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“That’s not exactly true. You want the keys.”
“That is our ultimate objective, yes. To achieve it, we need Hieu.”
“My father might know the general direction of the keys, but he can’t actually find them for you. Which means you need me, as well.”
And that meant that no matter what they did to me, they couldn’t actually kill me. It wasn’t much comfort, however—not given what they’d already done.
“Your father knows the location of the keys, so actually finding them should not present a problem for him. You are not so much of a concern.”
“I beg to differ—if he could find the keys himself, he would have done so by now. But only one of his flesh can find the keys and, thanks to you guys, he can no longer take on flesh. So, logically, that leaves me.”
Of course, it was a statement that presumed he was actually telling the truth when it came to the keys, and I had a vague suspicion he wasn’t. Not entirely, anyway.
“What has been undone can be redone,” the disembodied voice said evenly. “That is not a concern.”
I was betting it was, because otherwise I’d have been dead. “You held my father prisoner, so why didn’t you force him to help you then?”
A slight shimmer of energy snagged my attention, simply because it wasn’t the darker energy belonging to the Raziq. I frowned, my gaze scanning the little cavern before coming to rest on Amaya.
She was definitely closer.
I had no idea how the hell she was achieving it, but I wasn’t about to question it. Having her in my hand probably wouldn’t make any difference to my situation, considering how the Raziq had divested me of her in the first place, but my fingers still itched to wrap around her hilt. She gave me strength and made me feel safer—something I’d never thought possible when Azriel had first produced her.
“That,” the Raziq said, his voice no different and yet suddenly so filled with menace, “is knowledge you do not require.”
I licked my lips and said, “How am I supposed to find my father when he’s always been the one who’s contacted me?”
“We will give you a device that will notify us when you are in his presence.”
“Exactly what sort of device?” Amaya was almost within reach of a sideways lunge. I shivered and resisted the temptation to move. “And how does it work?”
“It is attuned to Hieu’s life force and will react when he is near. We will be notified.”
“My father is smart enough to realize what the device is the minute he sees it.” She was close, so close. My fingers twitched and tension began to wind through my muscles. “He’ll get the hell out of there before you lot ever make an appearance.”
“We do not agree.”
I snorted. “Of course you wouldn’t. I mean, you’ve had such great success trying to track him down so far, haven’t you?”
“He is not so important. The keys are.”
If he wasn’t so important, they wouldn’t be doing their damnedest to find him. “You’ve got one key—why can’t you just make a couple more?”
He didn’t answer immediately, but his energy surged around me, singeing the hairs on the back of my neck and making my skin crawl.
Anger. No, not just anger. Fury.
Maybe they weren’t as unemotional as everyone believed—at least not when it came to people thwarting their desires.
“We do not have the key for the first portal. Your father has it.”
No, he bloody well hasn’t. I was pretty sure of that, if nothing else. Whoever had stolen the key was someone entrenched in magic—magic that was dark, ungodly, and bitter. And while the Raziq’s magic was dark, what I’d felt of my father’s wasn’t. Not to the same degree, anyway.
But if my father or the Raziq didn’t have the first key, that meant it had to have been a dark practitioner who’d stolen it from under our noses—and, more than likely, it was the same dark practitioner who’d been buying up the land around Stane’s—a dark practitioner who was also a face-shifter.
As a general rule, sorcerers weren’t able to walk the gray fields, but ley-line intersections were places of great power and could be used not only to manipulate time, reality, or fate, but to create rifts between this world and the next. A powerful enough sorcerer could enter the fields via the intersection and find the gates.
Which is precisely what our thief had done—walked the fields, and permanently opened the first portal to hell.
