“What does she want from us?”
“That’s for her to tell you.” Kalo rose from the log, brushing ash from his trousers. “We’ll reach the Grove tomorrow. Try not to get your pet killed before then—Ebiti has questions for him, and she doesn’t like being disappointed.”
He walked away without another word, leaving her alone by the dying fire.
Nadi sat there for a long while, watching the flames dance and flicker, her thoughts a storm of doubt and fear. The embers crackled and popped, sending sparks spiraling up into the darkness of the cavern, tiny stars that winked out one by one.
When she finally returned to the wagon, Raziel was watching the door. It was only his red eyes that caught the light, just two pinpoints in the darkness. It made the flesh on her arms stand up despite herself.
“What did he want?” His voice was carefully neutral, but she could hear the edge beneath it.
“To warn me about you.” She settled onto the pile of blankets beside him, close but not quite touching. “To remind me what you are.” She huffed a laugh. “Like I don’t know.”
“And what am I, according to Kalo Lohti?”
“A monster.” She met his gaze steadily. “A weapon that will eventually turn on the hand that wields it.”
Something flickered in his crimson eyes—amusement, maybe. But with Raziel, it was impossible to tell. “He’s not entirely wrong.”
“Oh, I know.” She pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “Which was the conversation we were having. But I know I’m in too deep, no matter what.”
The silence stretched between them, heavy with unspoken words. Outside, she could hear the sounds of the camp settling in for the night—the low murmur of voices, the crackling of fires, the occasional cry of some creature in the depths of the Wild.
“I won’t lie to you, Nadi.” Raziel’s voice was quiet, stripped of its usual sardonic edge. “I am exactly what Kalo says I am. A monster. A predator. A creature built for violence and manipulation.” He lifted his chained hands, studying them in the purple glow. “But I am also someone who loves you. And I don’t know how to reconcile those two things any more than you do.”
It was perhaps the most honest thing he’d ever said to her.
She didn’t know what to do with it.
The next day passed in tense silence.
Nadi fed Raziel from her wrist, letting him sink his teeth into her skin where she could hide the bite marks. She didn’t want to get more disgusted looks than she already did. He drank slowly, carefully, his eyes never leaving hers as he took just enough to dull the edge of his hunger.
She didn’t tell him about her conversation with Kalo. Didn’t tell him about Grandmother Ebiti’s machinations, or the questions that still haunted her about what came after their revenge.
Some things were better left unsaid. For now.
The caravan wound its way through tunnels and caverns that grew increasingly strange as they traveled. The ubiquitous purple vines thinned, their glow dimming. The creatures that inhabited the Wild grew bolder too—she spotted hunting insects skittering along the cavern walls, and once, something enormous and serpentine slithered past in the darkness beyond the caravan’s torchlight.
“I thought we were going to ‘the Grove.’ It seems we are still going toward the surface?” Raziel observed it all with the eyes of a predator assessing new territory.
“The Grove isn’t a forest. It’s a…city. Where the elders gather. It’s named after a place that I think was once alive, a long, long time ago. One we had to abandon.” Nadi watched him as she spoke. She could practically see the calculations running behind those crimson irises—threat assessments, tactical advantages, potential weaknesses to exploit.
It was, she realized, exactly how he’d looked at her when they first met.
The thought made her stomach turn.
She forced herself to change her line of thinking. “It’s one of the last safe places for our kind. I haven’t seen it since I was a little girl.”
“Safe.” He repeated the word like it was foreign to him. “Nothing in the Wild is safe.”
“Safer, then,” she corrected herself. “Safe enough.”
The wagon lurched as they crested a ridge, and Nadi felt her breath catch in her throat.
The Grove stretched out before them in the vast cavern below—and it wasn’t like what she remembered. To be fair, she had only been there once as a child, long ago, and the flashes of it that lurked in her memory were vague and, honestly, she couldn’t swear if they were the product of dreams or stories she’d heard.
But it was as she’d said to Raziel—an entire city, swallowed by the Wild.
