Page 75 of Wicked Bonds
“You feel her,” Lucien says. I don’t bother denying it. “What is she doing?” Lucien asks, and for once the mask slips. He looks as unsettled as I feel.
“Breaking reality, apparently.” I grab the door to the fourth floor. “Which is why we need to get there before Wickersly does.” I trust Lucien as far as I can throw him, but I can sense his honesty in wanting to get to Rose before Wickersly does.
We crash through the door to the fourth floor, and there’s Drake, standing in the middle of the hallway like he’s guardian of Valhalla. All he’s missing is the magical horn to signal the end times. His form oscillates between solid and translucent, more real than I’ve ever seen him.
“Where is she?” Lucien demands.
Drake’s expression is pure anguish. “Gone.”
“What do you mean gone?” I advance on him, letting my human mask slip enough that he can see the demon underneath. “Where is Rose?”
“She did it.” His voice is hollow, defeated. “She found the way to access the original contract. She’s not on this plane anymore.
There’s a book on the floor, pages scattered everywhere. I can smell Rose’s fear and stubbornness, and that wild magic that makes her so intoxicatingly dangerous. But she’s not here. The space where she should be is empty except for a faint wavy quality in the air, like heat rising off the asphalt on a hot summer day.
“Bring her back,” Lucien says to Drake, and there’s actual violence in his tone now. “Whatever you helped her do?—”
“I can’t!” Drake’s form solidifies as his anger rises. “Don’t you think I would if I could? I can’t reach her. I can’t even find her.”
I close my eyes and focus on the thread between us, the connection I’ve been trying to ignore since that night I fed from her dreams. It’s still there, but stretched impossibly thin, pulled across centuries instead of feet.
“I can feel her,” I say quietly. “She’s… God, she’s in 1692.”
Both of them turn to stare at me.
“The Salem Witch Trials,” Lucien says, understanding immediately. “The original signing.”
“She’s there. Right now. Existing in two times at once.” I open my eyes and look at the shimmering space where she vanished. “And if we don’t find a way to pull her back, she’s going to be trapped there. Or worse.”
“Worse?” Drake asks.
“She’ll cease to exist in either time,” Lucien says grimly. “Temporal paradox. She’ll be erased completely.”
We all stare at each other, three supernatural creatures who supposedly hate each other, united in one terrifying realization: Rose is beyond any of our reaches, lost in time, and we might have just lost the only person any of us actually give a damn about.
Thirty-Six
Rose
It’s pitch black and I can feel the panic rising in my throat.
Then my eyes begin to adjust and I realize there’s a lantern, dim but burning steadily, about twenty feet away.
I was on the fourth floor. But the corridor, the moonlight, Drake’s voice, that’s all gone. Now it’s just me and the lantern and a sudden, absolute certainty that I’m not in the present anymore.
Shapes start to come into view and I see that I’m in a windowless room. There’s a door behind the lantern. It’s old, the wood warped and splitting around enormous iron hinges. The kind of door that once kept out wolves. No sound from beyond it. I walk slowly to the lantern because that’s what you do when you’re alone in a dark place, make for the only light, like a moth.
Okay, let’s assess.
I’ve quantum-leaped into somewhere, or some when. Unless I’m wrong, which isverymuch still a possibility, the original contract will be here. Except there’s nothing here. So what’s the plan?
The plan, obviously, is to open the door. I reach for it, and the moment my fingers make contact, I feel the bloodmark on my arm burn.
I open it to see the figure standing in the doorway.
She’s dressed in a white linen gown, cinched at the waist with a cord that looks like it’s made from horsehair. Her hair is long, unbound, black as midnight, and falling in heavy waves down her back. She moves into the lantern light with slow steps.
My first thought, stupidly, is that I’m going to have to fight her. For the contract.
