Page 223 of A Winding Wave of Magic
Gradually, my eyes adjusted, and I was able to get a brief look at the cave.
Not an abyss, then. Just a five-foot drop or so to a river that seemed to have carved the space out from the beginning. Walls that curved around us like a hug, covered in the same kinds of spirals and other markings I’d seen in the other passage tomb. Pockets had been carved out of each side of the river, where the remains of previous denizens lay in a jumble of aged bones.
I turned back to the door.
It was him.
Caleb Lynch.
The shadowed man, loose-limbed and tall, floated more than he could actually stand in the long black coat that seemed to drag his face even farther down.
The last five months hadn’t treated him well. He looked more like the skulls bordering the river than a living man.
Jonathan sprang up on the other side. He opened his mouth with a spell, but nothing came out. His eyes bulged as he tried again.
The man behind me barked a laugh, hoarse and cruel.
“Cat got your tongue?” he jeered in the Queen’s English. “I still can’t believeyouare my son. Such a disappointment.” He snapped his fingers, and Jonathan gagged like he was choking.
That was all it took to move me to action.
I jumped up and started for the door, hand outstretched. “Let him go!”
Just as I was about to grab his wrist, Lynch raised his other hand, and I was slammed backward against the wall. “I don’t think so. I remember that little trick from the last time we met. You’ll keep those hands to yourself.”
I tried again, but it was as if I was bound to the stone. Panic coursed through me—not just mine, but from others who had been in my exact position. Too many to count.
How many people had he tortured here?
How many people had died?
“Please.” I wasn’t above begging. “I don’t know what you want, but he doesn’t have what you’re looking for. I do.”
Lynch dropped his hand, leaving Jonathan to collapse onto the ground, gasping for breath. “Don’t know what I want? I thought you were supposed to be a vector for truth, little oracle. You know very well what I want, and you’re going to give it to me. Or else yourmatehere will suffer.”
“Don’t do it,” Jonathan called, his voice rasping with effort. “I’m not worth it, Cass. I’mnot.”
I glanced at him, then back at Lynch, who leered over us both in an excellent imitation of Lurch fromThe Addams Family.
“Come with me,” he ordered, and before I could do anything, he snapped his fingers again. My entire body was elevated off the ground just enough that the air itself could carry me after him.
“Cassandra!” Jonathan called in a voice cracked with the same desperation that seemed to cut through my chest, my heart, my soul.
“Don’t fret,” his father told him. “She’ll be back. Whether that’s in one piece is up to her.”
We floated—and I say “we”because I saw no evidence that Lynch was walking any more than I was—out of the depths of the chamber and up a flight of crooked stone stairs to an area of the complex that seemed to be much more recent—and by recent, I mean medieval instead of neolithic. It was a prison, all the chambers barred by great iron gates, no doubt enchanted to keep their prisoners, plain and fae alike, firmly in place. Misery and pain filtered up through my feet the moment they touched the ground.
I was plopped in the center of one of the chambers. Lynch entered behind me, his long black robes brushing the bottom of the gravelly dirt floor, adding to his overall apparition-like appearance.
Gods, why did he look so strange?
Though he wasn’t quite as shrouded in shadows as I remembered, there was still something very odd about the way Caleb Lynch was put together. His body moved as if the bones were separated from one another, jiggling like a marionette on strings. Everything seemed loose, and the dark circles below his eyes and in the hollows of his neck and cheeks enhanced that skeletal appearance. His very skin sank into his bones. It was like the old man was on the verge of scattering—like the unity of his body and spirit was a large shell suffering from millions of fractures, waiting for the right moment to crumble into dust. A single gust of wind might blow him away for good.
I wished it would.
“You have something of mine, Ms. Whelan.” His voice was low like his son’s but creaked like an old rocking chair.“Something that was taken from me by your grandmother. She was very stubborn, and it did not serve her well. If you give it to me now, you can avoid her fate.”
“You mean the one where you stole her memories and left her brain dead?” I swiped at him, but couldn’t find a way to take hold in his phantasmagoric form. He wasn’t quite a ghost but bordered on it.
