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Bang.
Grey jolted upright on the mattress, his heart slamming against his ribs as the gunshot rang through the halls and vibrated against the metal door. Screams and shouts turned his blood to ice as he scrambled backward. Each breath came harder and heavier than the last as he frantically searched for a place to hide—a place he wouldn’t find in this cell. Certainly nowhere where Reign wouldn’t be able to find him.
His body folded it on itself when he crammed himself into a corner and covered his head. The chaos beyond his little room grew louder as the seconds slipped by. He gritted his teeth and buried his face into his knees, trying to keep the tears at bay. That dream he had so many nights ago resurfaced in the back of his mind, bringing that phantom feeling of dirt crammed under his fingernails to free himself—that lost, lonely child deep within him that remained trapped in the Otherworld. A piece of himself that’d been dragged away the night his parents died, and he’d been hauled away to face the cruel reality all around him.
A sob broke through the overwhelming noise, made louder when a slam rattled the door. Grey pushed himself harder into the corner, like he might be able to make himself one with the wall and escape this inconceivable nightmare.
But there was no escape.
No hope.
No chance of happiness.
Only misery and pain, followed by an excruciating death at the hands of strangers with beautiful faces and razor-sharp smiles.
The door flew open, and Grey’s head jerked up. A splotch of brown and dark blue turned to two soft circles of green through his blurred vision.
Noel.
“Come on,” he said, breathless as he pulled Grey to his feet. “We have to hurry.”
He stumbled alongside him, blinking away the glassy haze as Cy zipped around the corner and jogged forward, her head on a swivel. She waved behind her before sprinting down the corridor, and Noel dragged Grey with him—hand in hand. His heart squeezed with that comforting feel of their palms against each other—their fingers interlocking.
Grey swam between that strange floating sensation of dream and reality until they made a sharp turn and Cy stumbled back. A shot rang out from somewhere down the hall they’d come from, and Grey flinched. Noel grabbed Cy’s shirt and shoved her behind him, letting go of Grey’s hand in favor of blocking him as much as he could from the two fair folk slowing to stop in front of them.
Reign and his feminine friend with the piercing pink eyes dipped in void. Her jagged smile split her face as she prowled forward until Reign held up an arm to stop her.
“Well, well…” Reign purred, their eyes narrowing on Noel in a predatory way that made Grey’s stomach twist. “If it isn’t the little mutt who plunged a filthy iron dagger into my back.”
Cy shuffled behind him, panting as she jiggled the door handle and cursed under her breath. Grey’s throat clicked as he swallowed back that unease—that knowledge that they were trapped. Forced to face the fair folk or run head-long into an undoubtable craze of fae madness they’d sprinkled on their way inside.
Another scream made all three of them jolt, and Reign chuckled. “Would you like to join them, mutt? It’s about time we did away with macharomancers. They’ve been a bit of a nuisance for some time, considering how difficult they can be to bend. I suppose the best way to handle them is to force them to break and start over.”
A shiver slithered through Grey, the tunnel warping around him as he recalled the abandoned town surrounded by water—the mention of hydromancers being wiped out and twisted into hemomancers in that history text.
“Leave him alone,” Grey blurted, pushing forward against Noel’s grasp. “You want me, right? Let them both go, and you can have me?—”
“Grey—” That horrified response from Noel ripped his heart in half, but it wasn’t like they had anything else to bargain. All of their things were waiting somewhere in the depths of this maze. All of their weapons and trinkets weren’t at the ready or useful to bargain for another few hours of time.
The hourglass had reached the last grains of sand, and Grey was about to be buried beneath it. But all roads led to this one, right? He’d been cursed to step into the Otherworld the day he was born because that’s what the fair folk had carved into him with their magic. That’s what they had mutilated him with, twisting him into something feared and outcasted with nothing to love him in return.
Except there were a couple things left for him to care for, even if they didn’t reciprocate those feelings in the same way. Noel’s echoing reminder of Grey being his friend was the only weight left for his feet to drag in his offered sacrifice to Reign. But Reign cocked their head, a single, pale brow arched in playful bemusement as a smirk danced onto their face.
“Oh, my dear finch,” they crooned, almost like a belittling teacher. “You can’t offer to trade something that already belongs to me.”
His soul shattered into a million tiny pieces as the air sucked from his lungs. A shadowy creature lunged from behind the pink-eyed fair folk, straight for Noel, and Grey threw himself at it, his heart racing as he dug his fingertips into the creature’s slick coat. That immediate rush to stop it from ripping Noel to pieces burst into a fiery, agonizing pain as that Otherworld energy tore through his veins.
A scream tumbled from his lips as arms wrapped around him and pulled him away from the creature—from Reign and their pink-eyed cohort as they sprang forward to grab him. Grey bucked against Noel, blood welling up in his mouth from how hard he’d bit his tongue. His arms shrieked while the barguest’s lifeforce pricked under his skin, like the sensation of being stabbed over and over again—like the knife being plunged into his eye until it’d refused to fully heal.
A door slammed shut. The lock clicked. And Grey was doubled over on the floor, heaving through tears as he shakily glimpsed the blackened tips of his fingers. Another piece of his humanity gone. All hope shattered.
41
NOEL
That stunned silence that gripped Noel quickly slipped away when the barguest threw itself against the door with a vicious snarl. It’d all happened so fast—the declaration of ownership, the pink-eyed demonic fair folk sicking her hound on Noel, Grey’s lunge toward it. And then that bone-chilling scream as the thing stiffened, halted in its tracks with whatever essence Grey had ripped from it. Instinct had overridden every other reaction Noel could’ve fathomed when he’d grabbed Grey. Tunnel vision of their sole escape became his end goal: get him somewhere safe.
But now he didn’t think they had time to assess the damage. The unknowns of what Grey had done were too great, and their time was trickling down with the footsteps prowling away from the door to find another way inside. All while the feral fae beast continued to dig at the floor.
