It quaked.
Shifted.
The blood leached from her face and icy claws gripped her stomach. Her flame, cupped in her palm, died. She tried to summon it, call it back, but whatever magic lingered here severed it.
The ground shook and the bricks warped beneath their feet. They all stumbled, Emmery to one side and Brennen and Destonne to the other and as a barrier rose from the ground, it sent her sprawling and the back of her head collided with theunforgiving stone. She squeezed her eyes shut against the bright flare of pain. Stars burst across her vision.
“Emmery!” Destonne hollered her name, threw it like a rope he prayed she could reach. That he could pull her back. “No, no—Emmery!”
But she knew it was too late.
Her eyes flew open, and as her vision focused the wall rose to meet the ceiling, and swallowed Destonne’s voice behind it. All at once, the rumbling stopped. Darkness surrounded her. Although her head swam and pounded, she shoved to her feet and threw herself forward. Her eyes strained as she sought the wall with blind hands in the blackness.
“Destonne? Brennen?” she hollered.
Nothing.
She yelled their names again, but silence filled the air. She searched her head for any sign of Brennen’s voice, but not even her flame answered when she called. Her magic was numb. Iced over. Distant.
Emmery skirted the wall, running her fingers along it in the darkness but she found no hand holds, divots, or anything. And the damn seeping quiet needled into her.The stone walls encased her like a bird in a cage, a rat in a trap, smog drowning the sun. Suffocating. Her heart rose in her throat and she couldn't catch her damn breath.
Once again, like all those years trapped on the wrong side of the gate, she was alone, encased in the impenetrable darkness, sentenced to only the company of her own thoughts.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
EMMERY
The labyrinth became an insidious, writhing nightmare. Voices lived inside the walls, taunting and shrieking and stealing Emmery’s increasingly fragile sanity. Because those voices echoed in her head, resounded inside her, and lived in those haunted memories and unceasing dreams.
The endless stone hallways echoed Maela’s scream when Nathaniel’s hot knife had branded her. When her sister had begged the guards to let her go, pleaded for her life, and like a coward, Emmery had sat back and watched her be tied down and thrown into the river. Watched her sink below the surface.
Watched her die.
And with her, a piece of Emmery had died, too.
Her sister’s body had decayed at the bottom of that water, and her skeletal remains waited there still.
Emmery sprinted through the labyrinth, skidded, and slipped. Her wrists bled from catching herself on the rough ground. She called Maela’s name into the unending darkness, but never found her. Never reached her.
Nathaniel’s gooseflesh-raising rasp, the consequence of too many smokes, spoke from the shadows. He reminded her he held the phantom leash around her neck and tightened it as he pleased. That he waited for her at the end of that stone tunnel, lurked behind her when the darkness grew too quiet, and whispered all the things he would do to her.
Because she would always belong to him.
The last voice she knew too well. One that lived inside her head and had somehow sunk into these walls, now residing where the mortar joined the bricks. It sang a vile tune, one of failures, and longing, and unending suffering. One of lonely nights and loveless glances. That her magic would overtake her, and the world would burn at her hands. The fever, her fire, it would all bring the end. And no matter how fiercely she fought, she would always be a vile, hideous creature, and that soulless, empty chasm inside her would expand and swell and envelop everything she ever was. Swallow her entirely, until no light remained in her universe. Until all she could see was unending darkness.
Every bad thing she ever said about herself, every thought inside her berating mind, now played on repeat—mocked, taunted, drove her to insanity, then shoved her off the edge.
Emmery stumbled through the endless labyrinth, her hand dragging along the stone wall as her only guide. She didn’t care to keep track of the lefts and rights and how long she’d walked.When she needed to sleep, she merely curled up and tried to shut her eyes. But in rest, the voices only grew louder.
And she feared, even if they escaped these stone walls, she would never truly be able to leave this place.
She wasn’t sure how long she wandered in the shadows. The labyrinth had a way of distorting time, of stretching and thinning until it looped into endless eternity, like a god carelessly twirled it around their little finger.
And despite how long she’d pounded on the walls or how loudly she called Destonne or Brennen’s names, dragged the cry from the far recesses of her soul, they never appeared. She clawed at the stone, shrieked and begged and bartered what little of her remained to bring them back to her. To not be alone anymore. To be free of this torture.
Emmery hauled herself into the room with the same high ceilings, empty walls, and fire tucked into each corner like the first game. Such ferocious hunger clawed at her that her bleary eyes barely believed it. But, there was no way she could trust it. The demons had surely tampered with it. Inflicted it with some sort of disease that would feast on her skin or poison sure to leave her a corpse foaming at the mouth.
She salivated as she surveyed the banquet table covered in lush fruits, roasted meat, and platters of foods she’d never seen. Wine and water awaited and, gods, her throat burned, her veins parched, and her body cried for the insatiable need for sustenance.