Page 104 of Fang Fiction

“What’s happening?” Tess called out. She threw up her arms to block the light—it was absolutely blinding. And unlike the light they saw in the meadow, it wasn’t going away.

“I don’t know,” Callum yelled, grabbing for Tess. She clung to him, and he kept his arm around her, even as Felix kept hold of Callum’s other hand so he couldn’t remove the ring.

After a couple of moments, Tess could make out something in the doorway to the terrace. It was like there was a hole in the light, an archway. But it wasn’t leading out to Felix’s balcony—it was a window to somewhere else entirely.

To a rooftop in New York City, just after sunset.

Where a tall, terrifying man was standing beside a beautiful woman—a woman wearing a gold Georgian cross set with a mammoth red diamond.

“Octavia!” Callum yelled. “Are you all right? What’s happening?!”

“Aw,” Felix mocked. “Is Callum sad I’m the one Konstantin chose to confide in?”

“Enough.” The tall man’s voice was deep and resonant, and everything went silent the second he spoke. Tess squinted to make out his face—she saw Callum’s eyes go wide as he recognized him—

“Konstantin?” Callum gasped. “But how—I thought you were—and you were never on the Isle—”

“You thought a little fire would kill me?” Konstantin smiled wide, brute force emanating from his body—Tess had never seen such a terrifying creature in her life. “Felix, no more games. End this now.”

With that, Felix’s men began filing through the portal, and Felix walked up to Tess and Callum.

“Tess, I want you to know that it was a genuine pleasure to meet you,” he said. “And I’m very sorry I never got a chance to drain your blood and leave your mangled corpse on Callum’s doorstep to pay him back for sleeping with Isobel, but hey, maybe we’ll see each other again sometime, yeah? Then again, my entire clan knows there’s a human in the castle, so, you know. Good luck getting out of here. Callum, let’s go.”

Callum tried to fight, and Tess was screaming and reaching for him, but there was nothing either of them could do. Felix’s men dragged him through the portal, and once he was on the other side, the blue light disappeared and the portal closed, leaving Tess utterly alone.

Chapter 26

Tess looked frantically around the room, trying to think of anything that could get her out of this situation, but she just felt…numb. She had really believed that Callum would be able to protect her, that they would find some way out of all this. But he was gone, and now she was probably about to die—unless the vampires were planning to keep Tess alive to torture her, drinking her blood over and over until Felix found a way to get them off the Isle too.

She could always leap from the terrace outside Isobel’s room. It might be the best available option—the fall was high enough to kill her.

No. She squeezed her eyes shut. She’d fought too hard, clawed her way back from the brink of desperation—she couldn’t give up now. She just needed a way out of this castle.

She thought back to that first night at Bar Between, the tarot card Flora had given her. She certainly felt like she was surrounded by a circle of swords now—but she had the strangest sense she just needed to remove her blindfold and the way forward would become clear. What wasn’t she seeing?

She took the card out of her dress pocket, held it between her palms.

Come on, she thought. There has to be a way.

Suddenly, she felt a shock of heat—she yelped and dropped the card, letting it flutter to the floor. She paused to make sure her yelp hadn’t attracted any attention, but she didn’t hear anyone coming.

Tess knelt down to examine the card more closely, then gasped—the illustration had changed.

The woman from the original card—the one who’d escaped before Tess’s eyes back at the bar—was back in the picture, surrounded by the circle of swords like always, but she wasn’t blindfolded anymore. Instead, she was on one knee beside a bed that was pushed at an angle, driving a sword into the space where one of the bedposts used to be.

“Is this—” Tess frowned. “Am I supposed to do this?!”

She didn’t know who she was asking, or whether she expected a response, but none came. But she certainly didn’t have any better ideas, so she set to pushing Isobel’s bed so it mimicked the same angle she saw on the card. The bed wasn’t too heavy, but it still took a good bit of effort to drag it across the stone flooring—Tess swore under her breath and wished she’d worn a sports bra to this ball instead of a damn gown, but she got the job done.

And there, under the right-hand post at the foot of the bed, was an obvious crack between two of the stones in the floor—a slot exactly the right size for the blade of a sword.

“Okay then.” Tess’s eyes went wide. She grabbed the silver dagger she’d seen earlier and drove it into the space in the floor. She heard a groan as one of the shelves against the wall swung open, revealing a secret doorway.

“Holy fucking shit,” Tess breathed.

She dragged the bed back to its original position, hoping this might prevent any other vampires from figuring out where she’d gone. Then she stepped through the secret doorway into an extremely dark, extremely narrow passageway, and pulled the shelves closed behind her. She took the dagger with her; it seemed like a good idea to have a weapon.

The passageway was dark, cool, and silent. It was sort of like an indoor fire escape, with little landings on each floor and steep stairways-cum-ladders between them. Tess prayed the passage led outside the castle walls, but there was no way to know for sure. It felt like she descended the ladders for hours in the darkness, scraping her body against stone walls, unwieldy in her dress. (Though she was grateful she’d skipped the brocade medieval gown—no way would that have fit through here.) Every so often, she heard shouts and footfalls outside the passageway, and she’d freeze until it was quiet again. Eventually, she made it to the ground floor, where there was a single door—but absolutely no way to tell where it led.