“What’s a flapjack?” Helios asked absently. He had removed his sunglasses and was leaning in to study the man’s face closely. His nose scrunched as if he smelled something rotten.
“A pancake,” Ivy replied. She flipped through the pages of the chart. Attached to the final page with a paper clip was a photograph of a smiling young man, face ruddy from the sun, standing on what looked like a mountaintop. White-capped peaks dotted the horizon behind him. A golden retriever sat at his feet. Ivy glanced at the man on the bed—withered with age and looking closer to seventy than twenty—and the man in the photo. The bone structure was the same. Identical strong eyebrow ridges. The broad jawline. The wide cheekbones. “How…? Why…?”
“Do you feel that?” Helios asked. He motioned her closer to the man’s bedside. Ivy stepped toward him and leaned over the bed’s plastic guardrail. The closer she got to the man, the stronger that sickly sensation clogging his aura became. It hadn’t been nearly as powerful with the other victims.
“Is it…,” Helios pondered aloud. “Could it be…?”
“It’s feeding on him,” Ivy said, her speculation solidifying into certainty as she spoke the thought out loud.
“I thought it was feeding on all of them,” Helios said with a dubious look. “Why is this man worse off than the others?”
“I don’t know.” Ivy shook her head. “It’s possible the ku?edra doesn’t deplete them all at the same pace. Maybe this is what it looks like when it’s nearly sucked someone dry.” This was something she would need to discuss with the Ala. From their previous conversations about the Ala’s own experience under the influence of the ku?edra’s toxic malevolence, it seemed a plausible enough explanation, though how the man had managed to age so rapidly without dying was an even bigger question.
Footsteps sounded from the corridor, the nurse’s rubber-soled sneakers squeaking in the hazmat suit she donned every time she entered the ward.
“That’s our cue,” Helios said, tugging Ivy behind the cabinet. There was a very real chance they were going to be caught one of these days; Ivy hoped it wasn’t today. She huddled against Helios’s chest, closing her eyes as she held her breath, listening to the night nurse’s steps as she puttered around the room. The smiling face in the photo ghosted behind Ivy’s closed eyelids. Michael Ian Hunt. Born March 21, 1994. Age twenty-three. Hiker. Dog owner. Geriatric.
A shudder ran down Ivy’s spine. A warm hand pressed against her lower back. Helios, trying to offer her what silent comfort he could.
If poor Michael Ian Hunt was getting weaker, it meant only one thing: the ku?edra was getting stronger.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was a moat.
Dorian thought calling it such was a generous description for the pungent waters that greeted them when they passed through the enchanted door. No one had tended to the moat for quite some time, judging by the thick layer of pond scum that coated its surface.
“Shouldn’t the moat be outside the temple?” Echo asked, voice distorted as she pinched her nostrils.
“It isn’t meant to keep people away from the temple,” Dorian replied. He tried breathing through his nose, but it made the stench worse when he could taste it. “It’s meant to keep people from exploring any farther.”
Reeds swayed in a nonexistent breeze, reacting perhaps to the faint hum of magic Dorian could feel in the air. He and Echo stood on a narrow, muddy shore. Before them was a rickety bridge, half submerged in the black water and partially grown over with horsetails and cheerful water poppies. The slats of aging wood were held together with rotting rope. It didn’t look like it would bear his weight, much less the weight of three fully grown individuals. The bridge—a rickety contraption hardly worthy of the name—stretched across the water to the other side.
“What is that smell?” Echo asked, voice muffled by the hand clapped over her mouth and nose.
“Rot,” Dorian offered. “Decay.” The moat filled the cavernous room from wall to wall. He spotted another door at the far end of the room. There were no other exits.
“Splendid,” Jasper said in a tone that made it clear that it was anything but. He stepped toward the bridge, but Dorian blocked his path with an outstretched arm.
“Wait,” said Dorian. It couldn’t be as simple as crossing a bridge to get to the other side. There had to be something else. The Drakharin weren’t known for making things easy, and Dorian had no doubt that his ancestors had left behind obstacles to stymie the progress of anyone who threatened to plunder the temple, even after they were all dead and gone.
He scanned the waters for signs of life. The surface was still, but he suspected the calm was an illusion, one meant to lure an idiot into a false sense of security and then to strike when least expected. It’s what Dorian would have done if he had designed a treacherous moat as a defense mechanism.
A shadow passed beneath the surface, almost imperceptible in the inky waters. Almost. Dorian tracked its movement and caught what looked like the flick of a tail. A very large tail. The thing stopped, as if it could feel his gaze on it, and Dorian saw a pale flash of skin before it dove deeper into the water.
“These waters are guarded,” Dorian said. He pointed at a pile of bones on the pebbled shore. “By nix, to be specific. That’s probably what became of the last person who tried to cross. I’d wager they left the remains as a warning to the next fools stupid enough to try.”
“Like us,” Jasper said. He sounded as enthused by the idea of crossing the ominous waters as Dorian felt.
“Indeed.”
Dorian scanned the surface of the moat again. It was still, eerily so. He could hear water babbling somewhere far away, perhaps from whatever larger body of water fed this one.
“And what, pray tell, are nix?” Echo asked.
“Mermaids,” Dorian replied.
“Mermaids?” Echo asked flatly. Dorian occasionally forgot that she was human, for all she was integrated with the Avicen. Mermaids were probably not something she had encountered in her travels.
“Mermaids,” he repeated. “I’ve never had the pleasure of making one’s acquaintance, but it’s said they have a taste for the dishonest.”
At that, Jasper took several healthy steps back.
“What does that mean?” Echo asked, still observing the waters dubiously.
“It means if you’re not true to yourself or others, the nix will know. Legend has it they can spot a lie in your heart before you even know it’s there.”
Dorian had more than two centuries of lying—to himself, to others, to his prince—in his ledger. All those fibs, great and small, would make for a tasty treat for the nix. He peered out over the water and hoped the nix were in a generous mood.
The moment was shattered by a loud splash and Echo’s shout. “Jasper!”