With our gear and supplies ready, we were ready to deploy. It was mid-morning, and an optimal time for our descent into Draconis, since guards tended to change around noon—a pattern we’d also noticed in Infernis. Fortunately for us, the daemon society functioned on a tight, military-like schedule.

I walked over to the bookcase-door, accompanied by Caspian and Pheng-Pheng. Vesta fumbled with the hidden mechanism until it clicked, then pulled the door open. The tunnel was quiet, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

“Again, I cannot stress this enough, but please—”

“We’ll look after your parents,” I cut Vesta off with a warm and reassuring smile. She gave me a thankful nod in return. I then looked at Laughlan, who stood by her side. “You two be careful here. We’ll be back as soon as it’s done. Hopefully it won’t take longer than a couple of hours.”

“We’ll be good. I promise. It’s not like we’re rigging the whole place with dangerous explosives—oh, wait,” Laughlan replied with a devilish grin, making me chuckle.

“Don’t blow yourselves up, then. I’m not risking my ass down there to deliver fae parents to a dead fae daughter,” I shot back.

“You’re not dying under my watch,” Pheng-Pheng solemnly chimed in. For a young Manticore who was still a few years from official adulthood, she carried herself with impressive poise and leader-like dignity. On top of that, she’d gotten so attached to me, and I to her, that I couldn’t find it in my heart to let her down. Getting myself killed definitely counted as letting her down.

“Right there with you,” I replied with a playful wink, then entered the tunnel.

Caspian and Pheng-Pheng joined me, and we rushed through the narrow stone passage. Five minutes later, I could hear Hansa and Jax come after us. Another five minutes, and Caia and Blaze joined the loose pack, followed by Fiona.

As expected, the access point at the end was guarded. A uniformed daemon leaned against the cloaked wall, cleaning the dirt beneath his claws with the tip of his rapier. If ever there was an easy target, he was it.

I took out several glass vials, ready for the next phase of our plan. We’d found the small bottles on the other side of the library earlier this morning, and Laughlan had immediately beamed at us. Using the swamp witch spells he’d learned from Lumi, he was able to charm the vials in a manner similar to what we’d seen back at the Broken Bow Inn in Azure Heights. We could now collect blood from daemons and keep it fresh in the charmed vials, in case we needed extra for our infiltration of Draconis. Each of our sub-teams had at least a couple to work with. Learning from our previous experiences, we welcomed the extra preparation.

Pheng-Pheng dashed over to the daemon, catching him unprepared. He didn’t even hear her coming until it was too late. He looked up and stilled, the tip of his rapier blade under his claw, as Pheng-Pheng’s scorpion tail stung him in the neck.

The poison worked fast, spreading through his body. He raised his sword to hit her, but by the time his arm went up, he’d already lost control over his limbs. Thirty seconds later, he was collapsed on the floor, spasming. Caspian and I came out to join her. Caspian slit the daemon’s throat, and I filled the vials with the fiend’s warm blood, then handed one to Caspian and one to Pheng-Pheng.

I kept the others for later. We consumed the first ration of our invisibility spell paste, then used a drop of the daemon’s blood on the cloaking spell’s fake wall. We vanished, and put our red lenses on, then passed through as the wall’s surface rippled from the blood.

Knowing that the rest of our team was close behind us, I braced myself for what came next. The daemon city of Draconis unraveled at our feet, with its four support pillars connecting it to the surface and its thousands of meranium prison boxes, riddled with swamp witch charms. In the middle stood the central penitentiary, with Death Claws circling overhead, flapping their leathery wings and occasionally screeching at the daemon guards below.

The narrow streets weren’t too crowded, but there were regular patrols moving up and down. In the wider sections, daemon generals joined the grunts, accompanied by collared pit wolves. Just twenty feet ahead, before the stairs leading down into the city, were a dozen daemon guards covered in leather and metal armor.

They hadn’t spotted us yet and were just chitchatting among themselves—the usual banter since we’d come to Neraka, specifically ways to capture us, so they, too, could get a taste of our souls. As usual, the more realistic of the bunch was quick to point out the bitter truth:

“You losers aren’t getting any of that fancy outsider soul chow. They’re reserved for the higher-ups and royalty. Get that thought out of your heads.”

They grumbled with discontentment, but, in the end, they resigned themselves to his words.

And, as Pheng-Pheng quietly made her way toward their group, I couldn’t help but smirk. No one was going to hold us down. If anything, we were just about to bring them down. All of them.

Down to the last obsidian brick.