as you had a base to start with. Descending to the lower levels almost always left you confident that you were going to smack into the hard paving stones at the bottom, shattering every bone in your body. It took years for that fear to finally subside. Luckily it only took a few months for a new apprentice to stop screaming. But at that point, the mentor usually gave them something new to scream about.
The empty shaft opened into a short narrow hallway that led to the main foyer of the floor. The circular foyer was surrounded by four doors that led to the private rooms of four different warlocks or witches. A dim light glowed in the center the foyer, lacing