Chapter 41
“Out! Now!” The words snapped out of Thorne’s mouth like a whip crack.
They ran for the portal, Zane still supporting Blaze. Thorne slapped his palm on a flat stone plate above an identical lever to the one they’d used to get in here, shoved the lever across, and the portal appeared. They dashed through it. Tyr closed it behind them, and they crowded around the viewer.
They could still see the cavern shaking. Small chunks of rock dropped from the ceiling and skittered across the surface of the tomb. Another, smaller crack appeared near the first.
After a moment the shaking subsided. They waited, holding their breath, watching Vyrkos.
Nothing happened.
After a few minutes they all let out their breath in a collective sigh of relief. Thorne and Tyr took off for the Batcave to check the readings, while Zane and Blaze followed more slowly. The spells had worn her out more than she wanted to admit; she still wasn’t a hundred percent.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried everything I could think of. Why the hell were the Seals even given to us, if there’s no way to put them back in the tomb?”
“It’s not your fault.” Zane dropped a kiss on top of her head. “We’ll think of something else.”
Four days later, they still hadn’t.
The tomb’s magical field had been further weakened by the reaction to Blaze trying to reinstate the Seal, and after stabilizing for a short time, was starting to inch downward once more. They still had a bit more time—but not much.
Blaze longed to spend time with Zane, just getting to know each other, but nearly every waking moment was devoted to hunting for a solution to at least one of their problems. Blaze spent hours poring through her spell books, looking for anything that might help, while the others hunted through the Draken archives.
Blaze wished that she had the other two Keepers to help her, although she wasn’t sure what they could do. They didn’t know where their Seals were, and they weren’t witches, so they couldn’t help her look for spells.
At least, they weren’t trained witches. Blaze suspected they had some latent power; after all, the Seals had originally been entrusted to sorceresses, to be passed down their lineage. And Blaze hadn’t forgotten the rush of power Tempest had displayed when she’d unexpectedly made the dragons obey her.
Rebel she wasn’t sure of, but she’d always wondered how Rebel had gotten through her magical wards the first night she broke into the vault. If she had some kind of ability to avoid or transmute energy fields—like magical wards or electronic alarm systems, rendering herself invisible to them—it would explain why she was such a successful thief.
Unfortunately, the two women were avoiding Blaze and the dragons. It seemed that Blaze’s attempt to get Rebel on their side had failed miserably. Thorne had also tried talking to Rebel, asking—or rather, demanding—that she and Tempest come and stay at the lair. That had gone about as well as you’d expect. And Tempest, despite her fascination for dragons, had sided with her sister.
Tyr had resorted to taking his books to the coffee shop next to Tempest’s store and lurking there for most of the day; Blaze wasn’t sure if he was guarding her or stalking her. Probably both.
Silas had dropped out of sight. He hadn’t contacted Rebel about the idol, or tried to come after Blaze at her house. That should have been good news, but the longer Rebel went without hearing from Silas, the more she seemed to convince herself that she and Tempest were out of danger and didn’t need the dragons’ protection.
Blaze knew in her bones they hadn’t seen the last of Silas. He’d worked and schemed for ten years to get the idol back. Now that he knew where it was—and where Blaze was—she knew he would keep coming for it until he got his hands on it, or died trying.
He was biding his time. Building his strength.
Which was what they were discussing that evening in the Batcave. Tempest had closed her shop and gone home for the night, and Tyr had been persuaded to come back to the lair rather than lurking outside her house.
Thorne was at one of his computers, running down leads on the other two Seals. Now that he knew who the Keepers were, he was sifting through Rebel’s and Tempest’s backgrounds, trying to get some idea what form the Seals had taken and where they might be.
Zane, Tyr and Blaze were talking about Silas.
“It seems to me that the extra stress on the tomb might be increasing due to his proximity to the idol, and his focus of attention on it,” Tyr was saying. “I believe Corwyn and Vyrkos are pulling power from him and the coven, through the idol. It’s allowing them to break down the tomb’s protections bit by bit.”
Zane was eating his second helping of chocolate raspberry torte, which he claimed helped him think better. Blaze was doing nothing more than toying with hers, scraping the icing away from the cake and licking it off her fork.
“I still think you’re wrong,” Zane said to Tyr. “There’s been incremental weakening, yes. But the biggest hits we’ve taken to the tomb’s protections were at specific points when the idol was responding directly to Silas, or the first time, when it was activated by Blaze’s spell. I don’t think he can have a continuous effect on it.”
“I disagree. I believe that now that it’s reconnected with Silas, it’s leaching power from the tomb itself,” Tyr said.
Zane sighed. “The idol’s in the spell cage,” he said. “How can any of them still be pulling power through it?”
Zane had taken to going in and checking the spell cage every day. It made Blaze antsy; even inside the cage, the artifact gave her the chills.
“I don’t know,” Tyr said. “Both the idol and the spell cage were created with Draken magic, after all. Some sources say that Draken Lords can manipulate and nullify Draken magic, since they’re the original source of it. Maybe because the idol is linked to Vyrkos, the cage doesn’t completely block his magic.”
“God, I hope it’s not that,” Blaze muttered. She licked more frosting off her fork.
“All I’m saying is, I think it’s worth a shot to try to sever Silas’s connection to the idol,” Tyr said. “By cutting off their conduit to the outside world, I think it’s likely we could send Corwyn and Vyrkos back to sleep. That would buy us time to find the other two Seals.”
“Or it could send the tomb magic into the critical zone, and they could break free,” Thorne said, without turning around. “We can’t risk it.”
“Better now than later,” Tyr argued. “The danger just keeps growing, the longer we wait.”
Zane interrupted the argument. “You can’t sever anything from Silas until you find the bastard,” he pointed out.
It was true. They’d spent some of their time the last few days trying to track down Silas, starting with the small enclave where the coven had lived during Blaze’s childhood. They’d found it in ruins; it seemed no one had lived there for years.
Dead? Or moved on? Blaze hadn’t been ready to know, though one day she would have to face it. How many had died, destroyed by the dark magic of the idol? How many still lived, still followed Silas? Was her father still alive?
But Silas had covered his tracks, and there was no trace of where he or the coven might be.
“There must be a reason he hasn’t faced us directly,” Blaze said now. “He sent Liriel and Jerome to fetch the idol, but he didn’t come himself. He worked through Jack—first as a projection, according to Rebel, and then with that puppet spell.”
That still gave her nightmares. That kind of magic burned up the host, sapping their life energy until they died. It was some of the worst of the dark magics.
Blaze had learned the theory, though she’d only tried it once—a few brief moments with a volunteer, under the tutelage of one of her less scrupulous teachers—before she realized where the energy for the spell was drawn from. He’d taught her other spells, too—spells where the backlash would kill you, unless you passed it on to some unwilling dupe to be killed in your place, or you’d bonded your soul to a demon willing to absorb it for you.
You had to be truly evil—or truly desperate—to work that kind of magic. She hoped she was never that desperate. Like she’d told Zane, just learning the spells had darkened her soul. She almost regretted learning them.
But not quite. Not if she could avenge her family. Or save them.
Thorne turned to her. “Why do you think he didn’t come himself?”
Blaze had been turning this over in her mind. “I can only think of two reasons,” she said. “One, is that he’s too weak. It’s possible that being without the idol this long weakened him to the point where he physically can’t leave wherever he is. At least, not until he has it.”
“And the second reason?”
“He’s so powerful that he doesn’t think he needs to come himself. He’s so sure of the coven’s superiority—his superiority—that he thinks he can afford to send minions to do this part of the job.”
“Which do you think it is?”
Blaze drummed her fingers on the table. She knew what she wanted it to be—weakness. But she had to be realistic.
“There’s no way to tell. And that being the case, we have to assume that it’s option number two. Power, not weakness. And that he’s going to be coming after us with everything he’s got.”
“So then we kill him,” Zane said. “That should sever him from the damn idol.”
“Yep,” Tyr said, making a note on his legal pad. “That would work.”
Blaze didn’t say anything.
“We’ll keep looking for him,” Thorne said finally. “At least that will give us more options.”
They worked for a while longer, until they were all exhausted. Zane didn’t accomplish much; he was too busy watching Blaze, making sure she didn’t overdo it.
She’d been so quiet since the discussion about Silas. As much as she’d told Zane when they first met that she’d kill Silas if he tried to take the idol, the idea of Zane and Tyr taking him out had seemed to upset her.
Maybe it was just reality setting in.
Finally, they put their papers aside and headed for their respective lairs—all except Thorne, who never seemed to sleep lately.
Zane took Blaze aside before she could get into the elevator, pulling her into his arms and kissing her gently. “You go on up,” he said. “I’ll be there in a bit. I have something to finish up here.”
She went, Bucephalus trotting after her. The cat had taken to hanging out in the Batcave with them, begging treats from Thorne and annoying him by walking across whichever keyboard he was using whenever the treats were not forthcoming.
Zane left the other two to their work and walked down the hall to the vault. The idol had become the focus of all his anger, all his fear for his mate.
He knew Blaze hated it when he went and talked to it, but he felt compelled to.
It looked the same today as it always did, resting in its cage, surrounded by the glow of the blocking spell, that smug fucking smile on its face.
“It’s coming soon,” he said to the idol. “We’re going to take you down. Your pet sorcerer Turner is going to put himself in my hands, and I’m going to break his evil scrawny neck. I’ll flame his flesh and eat his bones. And once that’s done, you’ll have no link to anyone in the outside world. Your last hope of escape will be gone.”
And Blaze would finally be safe. He left the idol to its smug contemplation, and went to make love to his mate.
The idol opened its eyes. Once again the illusory light around the spell cage dimmed, showing that the cage’s buffer shield was down to almost nothing. It was riddled with holes, like rotting cloth.
The Draken Lord’s voice rumbled through the vault.
“Corwyn.”
“Yes, Master?”
“Tell the sorcerer it is time.”