Chapter 40
Ten minutes later, they were dressed and in the Batcave. Thorne and Tyr were both in there: Thorne in his usual place at the computer console, and Tyr at the conference table, surrounded by piles of books and scrolls.
He had several books open and seemed to be cross-referencing between them, making notes on a yellow legal pad.
They both looked up as Zane and Blaze walked in. Tyr raised his eyebrows. “We didn’t expect to see you two for the rest of the day,” he said. “We could feel the hoard singing from here.”
Blaze felt her face get hot, and Tyr’s grin got wider.
“That’s none of your damn business,” Zane growled. “Keep your perverted thoughts away from my mate.”
“Well, since I don’t have my own mate to get perverted with, I have only my imagination to console me. Deal with it.”
Blaze twitched her fingers, magically smacking Tyr on the back of the head. “Ow! Hey!” He rubbed the place she’d hit him. “What was that for?”
“Imagining perverted things about me. What are you doing?” She sat down at the table next to him.
“Trying to figure out how the Seal ended up physically embedded in the Keeper. Which would be you. As far as I can tell, the Seals Arkyld took were physical objects.”
“Do the others have tattoos?” she asked. “Rebel and Tempest?”
Thorne answered from the computer console. “If it were only so easy. I spoke to Tempest while you were sick, but neither she nor Rebel has a tattoo. At least, not a magical one in the shape of the Seal.”
Tyr looked interested. “What other ones do they have? And where?”
Thorne just shot him a disgusted look and shook his head.
“So it’s just me,” Blaze said. Damn. She’d hoped that they all had tattoos, and they would be able to figure this out together. If they could seal up the tomb once and for all, it would limit the idol’s power—maybe even destroy it.
Everything both she and Zane had worked and sacrificed for would come to pass.
“Tell me how you ended up with the tattoo,” Tyr said, pen poised.
“It was my mother’s. She gave it to me when she was dying.” Blaze explained how it had been magically passed down the generations, mother to daughter. “She’d been sick for a long time, growing weaker and weaker, and no one knew why.” She thought back. So many things that hadn’t made sense to her before made sense now.
“Now I realize it started not long after the time the coven began working with the idol. She had bouts of fatigue and weakness, and sudden high fevers. The same symptoms I had before I passed out.”
“The Seal was fighting the idol’s influence,” Zane said.
“And neither one could win. The stress on her body just wore it out. And then—”
She broke off, for the first time realizing the enormity of what her mother had done for her. She’d resisted the idol’s influence for years with the help of the Seal. And then, when she’d realized she could neither recover, nor fight Silas and the others, she’d passed it on to Blaze.
“Then she gave the Seal to you.” Zane was beside her, his hand covering hers. She could feel his understanding, his realization of her mother’s last gift.
To keep Blaze safe, she’d sacrificed her only protection. And then she’d given in to physical death, to keep the evil taint from taking over her soul.
Oh, Mom. Grief overtook her, and she buried her head in Zane’s shoulder.
Thorne said, “How exactly did she give it to you? Could you give it to Zane the same way?”
“Fuck, Thorne, give her a minute,” Zane said.
Blaze shook her head, swallowing hard. “No,” she forced out.
“We just tried a little while ago,” Zane said. “It didn’t work.” He described the white light and the feeling, giving Blaze time to pull herself together.
“But nothing else happened,” said Blaze when he finished. “I still have it.”
Thorne spun back and forth in his chair, frowning in thought. “Maybe she’s not literally supposed to give it to her mate. What if she tried to transfer it directly onto the tomb, where the Seal originally was?”
“That would make the most sense,” Tyr conceded. “But I don’t like the idea of her in there with Vyrkos. What if her transfer attracts his attention and starts to wake him?”
“If it’s going to put her in danger, then hell no,” Zane said.
Blaze didn’t like the idea either, but it seemed like the most obvious thing to try. The Seal was supposed to get back to the tomb; that was the whole point of the prophecy. “I think we should do it.”
It took some coaxing for her to get Zane on board, but finally he agreed. Thorne led the group out of the Batcave, striding through the huge domed foyer and into the warren of tunnels.
Blaze glanced at Zane, and he slipped his hand around hers. That safe, protected feeling stole over her again. His touch said he had her back—he’d always have her back.
She was still astounded by that, at the realization that she was no longer alone.
They turned down another corridor, this one human-sized. They passed a couple of closed doors, and then stopped at what looked like a dead end.
Thorne reached out to put his hand on a flat place to the right of the featureless wall in front of them.
“Hold up,” Zane said. He pushed Blaze gently past Thorne, and lifted her hand to put her palm where Thorne’s had been about to go.
Zane put his on top of it. Blue light glowed around their hands, and Blaze felt a tingle of magic.
Thorne was scowling. “What did you do that for?” he asked.
Zane scowled back. “I gave her access,” he said, “because she’s a Keeper of the Seals. If this doesn’t work, and all hell breaks loose at some future point in time, don’t you think she should be able to get the Seal inside?”
Thorne made a reluctant gesture of acknowledgement. Blaze realized that he, too, was used to going it alone, with only his brothers for help.
It was hard for him to let other people in.
Zane turned to Blaze. “Take your hand off the sensor, and then put it back.”
She did what she was told. The blank wall slid aside, revealing a small room with a stone worktop built into the far wall, a frosted glass mirror in a gold frame above it. Two ornately carved wooden chairs on casters were tucked underneath. The whole place was covered in a layer of dust, as though it had never seen a zefir.
Thorne went forward and touched a button concealed on the bottom right corner of the mirror frame. The glass cleared like a windshield with the defroster turned on, becoming transparent.
It was the same view of Vyrkos’ tomb she’d seen on the monitor, the first night she’d come to the Batcave. Such a short time ago, but it seemed like a lifetime.
Now she was going inside—and it scared the hell out of her.
“This is a portal chamber,” Tyr said. “The Guardians’ shortcut to Mount Hood. Once the portal is activated, it can take us straight to the tomb.”
“When there was a full complement of Guardians here, there were two of them on watch in this room 24/7,” Zane added. “This lever over here activates the portal.”
It was a brass rod about three feet high set into a half-circle of gears on the floor, so that you had to shove it from one side of the circle to the other. It looked like the lever a cartoon supervillain would use to open a trapdoor to drop his enemies into a dungeon.
The lever was canted to one side, obviously in the “off” position. Thorne went over and shoved it to the other side.
There was a grinding of gears, and a circle of darkness appeared in the wall to one side of the lever. The circle spiraled out like a camera lens, and suddenly a dark shimmering doorway appeared in the wall.
They stepped through—Thorne first, then Blaze with Zane following, his hand reassuringly on her back. Tyr brought up the rear.
Blaze felt something cool and clammy brush over her skin, like walking through damp clothing hanging from a clothesline. She felt a sense of vertigo, and then she took another step and she was inside the cavern.
She sucked in her breath. Seeing the tomb on the viewing screen was nothing to seeing it in real life.
The cavern spread out into the distance, so vast she couldn’t even see where it ended in the dim light. On the far side was a tunnel opening—she guessed that was the original entrance. The roof soared above her, at least forty feet high. The stalagmites growing out of the floor were as big around as her whole body.
And then there was the Draken.
Zane, in dragon form, was as big as a good-sized RV. Thorne had filled the backyard of a small house.
Vyrkos could fill a football field.
He lay on his side, encased in that glassy lake like an insect caught in clear amber. His head was the size of a school bus, his giant closed eye the size of a truck tire.
Blaze had faced down a lot of scary things in her life, and she wasn’t easily spooked. But Vyrkos terrified her. It was as if she knew, down to her DNA, that this creature here was her greatest enemy.
Maybe even her doom.
Then she felt Zane’s hand resting on the back of her neck. Whatever happens, we’ll be together. We’ll fight together. Win together.
Die together. The words weren’t spoken, but they hovered in the air between them.
She moved closer, leaning her head briefly on his shoulder.
Then she followed Thorne over to one side of the chamber.
Set in the wall was a six-pointed star about three feet across, made of brass engraved with symbols and letters, most of which she didn’t understand. Three of the points had gold symbols inlaid in them.
The other three—the top point, and the bottom ones on either side—had rounded depressions about three inches deep and as big around as her palm, going through the brass into the stone wall. The top one had a dragonfly carved inside it. The one on the bottom left was carved with a dolphin, and the one on the bottom right with a phoenix.
This was where the Seals went. She ran her fingers over the place where the Dragonfly Seal would go, feeling the tingle of magic.
This brass star was by far the most powerful magical artifact she’d ever touched. Somehow, she was supposed to transfer the energy of the Seal from inside her to this container, so that it meshed with the star’s power.
She just had no idea how.
She started with the simple transfer spell her mother had used, placing her hands on the empty space in the brass star where the Seal was supposed to go.
She wasn’t surprised when it didn’t work. That spell was designed to transfer energy between living people, not between people and artifacts.
After that, she tried various spells she knew that transferred magical energy into artifacts. None of them had any effect on the Seal.
As a last resort, she tried a rare spell used to transfer a portion of a person’s life energy into an artifact, focusing it on the Seal.
Instead, it tried to transfer her own energy, which almost made her pass out. Zane moved in behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist. “That’s enough,” he said angrily to Thorne. “She’s barely recovered from the last few days. She—”
The rest of what he was about to say was drowned in a deep rumble. The floor shook as though they were having an earthquake, and a large crack snaked across the thick glassy surface of Vyrkos’ tomb.