Everbound: An Everneath Novel (28 page)

She took one step toward Cole. Then one more. “Love doesn’t matter here.”

She gestured with her arm as if inviting the Shades to come and get us, and that’s when I saw something dark on her inner wrist. A tattoo. A symbol of some sort. She held out her arm for a few long moments, so I got a good look at the mark.

Two swords, crossed. Embedded inside a circular wreath.

The tattooed swords. The indictment on love. Something clicked, but before I could do anything about it, Ashe charged the queen, his sword drawn in front of him. He swung it back, like a baseball player would swing a bat, and let it fly right for the queen’s chest. It made contact with something, but it wasn’t the queen. It was suddenly embedded in the trunk of a tree that had appeared out of nowhere but now stood between Ashe and the queen.

Ashe tried to pull his sword out of the wood, but his efforts were in vain.

With a snap of her fingers, the queen made the tree disappear, and Ashe’s sword fell straight to the ground.

Why would he charge the queen? Sure, he had success against the Shades, but did he really think he could take her on? She picked the sword up with two fingers, as if she were too delicate to grab it by the hilt, then she tossed it into the lake.

Strangely, it didn’t make a splash. It just disappeared. I stared at the surface of the water. It looked too glassy. Too calm. No ripples from the sword. Nobody else noticed.

The queen stepped closer to Ashe. “I’ll save you for last, brave man.”

She started to turn away, and the Shades moved toward us.

“Wait!” I called out.

She paused with an eyebrow raised. “What?”

I thought fast. “I’m really a messenger. For you, Your Majesty.”

She made a fist, and at the signal, the Shades again were still. “A messenger from whom?” The tone of her voice was skeptical, and I knew I had just one chance. I only hoped I wasn’t mistaken about the tattoo on her wrist.

But I felt the medal in my pocket. I wasn’t wrong.

“From the person who anchored you.”

“And who would that be?”

I took a deep breath, praying that my gamble would pay off. “Nathanial.”

The Everneath. The Ring of Fire
.

E
verything went quiet. Even the crackle from the flames of the Ring of Fire grew soft. Cole looked at me, shocked. He had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t sure I did either.

I thought back to every conversation I’d had with Mrs. Jenkins, everything I knew about the queen and the High Court.

“Once you reached the High Court, you thought you’d be able to grant your entire ancestral line eternal life. That’s the rumor, right? Did it work?”

She watched me with wide eyes, and I thought she would ignore me; but slowly she shook her head.

But even as the queen affirmed that it hadn’t worked, she didn’t seem convinced. So I pressed on.

“But you haven’t given up hope that it’s possible, right? You didn’t love your Everliving. You didn’t choose this life. All you want is what you’ve lost. The only man you’ve ever loved. But the magic of the High Court doesn’t allow you to raise the dead.” I was figuring it out as I was saying the words.

Her face cracked, and suddenly the image of her flickered in and out, oscillating between the tall redhead and a shorter, slighter woman with blond hair and blue eyes.

I took a tentative step forward. “I know who you are, Adonia.”

Ashe flinched, and his feet stuttered as if he didn’t know whether to run at her or run away from her. “Adonia,” he said, breathless. “It can’t be.”

She turned to glare at Ashe. “Why? Because the queen killed me? When you had me hunted down like a dog?” Her gaze fell on me again. “Nathanial wasn’t dead. He wasn’t killed in the war. They found him, wounded and disoriented in a run-down hospital two days after I’d left with Ashe. Two days!” She pressed her lips together and looked at Ashe. “He was saying my name. He held on for the entire six months I was in the Feed with you. He never gave up hope. I knew he was alive. For the entire century I was with you, all I could see was his face.”

She looked away, her mouth open, her entire body trembling as if she couldn’t contain the pain. I knew that feeling.

“So you Returned to the Surface for him,” I said.

She nodded, still with a faraway look in her eyes. “We were reunited for one whole day before he succumbed to his wounds.” She looked down and blinked. “He died in my arms. It’s like he was waiting to see me so he could say good-bye.”

Everything went quiet. Even the crackling from the fire walls dampened, as if in reverence to the grieving queen.

When she raised her head again there was fire behind her eyes, and it was directed at Ashe. “I was grieving for my love. I was trying to make amends to my family. I was ready to face the Tunnels, but that wasn’t enough for you. You wanted to see me torn apart!”

“But …” Ashe looked at Cole helplessly. Cole seemed just as lost as he was. “But if you’re here, that means you killed the queen. You took her place. And you never told me.”

She looked taken aback. “You betrayed me. So I betrayed you. The last thing I wanted was for you to get anything out of it.”

As they spoke, I glanced at the water behind me and slowly stepped away from Cole. My tether appeared fully, still pointing to the lake. But I no longer thought it was just a lake.

“I loved you,” Ashe said. “I only did what I did because you broke my heart.”

“You broke
me
,” Adonia hissed.

The conversation sounded familiar. Cole and I had had it many times. And yet here we were, standing next to each other, not facing off against each other. And closer to saving Jack than we’d ever been.

I grabbed his hand, and he squeezed mine. Then I started to inch backward, toward the lake. He gave me a confused look.

“Trust me.” I mouthed the words.

Had we reached that point? Where we trusted each other implicitly? If I jumped into the unknown, would he follow?

The queen had moved toward Ashe, following him step by step away from the lake. After all they had been through, the two of them still couldn’t resist the attachment that once bound them together as Forfeit and Everliving.

Ashe’s voice was calming. “Donia. Be with me. You can’t bring Nathanial back to life. I’m here, and he’s not. Let’s be together.”

I froze. Ashe had said the wrong thing. At the mention of Nathanial’s name, Adonia whipped around and stared at me.

“But this one said she had a message. For me. From Nathanial.”

Cole’s grip tightened on my hand. I cursed myself for saying I had a message.

I took a breath. “I came here for love. You understand that, don’t you?” It was the most honest thing I could think to say.

She got a wild look in her eyes. “If I can’t have love, neither can you. Now, tell me the message before I make another tree, but this time out of your friend.”

Adonia dropped her projection of the redhead and reverted back to her true self. Her face became maniacal. I knew she wouldn’t settle for anything less than the hope of being reunited with Nathanial. It was a hope I couldn’t give her. Her blue eyes bore into me, and yet she looked as angelic as she had in the cameo.

The cameo.
The cameo!
I remembered what Nathanial looked like in the cameo. Now I needed to buy some time.

“You have no message,” she accused.

I pulled the medal out of my pocket. “I have this.”

She stared at Nathanial’s medal for a few seconds and then snatched it out of my hand to examine it. I used that moment to close my eyes and shut out everything around me. The queen, Ashe, Max, Cole, the Shades. I only allowed for one image in my head, and that image was from the cameo of Nathanial. In my mind, I gave the portrait flesh and blood. I took a deep breath and breathed life into him. I dressed him in uniform, stood him up straight, and then I opened his eyes.

I placed him as far away from us as I could.

“Look!” Max called out.

I opened my eyes. Max was pointing behind the queen, and everyone turned to see. There, maybe a football-field length away, stood a man in an army-green uniform.

The queen took two hesitant steps forward, then she was running. The Shades followed her close behind. Even Ashe took off after her.

I turned to Cole, who was staring at the soldier with a stunned expression.

“We don’t have much time. We have to jump.”

He furrowed his eyebrows. “Where?”

“Into the lake. Did you see how the sword didn’t make a splash? It’s not a lake, I don’t think.”

Cole considered this for a split second and then turned to Max. “Go home, dude.”

“I’m not leaving you,” Max said.

“When they turn around, let them see you run into the maze, as if you were following us. They’ll think we’re in the maze. Then go to the Surface and hide out. I’ll find you.”

Max looked unsure. By this time the queen would be close enough to realize that the soldier’s face lacked real definition. We had only moments.

“Do it!” Cole commanded. “She’ll never think anyone willingly went into the lake.”

“Okay.”

Cole and I turned toward the water. “Ready?” I asked.

“We have no idea what we’re jumping into.”

“I know. But I don’t have anything to lose.”

“I do!” His voice was gruff, and full of more emotion than I’d ever heard from him before. I looked into his eyes. He was holding on to something as dear to him as his own life. I knew that. I’d seen it in his memories. “You have to know … if I lost you … Why can’t you see that would be the end of me?”

I knew exactly how he felt. Because I felt the same way about Jack. I was asking Cole to risk his life, again and again, for the boy I loved. And it wasn’t him.

I eased his grip from my arm and clasped his hand in my own. “I’m going. But I understand if this is where you have to leave me.”

He brought my hand up to his lips. “Never. We jump. If something happens, it will happen to both of us.”

We coiled our legs and jumped.

I was right. The water didn’t splash. We went right through it, into a free fall.

The Everneath. The Tunnels
.

I
fell for a long time. Well, fell or floated. I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that once we passed the threshold of the water, there was no light. There was no sound except my pulse thrumming in my ears. There was no feeling except the rough skin of Cole’s hand enveloping mine. After a while there was no up and no down anymore.

We’d been falling for minutes. Hours. Maybe we would never stop.

“Cole—” I started to say when suddenly the wall slammed into my back. I had no air to scream. My lungs smashed against my ribs. My head felt as if it had exploded against a cement slab. I imagined my brain in a gooey mess coming out of my ears.

But it was still dark. I couldn’t have seen that. Now I was cold, and when I opened my mouth, water rushed in.

“Nik!” Cole’s voice came from beside me. I wondered when he had let go of my hand, but then he was pulling me upward. I couldn’t feel my hand. “It’s water! We landed in water! Nik!”

Maybe I wasn’t dead. But I couldn’t breathe. Something was squeezing my lungs together.

I tried to cough, but I couldn’t even manage that. My arms flailed. I tried to grab something for support: the ground, a wall, Cole’s face, anything that would help me get air. I could hear water splashing all around us.

“Whoa, Nik. Settle down.”

He didn’t understand. I couldn’t breathe!

“Step down. Reach your foot down. It’s not that deep.”

Why didn’t he understand that the depth of the water was the least of my concerns at the moment? Air. Air.
Air
.

My foot grazed something slippery. The ground. Large rocks. I pressed against them and regained my balance. All at once, the invisible vise around my lungs loosened. I gasped. Sputtered. So loud it sounded like a horse with colic.

“You okay?” Cole said. I realized he hadn’t been yelling the whole time. In fact, he was whispering.

I nodded. “I couldn’t breathe.”

“Shhh. It’s okay.”

“Easy for you to say.”

He chuckled as I gasped in precious gallons of air. I blinked the tears out of my eyes. It was still too dark to see. My eyes should’ve adjusted by now.

“Where are we?”

“Good question,” Cole said.

“How come you”—I gasped—“recovered so quickly?”

“I dove.”

“What?”

“I don’t know how I knew. I think I heard lapping water or something right before we hit. So I twisted around and dove. Whereas you went flat as a pancake on your back.”

“You could’ve told me.”

“Yeah, because there was plenty of time for that,” he said sarcastically. As Cole was talking, he pulled me forward, and I realized that whatever water we were in, it was getting shallower as we went.

“Once we’re out of the water, we can check. And see if you feel anything.”

I nodded, even though he surely couldn’t see me. I couldn’t get over how dark it was. My eyes would’ve adjusted by now, but there was nothing to adjust to. There was absolutely no light. The air I was breathing felt heavy and stale. I wondered if light could even survive down here.

The water now barely covered my feet. “We’re out,” Cole said.

I shivered. We still held hands. If we were separated, I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to find him again. My other arm was outstretched in front of me. I assumed Cole was doing the same. We took a couple of steps forward, the ground shifting beneath my shoes as if I were walking on wet sand at a beach. But not fine sand.

“Stop,” Cole said.

“What is it?”

“I feel a wall.”

“Your arms are longer than mine.”

I inched forward until I felt the same wall, craggy and rough beneath my fingers.

“Okay, Nik. It’s down to you again. Which way?”

I didn’t have to close my eyes and concentrate. The pull toward Jack—at least I hoped it was toward Jack—was constant in my chest. A dull ache that never went away. It had only become more pronounced down here. Even as I grew weary, my connection to him was there.