Bran’s ankle ripped from my grasp. I shrieked and writhed and raged against the sides of the tunnel. I tried to flip over, but it was too tight, too tight. The blackness was a living thing, eating me. I clawed against the stone, my fingernails ripping until my fingers slipped on blood.
I screamed as something grabbed my wrists. I twisted and bit and gouged with shredded nails. “Noooo!”
I thought I heard someone calling my name, but the panic had me. I was lost.
“Hope!” I was wrenched forward. “For Christ’s sake, open your eyes!” It was Bran’s voice. Bran’s voice!
My eyes snapped open in shock. I could breathe. And I was wrapped in Bran’s arms, lying on the floor of a large, open cavern.
“We—we’re out,” I said lamely. I looked up to see the hole in the smooth wall where we’d emerged.
“Um, yes.” Bran touched a jagged scratch across his jaw. “We are at that.”
When I could stand on my own, Bran used the guttering torch to light several others mounted in iron holders.
I recognized the tingle of power against my skin. The pulse of the Dim, but magnified a hundred times. The cave was narrower than that beneath Christopher Manor, but longer. Forty feet across from where I stood—at the triangle’s apex—a chill breeze blew from a man-size opening. I crossed the room to peer inside, but could see nothing except unrelenting darkness. Picking up a stone, I tossed it in.
I never heard it land.
I snatched a torch from the wall and thrust it inside, then gulped as my eyes widened. A chasm. A vast emptiness that was so deep and so dark, it seemed to have no beginning or end. The electrical pulses, powerful and ancient, shivered across my skin.
I skidded back, panting, drawing in the scents of earth and long-faded incense. A desiccated, electric flavor skipped across my tongue.
Ghosts.
A shiver ran up my back. “Bran, this opening, it’s a . . .”
I trailed off at the sight of him huddled on a stone near the tunnel exit. He curled in on himself, as though his skin was shrinking.
Bran’s exhausted smile wavered around the edges. “I’m fine.” He gestured with his chin. “By the way, there’s your symbol.”
Carved into the smooth floor, near the dark opening, was the figure I’d felt under my fingers in the tunnels, and that Bran had drawn in the mud. An elongated figure eight with three wavy lines bisecting it, and a single vertical slash through the center.
“So what do we do now?” I knelt beside him. “Say abracadabra? Click our heels together?”
Bran snorted. When he shifted on the rock, though, a quiet moan escaped.
“Let me see.”
Unprotesting, he let me draw up the hem of his tunic. I sucked in a quiet breath. The wound had broken open. Dark blood and murky fluids drenched the side of his breeches. The red streaks across his abdomen were now a dark, malevolent purple. When he touched my hair, in question, it was a moment before I could face him.
“Okay,” I tamped down the horror and plastered on a smile. “So . . . it’s not that bad. But, uh, we probably need to get home pretty quick.”
“You,” he said, “are a terrible liar.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but he brought a finger to my lips.
“When we met by the river,” he said, “I had a purpose. Get the information for my mother. Do whatever she said, so she’d leave my brother where he was safe. Then, once he turned eighteen and could leave her, I’d take him away with me. We could go and I’d never be her bloody slave again.”
Inside the silence of the cavern, the only sound was Bran’s raspy breath as he curled a strand of my hair around his finger.
“But there you were,” he said, “so shy and funny, but brave, too. So beautiful and so damn brilliant that everything changed.”
He leaned in toward me, his lips hot embers where they touched my cheeks, my lashes, my forehead. His hands scorched my cheeks as they cradled my face.
“I’ve thought of you every single day since they took us, you know.” His voice was husky. It filled me with a need so deep, I couldn’t get close enough to him.
He smiled ruefully. “When I was small, and things were so bad at home, I’d pretend you were a lost princess in a tower, and that I’d be the shining knight who rescued you.”
I trembled in the cold as tears stung my eyes. “You did.” His eyes widened, as I choked out the words. “Don’t you know that?”
The kiss was sweet. A blessing. My eyes closed as I leaned into him. When he rose onto his knees, I went with him. His hands burrowed into my hair, his mouth slanting over mine again and again. When he gave a deep, guttural growl, I felt it all the way to my toes. The kiss turned desperate, hungry. Savage. I was soaring, the blood singing in my veins as I twined my arms around his neck, and I knew I’d wanted this since the first moment I’d seen him in the river. Since the instant I’d felt that strange connection between us. I felt something click into place, like two long-lost puzzle pieces finally brought together and made whole.
The muscles in his shoulders bunched as he pressed me to him. We breathed each other. Fire and ice.
Chapter 47