“So were you waiting for the dark and for us to be alone to press against me, bunny?”
I thought I felt a hand skim along my back. It didn’t make me step away. “Don’t flatter yourself.”
Nicco laughed, but he didn’t tease me anymore, and somehow I was closer to him than before and neither of us mentioned it at all.
My magic was pulsing, throbbing inside me. It was all I could hear.
And still, I kept walking.
The tunnel narrowed more as we descended, the walls pressing closer, the ceiling dropping in increments so gradual I only noticed how much when Nicco had to angle his shoulders to pass through a section that had been wide enough moments earlier. The diamonds thinned as we went deeper, then stopped entirely, and the walls around us were just rock.
Plain, dark, cold rock.
The moonstone Nicco carried threw shadows that moved with us.
“Is that mine?” I demanded before I could stop myself.
“Maybe.”
“Nicco—”
“Shh.” He looked around. “Feel that?”
I did what he said without argument, and I felt it against my skin. “It's getting warmer,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Because it’s hotter in the core?”
His smile might have been the first genuine one I ever saw from him. “You listen well, bunny.”
“You need to stop calling me that,” I grumbled.
“Why?” He smirked. “You literally followed me down the rabbit hole,bunny.”
“Shut up.”
I pressed my hand briefly against the tunnel wall. The rock was not exactly warm, but it was less cold than it should have been at this depth, in this country, in the middle of what passedfor winter at its worst. Something beneath us generated heat that had nowhere to go but up.
My magic was not helping me think clearly.
It had stopped pulsing, which would have been a relief, except that it had stopped because it had found what it was looking for and was now simply… present. Awake in a way it had never been before. It wasn’t reaching, or straining, it was justopen. Like the door that had been closed for a very long time and had finally, quietly, swung wide.
I was terrified of what that meant.
“Stop touching the walls,” Nicco said.
I drew my hand back. He raised the moonstone, and in front of us, we could see that the tunnel opened.
Not gradually, as it had narrowed on the way down, but all at once, the narrow passage giving way to a space so large that the moonstone didn't reach the far wall. The ceiling rose into darkness above us. The floor was smooth, too smooth for natural stone, more like something had worked it, either by hand or by something older than hands.
And in the center of the space, rising from the floor in a formation that had no natural right to exist, was a column of stone threaded through with every color of diamond I had seen above ground. Blues and violets and deep amber and colors I didn't have names for, all of them running through the rock in veins that converged at the column's heart andpulsed.
Actually pulsed.
Slow. Rhythmic. Like a heartbeat.
Like breathing.
