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“Here we are,” Greg said, looking around. “What now?”
With my hands raised, ready to begin a magicking, I crept to the cliff. I couldn’t make out anything below except the thrashing waves against a rocky shoreline, but farther along, a notch was cut into the cliff edge.
“I think there’s a path there,” I said, pointing. “About half a mile farther along. It must lead down the cliff.”
We hurried over with the salty wind licking over us. It might have been a pretty view on a sunny day, but today’s clouds only made the scenery look ominous. The grass was so sparse I couldn’t tell how well-traveled the route we were taking might be. Certainly this didn’t seem like a place many people were likely to casually wander through, even without a magic spell repelling them.
As we came up on the notch I’d seen, it became clearer that it was indeed a path carved into the cliff face. A narrow ledge slanted sharply down along the otherwise stark drop. I paused at the top of it and looked at my companions.
“I have to go down. Whatever’s waiting down there…” If it was the threat Gabriel’s enforcer had seemed to think it was, I was better equipped to deal with it than anyone else here.
“You can’t go alone,” Damon said. “I’m not getting left behind.”
Gabriel had turned to Ky in hushed conversation. “Why don’t Damon and I go with you?” he said a moment later. “Everyone else can stand guard up here, ready to shout a warning if the enforcers launch another attack.”
I glanced at Naomi. “Are you okay with that plan?” She was the one who’d be providing most of the defense if it came to that.
She nodded, her mouth set in a defiant line. “I won’t let them get past me.” Greg reached to squeeze her hand, and she shot him a tight smile.
“Let’s get this over with then,” I said, and took the first step down the path. I wasn’t letting any of my consorts act as my shield.
We picked our way along the descending ledge one by one. In no time at all, the top of the cliff and the people we’d left there disappeared from view and hearing. The warble of the wind and the roar of the surf drowned out everything else.
I only noticed the trap because I was so intent on setting my feet securely on the rough stone. A patch of rock just ahead of me shivered with a magical haze, and I stopped in my tracks, holding out my arm to halt Gabriel and Damon. Damon pulled out his pistol, but it wasn’t as if he could shoot through a spell.
I studied the patch of magic, absorbing the wisps of energy it gave off into the air. Then I slid my foot forward with a sweep of my arm. The strands of the spell fractured apart and spun off into the air. The heat that wafted over me with their leaving suggested we’d have been burned to a crisp if the spell had been truly activated.
A shadow on the cliff face came into view up ahead. I eased down the last several feet to the opening of a cave, barely wide enough for me to step inside without brushing both my shoulders.
The guys squeezed in after me. A dim stream of daylight followed us down a passage about ten feet long. Our shoes rapped against the stone as we emerged into a larger cavern. Huge stalactites and stalagmites loomed from the ceiling and floor around us. Water dripped somewhere distant.
The space should have been dark and cool, but warmth emanated from a ruddy light at the far end of the cavern. Warmth and a pulse of energy so off-kilter it made my stomach turn.
I walked toward it, and nausea swelled to fill my entire abdomen. A faint whine filled my ears. My nerves started to jitter in revulsion. I still didn’t understand what I was looking at, only that it was a ring of hazy reddish light on the far wall of the cave, maybe as tall as I was but high up near the ceiling, with a thinner reddish glow swirling within the ring in time with that pulsing, sickening energy.
There was something almost magical about that energy. A sense that it could be used to shape and control, the way I could use the magic I was familiar with. But this energy didn’t move or taste the same at all, in some way I couldn’t have explained.
It was simply something other, something unlike anything I’d ever experienced or could have put a name to. But every particle in my body was vibrating now with the deep certainty that whatever it was, it had never been meant to be here. To be part of this world in any way at all. It was simplywrong.
I was maybe ten feet away from it when a face appeared in the midst of that shifting glow. A face half the height of my entire body, its skin swirling with the same red glow, with gnarled features and eyes so dark they seemed to fall away into an abyss.
My legs jarred. A squeak of shock slipped from my mouth. Behind me, Damon swore. The face turned its eyes toward me, and every drop of blood in my body turned cold.
The immense being’s twisted mouth curved into a smile. For an instant, through the glowing ring around it, I caught a glimpse of a whirling red-tinged world sprawling out behind the monster—a world that wasn’t any part of my own. Then the face pushed farther out into the cave, the suggestion of a clawed hand beside it, and I stumbled backward. My arms shot up defensively, but I didn’t have a clue what magic could repel that… thatthing.
A familiar and yet unexpected voice rang out in a language I didn’t recognize. A barked command, several short choppy words.
The monster in the opening flinched. It made an expression that looked like a sneer and rasped a brief response that sounded disdainful, but it pulled back. In an instant, the red glow had swallowed it up as if it had never been there. My chest released from its painful contraction as my breath spilled out of me. But I didn’t have time to enjoy my relief.
I spun around to face my father.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Rose
Dad had stepped out from behind one of the large stalagmites near the wall. The strange lighting of the cave made his face look haggard. My gaze shot to his hands, and mine dropped an inch from their poised position when I saw he wasn’t holding any weapon. But only an inch.
“Stay right there, asshole,” Damon said.Hishands were up too, his pistol pointed directly at my dad. His face had gone sallow, I was going to guess because of the horrific visage we’d just seen, but his arms held steady.
