Page 80 of Vesuvius

‘Why wouldn’t they be? Trust is easy.’ Loren frowned. ‘What made you lose yours?’

For a moment, Felix bore the expression of someone who badly wanted to confess. As if the words hovered on his tongue, dying to plunge. Loren waited, ready to dive with him.

‘Forget it.’ Felix looked away. Then he paused. The bag hit the ground with a soft thud and he strode for the centre of the pit. ‘Did youdrop this?’

When he straightened, he held a knife. Wood. Iron.

Loren felt the blood drain from his face.

‘Funny,’ Felix said. ‘I took a knife like this off someone days ago, but I lost it.’

‘Common enough design. Coincidence.’

‘You say that an awful lot for someone who doesn’t believe in those,’ Felix teased, then his lips twitched down. He held the blade to the light, tilting it this way and that. ‘I swear the etching was the same. Almost looks like the mountain.’

Daring to inch nearer, Loren squinted at the afternoon sun reflecting off the blade, catching on an engraved squiggle: an inverted V with a cratered top.

You are close to the answer, Ghost-Felix had said in the dream.

Loren’s eyes drifted up. From the bottom of the chamber, he could only see only its crown, a silhouette ringed with clouds. The mark could be any mountain, really.

Except Ghost-Felix had dropped this knife here for a reason. Had said,If you want to stop this, come and find me.The realisation struck in a sting of lightning, a blast of steam, quicksilver eyes locking on a target – a target that had been there all along. The mountain, at the edges of Loren’s dreams. The mountain under a red storm. Always the one constant. Frustration mounted in his chest, swirled with the flush of an answer at hand.

Years of taunting visions were about to end.

‘Remember when you said you don’t believe in fate?’ Loren murmured.

‘Fate can fuck itself.’

‘In my dreams, I see a mountain.’

Felix stepped closer, following Loren’s stare. ‘Don’t say what I feel you’re about to say.’

‘I think,’ Loren said regardless, ‘I know where to go next.’

Chapter XIX

FELIX

When Felix asked for help with the helmet, he didn’t think it would involve batting off clouds of gnats and dodging stinging nettles as he chased Loren through fields of grass.

Loren always wore his heart outside his skin, but this took chasing his impulses to a new extreme. Knuckles bloody from climbing from the spire pit, he’d sprinted through thickets and brush, gaze locked on Vesuvius, a boy possessed. Felix was naturally speedy, but even he struggled to keep pace with Loren’s long legs. Ridiculous. Reckless. If Felix weren’t so annoyed, he might find it attractive.

By the time they stumbled back onto the road leading to the mountain’s base, the scorching heat had peaked. It’d be a hell of a climb armed only with sandals, a fact Loren seemed oblivious to. The last dregs of Felix’s draining self-preservation roiled.

‘Changed my mind,’ he called. ‘I don’t care about the helmet after all.’

‘Pity.’ Loren was six strides ahead. ‘My mind is set.’

‘We can’t scale a mountain like this. Remember when you hit me with a bowl? And sliced my arm open? I’m in no condition—’

‘It’s calling me, Felix.’ Loren’s heels dug into dirt, and he spun to glare. His cheeks were flushed, eyes bright with discovery. ‘We wereled to the spire pit. We were meant to find that knife. The answer I’m –we’re –looking for is on the mountain. Go back to Pompeii if you want. I never said you had to follow.’

‘Well. I am.’ Felix shifted the laundry bag to his other shoulder. ‘Following.’

‘Oh.’ Loren blinked. ‘Good.’

‘But it’s a bad idea.’

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