Page 128 of Mantle

I held out my hand. “Then, let’s go. Let’s leave this place.”

He remained still. “When it’s ready. Or when Corvin is imprisoned. Only then.”

He tightened his hold on my arm, but not to a painful degree, just enough to convey his urgency. “I don’t know where I was being held. He only moved me in and out of there through teleportation so I never saw where. But tell Ariana and Cassius to restart their spell. I felt them trying to find me. They were close to Corvin’s lair. He’s a killer. Bodies and blood are everywhere. It’s dark, underground, dirty. Skulls lined the walls and the floor where I was kept.” He shuddered. “They crunched beneath my feet… bones and skulls from real beings… badly hurt, then murdered.”

“Fuck, I’m so sorry you had to endure that, and—”

“No, kind one. Listen. In the lab with Ariana that day, she struck him. He bled. He’s part vampire. His blood that spilled wouldn’t just be his own… it would have the essence of his victims’ blood—victims who he keeps at his lair. A spell could be made to use that blood that spilled at the lab to find those victims. Then you find the place.”

He was a fucking prodigy.

His mind was… young… in some aspects, but the knowledge he carried was miraculous. And it seemed even that young and fractured aspect was evolving swiftly.

In truth, he was fucking extraordinary.

He released my arm, then smiled. “Go now. I will wait for you. Do not worry, I like it here very much.”

He pressed his hand to my head and then I choked as his power briefly touched me, enough to pull me from the dreamwalking and back to reality.

I jolted and blinked hard,slapping my hand to my chest as I pushed past the unsettling sensation of coming back from a dreamscape, especially one that had been so immersive and took such great power and concentration for me.

I rose to my feet and looked at Ketheron unconscious on the floor of the magical cube confining him.

I smiled to myself.

But he wasn’t confined—not to him.

That wasn’t touching him.

He was happy for now.

And once we dealt with Corvin, he’d be able to have that in reality as well.

He was the antithesis to being too far gone.

He was a sweetheart through and through.

And by conveying what he had about the severance spell, he’d just saved Ariana’s life.

When factoring in the reaction of the Celestial Plane,allof our lives, actually.

“I’ll be back,” I told his unconscious form. “We’ll fix this. You’ll be free. I fucking swear it to you.”

26

~Kai~

Lack of knowledge and understanding had almost fucked everybody over yet again.

As a rule, that got under my skin like nothing else.

But in this case it was far worse because it had involved Ariana’s life.

The way that Cassius, Mia, and Jaxon had been prepared to carry out the Severance—breaking the link between the Celestial Plane and the mortal world—would not only have failed, but also very likely drained and killed Ariana as well.

All because Celestial knowledge was so limited.

Even Cassius being a True Celestial who’d only recently been sent down to the mortal plane had limited knowledge—just specifically what they’d wanted him to know to be able to do his specific job with training Ariana. And when it came to something blasphemous like breaking the connection to those fuckers and cutting them off permanently, it was buried far deeper than anything else.

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