“You need to be careful.” Her low voice was edged with urgency. “Where you are going, monsters wait in the darkness. A trap is being set. You will be the bait.”
Behind her, my father emerged from the darkness, still in that blue tattered sweater, lifting a hand in greeting.
“Hi, Dad,” I said softly, emotions clogging my throat and pushing tears out of my eyes.
“Listen to your mother, Emberline.” Enzo linked his fingers with Ottavia’s. “She’s trying to help you.”
“I’m… not sure what to do,” I admitted, eyes locked on their linked fingers. “My husband is in the Fossa, and I’m worried he’s…” I bit my lip, suddenly drowning in emotions as everything I’d feared this past month crashed down around me.
“I have this feeling when I get there, he won’t be alive.”
Enzo’s eyes were sad, his smile the one he used when things were about to go badly, but he was trying to be positive. “Dante is a survivor. And he needs you now.”
“I know,” I sighed. “But… maybe I should stay here. What if I only get in the way and slow them down?”
“You are the only one who can find him in the maze.One more day,” my mother intoned. “Only one. You must go now if you wish to save him.”
My heart sped up. “What do you mean, one more day?” I took another step, the veil flapping around me, ice crackling over my face as I broke the plane between my dream and the Underworld.
My parents’ eyes flared wide in alarm, raising their hands to stop me.
“What do you mean?”
“No, Emberline, go back,you can’t…”
I burst out of the darkness into the dappled light of my bedroom, gasping for breath, dust swirling around me like a cloud. My face stung, and when I patted my cheeks… they were covered in ice.
Impossible. There was no way I’d dragged part of the Underworld out of my dream, but there it was, melting on my palms as the last of the day’s sun faded through my window.
One more day,Ottavia had warned, so did that mean today was Dante’s last day?
Or were we already too late?
15
EMBERLINE
Still rattled from the dream, I picked apart my mother’s warning, trying to decide if we were already too late.
To make matters worse, the location of this particular gate was in the worst possible place, two streets down from the Sala del Giuramento—also known as La Sala—so getting through unnoticed would be a… challenge, to say the least.
Especially with all the increased security.
“Ten guards on La Sala,” I muttered, looking down from the roof at the darkened fondamenta, lit only by lanterns on the sides of the buildings. “A bit excessive, don’t you think?”
“The house of a respected Dynasty member exploded and killed two Pentarch heirs in a single day. Enemies are loose in our city, and mayhem abounds. According to the council, it’s not excessive at all,” Nico pointed out, one side of his mouth curved up in a smile. “If the threat was real, I would have posted more.”
I lifted my brow. “Youposted them?”
“What can I say?” he shrugged lazily, outlined by the starry sky. “I’m good at my job.”
“Are you intentionally trying to sabotage us? You couldn’t have… I don’t know,given them the night off or something?” I hissed.
“Like I said,”—Nico crossed his arms over his massivechest—“I’m good at my job. I can’t just pull every Draconi soldier off the Don’s house with no explanation. Now let’s figure out how to get from here to there.”
Unfortunately,therewas just before the busiest bridge on the Riva dei Sette Martiri, where the slight distortion of a fixed gate shimmered in midair. Since he was short on trust, Gabriel commandeered the cipher, obsessively rubbing his thumb in circles on the metal as he studied the gate, the crowds of tourists moving past it in a never-ending river.
All the while that tight, panicked sensation in my chest was telling me to hurry the fuck up.
