The Sweetest Burn (Broken Destiny #2)

Don’t let him hurt you, she mouthed at me. Please.

Adrian’s back was turned, so he didn’t see it. I closed my eyes for a moment, wishing I could reassure her that her fears were groundless. Adrian wouldn’t betray me. He’d only hidden the true purpose of my destiny from me before because he’d been trying to help me, and while that had been a betrayal of my trust, he’d had good intentions. Just like I’d had good intentions when I’d hidden my knowledge of Demetrius from him.

Adrian tugged on my arm again, turning around. “Ivy?”

“Coming,” I said, adding, “I’ll be fine,” to my sister. Then I went into the tattoo shop with Adrian.

The proprietor did speak English, and he agreed to let Adrian make an international call after he dropped a hundred-dollar bill onto the counter. I didn’t think he’d had any money, so I was more than surprised to see several more Benjamins in his wallet. At my questioning look, Adrian shrugged.

“I brought some emergency cash along with our dry clothes.”

“You didn’t get any sleep earlier, did you?” I muttered.

Adrian only smiled as he accepted the phone from the proprietor and dialed. After a moment, he began to speak in French, judging from the few words I recognized. The conversation lasted about five minutes, and when Adrian hung up, he looked satisfied.

“We now have a hotel reservation and a car on the way. The rest of what we need will arrive tomorrow.”

He knew someone who could get four fake passports within twenty-four hours? I was impressed. “Wow.”

“The salt mine’s just a few blocks up from here, isn’t it?” Adrian asked, as if only casually inquiring.

“Yes,” the black-haired, heavily tattooed man replied in accented English.

“Thanks.” To me, Adrian said, “Want to walk by and see if it interests you?”

I translated the subtext and let out a short laugh. If I felt nothing at the mine, then I had been wrong about Adrian being the map and possibly everything else.

“We came all the way to Poland,” I replied. “I sure as hell hope that it interests me.”

*

COSTA, JASMINE AND BRUTUS came with us, even though the three of them hung well back. That was fine. I was focused on my hallowed sensor. So far, I didn’t feel anything, and the closer we got to the mine, the more that worried me. I’d been so sure that I had figured out the real clues to finding the staff. Zach knowing without us telling him that we wanted to go to Poland only seemed to confirm that, but in retrospect, he’d never said that I’d gotten it right. He’d never said anything, in fact, except that he wasn’t our doorman. Would Zach really drop us here if he knew that it was nothing more than a wild-goose chase based on a very incorrect assumption?

Yes, I thought grimly. He would. And probably be smug about it afterward, too.

When Adrian said, “This is it,” I was still registering a zero on my hallowed meter. The small, rather plain-looking building in front of us didn’t match with my mental picture of the home to a salt cathedral, either, although it was a mine so everything interesting was below.

“How deep is the mine?” I asked Adrian. Maybe that was the problem. I could be standing directly above the staff, and yet perhaps still be far enough away not to sense it.

“Very deep,” Adrian replied. “Over a thousand feet. And the mine is also well over a hundred miles long.”

I gaped at him. “Are you serious?” If it was that massive, it could take a full week of underground explorations before I picked up a hint of the staff, even if it was here!

“You don’t feel anything?” Adrian asked, his tone light.

I knew him well enough by now to know that the more deliberately unconcerned Adrian sounded, the more he usually cared. “Not yet, but if it’s under a thousand feet of solid rock because it’s at the bottom of this thing, I wouldn’t expect to.”

So saying, I walked toward the entrance of the mine. At some point, this place had been turned into a tourist attraction, and signs in four different languages, English being one of them, told me where to go. Adrian caught up to me in a few strides. So did Brutus, who was eager to be inside anywhere.

“Stay here, Brutus,” Adrian told the gargoyle when we entered the building. Then he spoke to him in Demonish, and the tourists ahead in the ticket line cocked their heads at us.

“You talking to bird?” the woman asked in stilted English.

“He’s our pet,” I told her, patting Brutus and stifling my smile as she goggled at that. “We just love seagulls.”

Then, it was our turn to get tickets, and Adrian selected four for the Tourist route. He paid cash and then handed two tickets to Costa and Jasmine.

“You are in luck,” the female teller remarked. “The English-speaking tour group needed four more to be complete.”

“Let’s hope our luck continues,” I said under my breath, then gave the teller a parting smile as we joined the group.

Edgar, our tour’s group leader, went over a brief history of how the mine was thousands of years old and used to be a major producer of salt for the area. I stopped listening after the first few minutes, tuning into my hallowed sensor instead. So far, it was still flatlined. After several more minutes of droning on, we were herded into the mine’s version of an elevator and our descent began.

I was glad I was wearing jeans, but I soon realized that my blouse wasn’t suited for this. With each story that we went down, the temperature seemed to plummet, until I was fighting a shiver when we stopped and got out at the first leg of the tour.

“Everything you see is made of salt,” Edgar was saying, and I paused in my hallowed-finder mode to give an appreciative look around. Statues and what looked like 3-D paintings were carved into the walls, as detailed and impressive as anything I’d seen in a museum. I could understand why Edgar had to specify that all of this was salt, too. With its bluish-gray color, it more resembled granite than the stuff I sprinkled on my food.

An hour later, I was torn between being thoroughly impressed and very disappointed. We’d traveled down hundreds of carved steps, seen the magnificence of the Chapel of St. Kinga, which rivaled the basilica for beauty, in my opinion, as well as other caverns that were decorated with life-size statues acting out religious scenes. There was even an underground lake, with a light show playing across its glassy surface set to the music of Chopin. Yet while I’d been awed by all the works of art around me, especially considering how they had been chiseled out by hand from solid rock salt, my hallowed sensor had been silent.

I didn’t understand it. If there was ever an example of senseless human behavior being influenced by a supercharged, hallowed object, this mine should be it. And still, I felt nothing hallowed at play here.