“I don’t know. But I need you to tell me if she turned on her location services.” The software on Atlas’s computer was faster at bringing up locations than a cellphone—and Darien didn’t have time to piss away right now.
“It was toggled on approximately…,”click, click,“ten minutes ago.”
“What location?”
Tanner bit out a curse word but didn’t hesitate to give him the location.
Darien uttered a thank-you and a warning that he might need assistance before he hung up and gunned it to Randal’s lair.
—
Ivador Langdon paced back and forth beside the stormwater runoff in one of the many rooms in Randal’s underground lair. Aside from the rushing of water at Loren’s back, the only sound was his polished shoes clapping against cement.
Where she knelt on the ground with her hands tied before her, Loren tracked his movements. “Headmaster.” She kept her voice low, so the rushing water might stop her words from being heard by the guards stationed at theirs post outside the room.
The wave of Randal’s magic that’d slammed into her at the hospital was so intense, she was still seeing stars. Not only that, but he’d also given her a drug to make her compliant and rendered Singer unable to respond in her shadow.
Loren swallowed. “Headmaster, please don’t do this. We can’t use the Well. What they want to do with it… Nothing good can come of it—”
“You don’t understand!” The words were thrown against the cement walls and back at her several times, his silvery eyes sparking with rage. “It was never supposed to get this far! I only wanted the antidote so that my daughter might walk again, but Calanthe—” Realizing he’d said too much, he stopped, his hands shaking at his sides.
“Is Calanthe making you do this, Headmaster?” Loren spoke softly. “You don’t need—”
“You know nothing, Miss Calla,” he seethed. “You don’t even know the beginning of it.”
“Then tell me.” She was trembling so hard it was a miracle she wasn’t lying face-down on the floor. “Tell me, so that I might understand. So that I can help you—”
“You can’t help me.” He began pacing again. “You can’t help anybody. This city…it’s doomed. The people—we’re all doomed.”
“Headmaster—”
Footfall sounded from the tunnels. Loren held her breath as Randal and Calanthe strode into the room, along with two of Calanthe’s bodyguards and several of Randal’s cronies.
More footfall echoed—lighter footfall.
And then Emilie Croft and Christa Copenspire swept in, where they came to a standstill on either side of Calanthe. Neither of them said a word, nor did they look at where Loren was kneeling on the ground. Trailing behind them was Lenora Aldonold, the vampire Calanthe had claimed was missing, back when she’d offered up an alliance to the Devils and the wolves.
Randal was assessing Loren as though she were a piece of meat. “It took us a while to figure it out. But it seems you were exactly what we needed all along.”
The water behind her trembled as some manner of creature swam through it. If it weren’t for the flesh-hungry serpents that often swam upstream from the river, she might’ve considered throwing herself into the water, so that it might carry her away from here.
When Darien’s father spoke, it was to Langdon. “Did Darien buy the lie you made her tell him?” That lie had snapped Loren’s soul in half. Darien had sounded utterly broken on the other end of the call. She hated herself for saying it—for saying those words. And it pained her that he honestly believed she would want to leave him, would simply want nothing to do with him after everything he’d done for her, everything he’d sacrificed.
While she was calling him, she’d managed to toggle on her cellphone location, in case Darien realized what was happening and might be able to come and help her—though the thought alone terrified her and had her wishing she hadn’t done something so selfish.
He couldn’t come here. Hecouldn’t. She had been stupid to turn it on—
“Sounded like it,” Langdon replied.
“Good. We don’t need any distractions.” Randal crouched before her, bringing his head down to her level. When she refused to meet his steely eyes, he snatched her chin into a hand, fingers digging into her flesh. “I’m dying, Loren Calla.” His eyes shone with a strange medley of anticipation and agony; he truly looked like a man who’d lost his mind. “A slow and painful death, to which there is no known cure—except the Arcanum Well.”
“Let go of me,” she bit out.
He shoved her face aside and pushed up from his crouch. A smile spread across Calanthe’s face as Randal strode to a plastic tarp that covered a massive object at the very back of the room, near the bend of the river that snaked toward the outdoors.
He grabbed a corner of the tarp, and with one flick of his arm he pulled off the tarp to reveal—
The Arcanum Well.
