“Miles. Probably many dozens of miles.” She gestured at a dark tunnel some eighty feet away—an entrance into what was very likely a maddening network of caves. “Don’t expect it to be a straight line either.”
“Wonderful.” His legs still felt unsteady, but they held his weight. But weeks of hiking toward the surface did not sound entertaining. “And I suppose there’s no quick way back up?”
“No.” Nadi shifted the weight of her bag on her shoulder. “There might be a caravan closer to the surface. If we find one, we can rest, get supplies, and figure out our next move.” She started walking toward the entrance to the caves.
“And they will help us?” He arched an eyebrow. “They would rather skin a vampire alive than help one. And that’s before they find out my name.”
With a sigh, she didn’t look back at him as she started to climb up the rocks toward the cave entrance. “You’re assuming we have a choice. There’s no going back.”
That was true. She could drag his drowning, unconscious body back down through the water and to the shore, but she’d likely already thought of that, and she’d chosen this location for a reason. She’d brought him here to the Wild,specificallybecause of the fae.
Because among the fae, they might have a common enemy. Namely, his family.
“You think we can find allies here.”
“The fae clans hate your family as much as you do, Raz.” Even in the darkness, he saw her jaw tick. “Some of the fae are working with your siblings, and I know that’s not going to sit right with the other clans.”
“If we have come here for an army—if we have come here forsoldiers—I will use everything I have at my disposal.” He grinned. Perhaps a little too wolfishly than he should have. But he did not care at the moment. Especially when it made those black opal eyes of hers go so deliciously wide. “And I have so few cards in my hand at the moment, don’t I?”
They were standing at the entrance to the cave. When he went to enter, she stopped him with a hand on his wrist. Turning, he looked down at her.
Her brow was creased in the center. “The other option is to run. We run as far away as we can go, and we live in hiding. We give up on our revenge, on your plot to rule the world—or whatever thefuckit is you’re really after—and go where no one can find us. We live. The two of us. Together. Happy.”
Part of that was tempting. Very tempting. A quiet life, on the edge of one of the far settlements of Runne. The two of them, living off the land, in love…They would be a kind of happy. He wondered if he could even sire children with her.
How idyllic.
Bringing up a hand, he crooked a finger under her chin and tipped it up to look at him. “That life was never meant for us. You and I are meant to drown in blood or stand triumphant in the ashes of this world, Nadi. And you know it. We will kill each other or die at each other’s side.”
Her eyes slipped shut and she let out a long, weary sigh. “I know…I just sometimes wish…”
Leaning down, he kissed her. Slowly. Tenderly. He could taste the salt of the sea on both their lips. How beautiful and how tragic—two killers, wanting nothing more than to set it all aside, but knowing they never could.
When he broke away, he watched as her face hardened into an expression of pure determination and set off in front of him, leading the way.
The fae assassin.
And the Serpent.
They would die.
Or they would rule the world.
Come what may.
TWO
Nadi remembered enough of the Deep Wild to know how dangerous it was. And how many of her people had ventured into it never to return. Not simply because the caverns were narrow, dark, and endless in their twists and turns—but because of what lived within them.
Species that had countless ways to poison, maim, and consume.
The only way she knew which way to go was because of the vines. It was one of the very first things that all those in fae clans, human or not, were taught how to navigate. The Wild was too twisted, too impossible to map, otherwise. It would be a deathtrap to anyone and everyone without some knowledge of how to trek through it if they got separated from one’s clan.
The ever-present purple-black vines that wound their way through the caverns were the secret. It wasn’t as simple as following them to the larger caverns—it was knowing how to read them. Different parts of the growth would have different patterns in the skin or bark of their covering—showing the age of the vine, and whether or not it was part of the thicker heart-vines that ran from the Deep Wild to the surface, or was just a dead-end offshoot.
The trick was to find a part of the growth that showed the right pattern, and to follow it from thinner to thicker, seemingly in thewrongdirection, until one found a huge, building-sized heart-vine. Those enormous “trunks” could then be followed up through the caverns reliably and without fail, as long as at that point one always made sure to keep following the branches that grew thinner along the way.
She did not tell Raziel any of what she knew.
