Page 53 of Xantera
Fuck,Lucan agrees with a sigh.
Because I don’t just have to find my way back home tonight. If I’m going to get that key to let him in, I need to find out which of these tunnels leads to the Blood Moon Palace, too. I need to do what Diggory wanted to do ever since his daughter was stolen away.
I need to sneak into the home of the vampires.
Night after night, Saskia explores the catacombs.
And each night after she takes off the necklace, I morph back into my human form and stay up until sunset to map out her discoveries. My pencil strokes have become a cathartic release for me, creating a maze of lines that travel back and forth, split off into forks, and burst into multiple pathways that I now know like the veins on the back of my hand.
Saskia has discovered that the tunnels wind underneath the city in a labyrinth, with multiple entry and exit points located strategically throughout. Several lead straight to the Wall, ending in doors just like the one she ran into the first time. Others rise up to various alleyways between complexes. A few are locked that she can’t get past, which only deepens my curiosity at what else they’re hiding.
And one—a singular one—leads to the original catacombs directly beneath the Blood Moon Palace, where an ancient staircase ascends to a dungeon door.
Her way in.
I stare at that tunnel on my map now, clenching my jaw at the thought of her inside it.
My nerves are completely frayed. My mind hasn’t fully relaxed in months. I’m on edge whenever she’s down there, just waiting for another vampire to cross her path and snatch her away.
And yet to both my amazement and my immense relief, nothing has happened to her. Saskia has observed a few more of the parasites creeping along the tunnels long after their citizens have gone to bed, but they’ve never detected her hiding in the shadows. Somehow, they’ve never detected the fresh blood humming through her veins.
Still, I’ve spent hundreds of hours listening to her gasps, feeling her racing heartbeat, and absorbing her emotions, hating that I can’t bear the brunt of the legwork. Hating that she’s alone.
Maybe it’s why I’m being such an ass to my pack members now.
“No touching.” I shove Ashe’s fingers off the edge of my paper with a growl.
Vivian whistles under her breath at my annoyance, but I just glare at everyone’s hands too close to my map, protective over the tangible result of all of Saskia’s hard work.
Soren is the first to lift his head from where five of us are hunched over in a circle around the desk in my office.
“Is this really happening?” he asks eagerly. “We’re finally going to fight and kill these bastards?”
“Not yet,” I say darkly, “but this is the first step.”
Soren whoops as Merrick slings an arm over Vivian and grins. “We’re going to bring the Wall down with their own fucking key.”
But Vivian continues to watch me intently. “She’s agreed to open it?”
I cut my eyes to her, narrowing them at her tone. “What does that mean?”
“Do you actuallywanther to?” she presses.
My knuckles turn white from how hard I’m pressing my hands against the cold wood of my desk. “Of course I fuckingwanther to.”
Everyone collectively lifts their head, wide-eyed, but Vivian continues. She always continues—because she’s forever designated as the one to push my buttons. “It’s okay to care about someone, Lucan. We can sense the effect she has on you.”
“I’ve never even seen her or met her in person,” I insist, even though my mind keeps straying to that moment when we were merely twelve feet apart, only a slab of God-forsaken stone between us. Fuck, I canstillsmell that sweet strawberry scent of hers. It’s like a ghost on my tongue, never enough to satisfy my sudden craving that has grown and grown.
“But you’ve been inside her mind,” Merrick adds tentatively. “For months.”
“And?”
“It’s possible to fall in love with someone’s mind—their soul,” Viv says. “I’d say that’s more important than her body.”
I don’t miss Soren’s smirk at the mention of Saskia’s body, and it takes everything in me not to reach out across my desk and claw his lips off his face for even daring to imagine what she looks like based on the details they’ve all picked up from my mind.
“It doesn’t matter what I think about her soul,” I remind them all bluntly, trying not to perseverate on that one word—love. I’ve resisted the urge to stray into any more personal territory with her and lusting will get me nowhere. At least not now. “She’s a human who’s decided to help us, and she deserves our respect.” I level a glare at Soren. That fantasy ismine. “No thinking ortalking about her body allowed.”
