Send Me Their Souls (Bring Me Their Hearts #3) - Sara Wolf Page 0,130

know you can,” the beneather sighs. “It’s just to be safe. C’mon.”

She studies the impossibly long drop for a second more and then slings her cane beneath her pack, climbing on Malachite’s kneeling back. He straightens, holding her like it’s nothing, and looks back at Lucien and me.

“I’ll leave you two slobbering lovebirds to figure out who goes first.”

“Eternally thankful,” Lucien drawls and tips an imaginary hat. He turns back to me with a smirk. “Jealous, you think?”

“Irascibly so,” I agree and motion for him to go first.

“Don’t fall,” he advises.

“If I do, I’ll shout up and let you know how deep it is.” I smile. I’m making jokes, but the second I take two steps onto the precarious line of stone, I feel my stomach drop out. A cold wind whispers up from the abyss on either side of my feet, and I finally get it. It wasn’t the traps or the suffocating darkness and closeness of the tunnel. It’s this yawning nothingness that crystallizes my understanding of the Dark Below—it goes on forever.

It’s not a place but a feeling, the deep and unsettling feeling of eternity. I’ve felt it before in my darkest moments of hunger—the hopelessness of my situation. The hopelessness of immortality. No change. No end. Only pain like dark, without rest.

I look up from the fall and to Lucien’s back. Because of him, I found rest. Because of them all, I found change. But other Heartless aren’t so lucky. And the valkerax aren’t lucky at all—dying in scores for a Tree they can’t disobey.

We make it to the other side of the fall, the cavern narrowing again, and I look back once at the runes all over the walls. Runes that tell me to forget, to think, to run chaos in my own mind. Runes that presume I’m like the other valkerax, like every other Heartless, like everyone else who can’t disobey.

Like everyone else who wants to continue the cycle.

A single blood tear falls off my cheek, and my soft laugh is swallowed up by the abyss.

…

Finally, through the bones and the traps and the shadow, we come to a door.

The complete lack of sound in the Dark Below started to break apart long ago, interrupted by faint hissing, bangs echoing, the sounds of footsteps. Civilization. Even the smell changes—moss and sterile stone replaced by cooking oil and metal and tobacco smoke. The door is made of stone like the tunnel is, like everything in the Dark Below is.

Malachite turns to us, knitting his fingers in his broadsword handle. “If they ask you questions, don’t say shit. Let me handle it.”

“I thought you’ve been disowned?” Fione lilts.

“I can speak to them,” Yorl asserts. “My grandfather was a prominent figure here—”

“If I hear you say ‘my grandfather’ one more time, I’m gonna make you meet him,” Malachite snaps.

I slide in and put a hand over Malachite’s mouth, smiling at Yorl. “I’ll go first. I’m a great talker.”

“A greab horbseshitter,” Malachite grumbles through my fingers. But when I release him he plays mild and leans on the stone door to crack it open for us. I blink away the light, everything so bright and sudden, and walk over the threshold.

The feeling of a blade at my throat is almost immediate, but I can’t see them through the eye-searing light. Sound works a little better.

“Who are you? Identify yourself immediately or face death!”

The voice means business, so ragged and furious, the joke in my throat dies. The clink of bone armor and the feel of cold steel against my neck. I adjust slowly to the sight of a beneather holding a fanged dagger to me, the same dagger design I’ve seen on Malachite’s hip. The room is well-lit by clusters of brightmoss in clay jars, the kind I grew used to in the underground arena where Yorl and I trained Evlorasin. But this moss is much brighter and all in the same golden-orange color, nearly simulating the hue of fire torches. Incredibly intricate and rich tapestries line the walls in the hundreds, made of what looks like white valkerax hair stained in differing shades of green and rust. Remarkably, they’ve gotten the persistent valkerax-y smell of blood out of it; the whole room thick with the saccharine smell of incense and oiled metal.

“My name is Zera Y’shennria,” I say slowly. “And I have some information for the ancestral council about the valkerax horde.”

The eyes of the guard holding the dagger to me widen, the ruby a darker wine-red