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“You give up way too easily, thief. How did you ever get anywhere in life?”
Her question made me pause, because she was right. I wasn’t a quitter.
“Just never was much good at school,” I said after a few moments, remembering how my old man had encouraged me to go straight into his line of work instead of worrying much about academics. He’d started me thieving when I was barely old enough to walk. But that didn’t mean I was incapable of learning a new trick.
“Tell me again. Show me what it looks like,” I said.
Blaise studied me for a long moment, then pushed her way into my mind with icy accuracy. It hurt like hell, but she was able to drag me back to her mind somehow. For the first time, I could truly understand what I was looking for.
I gasped as I saw her mind like a series of rooms spread out before me, some memories tightly locked away and others open and available for me to look at. My body trembled as I sunk into the power of it, seeing how I looked through her eyes and hearing her voice echo in my head.
Then, without warning, she dragged me into Luca’s mind. The wolf whined as Blaise shoved her way in, and I felt like I was stumbling down a hill too fast to keep my balance.
What did the gobbelin smell like?she demanded of Luca, and I heard her voice clearly in my mind even though I was watching her face and lips stay completely still. She had well-developed ice magic, that was for sure.
Luca squirmed at the painful, invasive feeling of having someone poke around in your mind, but then the image of the dead gobbelin from the banquet hall spread across the virtual floor of his mind, and my nostrils filled impossibly with the stench of death and decay, plus something earthy and tart, like limes and fresh soil after a rainstorm.
Neither Blaise nor I had been in the room when Vento had brought in the gobbelin, and it was crazy how I possessed that memory now, as crystal clear as if I’d lived it.
But then the rest of Luca’s thoughts came flooding in, and I was awash in the pain of shifting, his worry over Kana, and his constant rage against Merden. I knew mindspeak only worked with current thoughts, not memories that had been locked away, and the wolf’s mind was a mess of ceaseless worry, playing on an exhausting loop.
Thank fuck, Blaise yanked our minds out of Luca’s, and the three of us sat awkwardly in the cave, all trying to catch our breath.
“Why the fuck did you do that?” Luca finally growled, massaging his temples. “Even when I thought I was part vampire, I never had the magic to keep someone out. Fucking hurt.”
“You signed a blood contract,” Blaise whispered, ignoring his aggravation. Luca stilled. She looked at me, and I nodded to confirm what she’d seen.
“Kana knows,” Luca said, his voice full of regret. “And yes, I know it was stupid, but I was desperate. Merden hasn’t invoked it yet. Maybe... maybe she’ll forget about it.”
I snorted. The wolf was living in a fantasy, because that woman never forgot anything that could give her an advantage. “She’s just biding her time, wolf. But we’ve had too much else on our plates to figure it out,” I added, warning Blaise that even though she’d come into our circle of secrets, she still didn’t know the half of it.
Blaise sighed and pointed at me. “You - keep trying to find Kana while we wait for that gobbelin to head another direction. The wolf and I are going to talk about this contract. There has to be a way to break it without him or Kana dying.”
Grumbling to myself, I turned my back on their conversation and tried to focus.
It was fucking hard, though, catching snippets about how theBook of Icemight have had a spell to break the contract, and we’d just fucking given the thing to Merden without even looking through the pages.
Not to mention, Merden could invoke the contract’s magic any time she wanted if Luca was taking too long, and he would become obsessed with killing Kana.
Focus, Kingston, Blaise shot into my mind, making me grit my teeth. I flipped her off over my shoulder, but I knew she was right.
I had to figure this shit out.
We needed a way to communicate with Kana, and if I was being really honest with myself, I needed to step up my game if I wanted to be more than a prophesied weapon to this woman. I wanted to be worthy of her, and a commoner thief with no control over his ice magic certainly wasn’t going to be it, no matter how pure my blood was.
––––––––
KANA
The sun had dried my tunic completely, and still there was no sign of Jillian and Darnell.
It crossed my mind that maybe they weren’t trying to leave me but were instead plotting some way to kill me without breaking the Trial’s rules, like how Jillian had offered me the mushrooms that were mildly poisonous.
Determined to wait them out, I flipped to my stomach and surveyed the pool. It looked more like something you’d see in Aralia than Saori Sang, and I wondered how exactly the labyrinth had been built, and where. Maybe we weren’t even in Saori Sang.
Another harpy flew overhead, and I watched its reflection in the smooth surface of the pool, not bothering to acknowledge the ridiculous noble perched on the poor harpy’s shoulders. Too bad the harpies couldn’t just dump their riders in the labyrinth with us.
Now that would be entertainment.
