Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,129
my blood-drenched one. I can feel all of them helping me—Yorl’s paw on my back, Fione’s hand on my arm, pulling me out of the blade and into place for the next as Malachite stops the second-to-last one, his face pouring sweat and his veins glistening under paper skin.
“Last one!” Fione encourages, blood-flecked face determined. Her tender touch is so different from her fearful hyperventilating just a month ago. It gives me something to hold on to as I fling myself into the path of the last blade, marking the wall with my blood one last time.
We make it through, and they pull me out yet again. A handful of hands, helping me. I collapse on the ground, laughing blood. Lucien kneels at my side, cradling me, and I can feel him pouring all his concentration into the magic flooding into me and stitching closed my injuries.
“What’s so godsdamn funny?” he whispers down at me, the words hot but his tone cool.
“Thank you.” I smile up at him, touching his face and regretting the blood-finger marks it leaves on his golden cheekbones. “For letting me get hurt. For letting me do what I can to help.”
“Implying anyone could ever let you do anything, you stubborn wildcat.” He holds me close, my chest wounds closing against his own chest.
The pain was worth it this time, and it’s nice because that’s never a guarantee; pain isn’t often wrapped up in a neat bow of purpose. But the benefit of immortality is a second chance at everything. Now that we’ve sprung one trap, Fione and Yorl know what to look for—the mechanical triggers hidden in the stone and littering the tunnel moving forward. They steer us around every horsehair tripwire, every deadly gas vent, and soon the tunnel changes, morphs and widens and opens into a yawning chasm—darkness as far down and far as we can see. The tunnel continues as a thin stone pathway from one side of the gap to the other, barely room enough for two people to walk side by side.
“I’m no expert, but this room sort of screams ‘trap.’” The buzzing in my head chooses the exact moment I step into the cavern to intensify, crushing me with a flood of random thoughts and pressures. It’s like someone’s crashed cymbals in my head and turned it to mush: strings of jokes I can barely hold on to, one argument replaced with the next, one thought laced with another, and the hunger beneath it all, conducting it like the head of a dark, chaotic choir.
“Definitely a trap. Not for us, though.” Malachite points at the distant, faintly lit walls on either side of the chasm. They slope up to the infinite ceiling and down to the infinite drop, but Lucien’s flickering witchfire illuminates them enough to see the very deliberate carvings in the stone.
“Beneather runes.” Yorl squints, his catlike pupils dilated so large his eye color is just a faint ring of green around black. “This room is a hevstrata.”
“Hev-what now?” Fione frowns.
“Beneather runes are the only things that can affect valkerax—hold them in place or keep them out of a place—”
“I know that,” Fione interrupts, but Yorl presses on.
“They become unreliable against large masses of valkerax. Which is why these hevstrata were made in the early days of the War of White: choke points full of beneather runes meant to disorient groups of them.”
“It messes with their brains,” Malachite clarifies. “If a hunting party’s being chased by a bunch, they come here to throw ’em off. It works. Most of the time.”
“Well, good news—it’s working right now.” I wince, holding my scalp. “Bad news—it’s working right now.”
“Are you all right?” Lucien asks.
“Oh, I’m fine. I just can’t—” I pause, gulping air and trying to remember what I was going to say next. The noise is like a cloth over wood, sweeping away the crumbs of the sentence cake I was trying to build. “I—I can’t think straight.”
“Then think crooked,” Malachite snipes. “We just need to get across the gap, and it’ll get better.”
“Maybe,” Yorl adds.
Malachite sends a withering look at him. “Maybe move your arse.”
“I’m just being factual,” the celeon hisses back, beginning to mince down the thin pathway with an effortless ease. His tail swishes, no doubt giving him a balance advantage. Fione stares warily at the thin pathway and then her cane.
Malachite sees it and offers his pale hand to her. “C’mon, Your Grace. I’ll carry you on my back.”