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“You were forced into it…”
He lifted his eyebrow. “And look how well that’s gone.”
I ignored his good point, especially when I got a look at the place we’d arrived at. Again, it was stone, carved from the rock. Where the council room had been closed in, however, here a large window led to a balcony. There was no glass, and a heated breeze blew into the room.
I went toward it, drawn to see where we might be. Grant had explained that much of mage territory didn’t exist in realplaces. At least, not like I understood, on a map of the world. I couldn’t point just south of Phoenix and say, ‘there it is!’ They sat in small pocket universes, places the mages of the old days had carved out. It meant nothing could attack them or gain access.
There was no horizon like I was used to, and the reddish hue of the sky reminded me too much of hell. Beyond where we were, I could see no land, no sea,nothing. Peering down and up, I found the face of a mountain rather than the castle I expected. It seemed they’d created the place right inside the rock, carving it out and making rooms from stone inside it.
Grant set a hand on my lower back as he came up beside me. “I remember these halls. I might have lived in that penthouse, but I grew uphere, in this place, with this sky.”
“Why?”
“My father was always working, and I spent my time inside books. I wanted to learn everything I could, to make the most of what I had. This place is the seat of mage power. Not the penthouse, not the place where mages bicker and think that the right last name is power.Hereis where our ancestors unlocked real power, where they learned how to harness energy, where they wrote it all down. There are whole libraries in this place that haven’t been visited in hundreds of years because we’ve forgotten what real power is.”
“You’re telling me you haven’t gone to see them?”
He shook his head. “There’s too much here, more than even an immortal life could ever hope to read. I’ve probably seen more than any other mage alive, but even for me, it’s too much—too vast. It’s made for an entire people, not for one person.” He blew out a sigh. “Sometimes that’s the worst thing for me, knowing how much is here, knowing what we were and what wecouldbe again, but then to realize that no one else cares. No one else wants that. They’re too busy fighting each other.”
I slid my arm around him, staring out at the bleak landscape and the fathomless depths of it. “It could change.”
“Maybe. I remember something my father said to me, something that stuck with me. He closed a book I was reading once, snapping it right on my fingers.‘Get your head out of the books and look around,’he snapped.‘You’ll miss everything important.’I looked at him and told him,‘The man who refuses to read has no benefit over the man who can’t read.’It was something I’d heard when I was still on the streets, from this old woman who had handed out books to any kid who wanted to read, who had sat there and taught me to read. My father stared at me, as if he hadn’t expected me to talk back, and said,‘Things are the way they are, and only a fool tries to go backward.’” He sighed. “I guess he learned it in the end, though.”
I opened my mouth, ready to say something to him. I wanted to reassure him, to tell him I understood, but before I could, he turned around. “All right, let’s summon them.”
I tore my gaze from the eerie sight outside the window, following Grant back inside.
He held out his arm, and three marks rested on his skin. It was hard to say they hadn’t been there before, what with the huge amount of other tattoos present, but it seemed I’d had enough time to memorize each part of his body, because I knew they were different.
He whispered words as he ran his fingers over each mark, a different design for each.
A shimmering circle appeared, one for each mark as he activated them, and through them stepped the three men.
Kase looked as he always did, butmuchbetter than he had before feeding from Troy. It reassured me that we’d done the right thing. He wore a suit, as always, with his hair pushed back and his skin its normal color. He took a moment to straighten the cuffs on his shirt, an action that made me smile. We were ready to head to a place no one shouldevergo, and there Kase was, still trying to look his best.
Troy, on the other hand, was dressed down. He wore a pair of faded blue jeans and a loose black T-shirt, the sort of thing he’d worn to do yard work—at least when I wasn’t lucky enough to see him shirtless. He caught my gaze, his silver eyes intense as if he hadhatedme being somewhere he couldn’t get to before.
An answering surge of want ran through me, reminding me that whole mate thing wasn’t something to take lightly.
Finally, Hunter walked over to Grant, wearing a T-shirt and jeans with holes in them, looking like a man who really believed his band would take off any day now.
“Everything go well?” Hunter asked.
Grant nodded before rubbing his hand over the marks on his forearm, which disappeared as if they’d never been there in the first place. “Almost perfectly. We’ve got about forty-five minutes before we’re supposed to get back.”
“And how far is the circle?”
“From here? Thirty minutes.”
“Couldn’t you have summoned them directly to the circle?” I asked. “If anyone sees them, I feel like it sort of does away with our whole secrecy thing, and in case you haven’t looked in the mirror lately, you all aren’t inconspicuous.”
Grant shook his head. “The closer to the circle we get, the less reliable portal magic is. The circle at the roof rests on some of the most unstable power lines anywhere. It’s why the old mages created this placehere. Things get weird the closer we get, and magic becomes less predictable.”
I frowned. “If there’smoremagic available, why would it work less well?”
“It’s like having a blender that needs a certain amount of power to work. If you overload it, if you send too much electricity through, you end up with a spark and maybe a fire.”
“So why do you think you can use that power to get us to purgatory, then? If it’s that dangerous, why do you think you can do it any better?”
