Descendant (33 page)

Fifteen minutes later, we’re kneeling on the snow and have managed to scoop out a path almost two feet by two feet when Jen grabs my arm. “Stop. This is crazy. It’s going to take hours. Kye doesn’t have that long.”

I want to scream at her how much I know that. It’s all I can think about as I dig handfuls of snow while the boy I love suffers, but everything I want to say is lodged in my throat and all that comes out is a wail.

Jen pulls me up and hugs me again. “Stop, okay? I’m going to do it. It’s too selfish of me not to try. Just—” She glances at each of us. “Just stand back.” Her hands shake as she aims her palms at the ground. Her energy changes as red heat flows from her core and into her arms, then slowly down to the tips of her fingers until flames shoot out in short bursts, melting random patches of snow and coming precariously close to melting Toby’s boots.

The flames stop and Jen takes a breath.

“Focus,” Val murmurs. “Concentrate on a small area at a time. See the snow melt in your mind’s eye. See the fire bow to your command.
See the wind be still. Force it to obey your thoughts. You control the fire—it does not control you.”

Jen tries again. Moving her palms in slow circles, she closes her eyes and listens to Val. As she does, a funnel blazes forth, melting a path that looks half a mile long, setting a number of trees and shrubs in its path aflame. Unfortunately, the path is going in the opposite direction from where Val wanted it, and Toby and another Dragon—whose pant leg looks suspiciously blackened—rush to put out the residual fires before anything else catches.

It takes more encouragement, and a reminder from desperate, frustrated me, but Jen agrees to try once more. Again, the fire pulses from her core, but this time the flames lick to life more slowly, wavering but steady as Jen commands the heat. Like ice cream in the summer, the snow shrinks into the sodden earth, evaporating under Jen’s power. After several minutes, she has melted enough to allow us through, only four small shrubs are left burning, and no one has been terribly injured aside from Gabe’s eyebrows getting singed. It’s good enough.

Jen’s arms—shaking with the exertion—drop to her side and her eyes roll back in her head as she lets out a relieved breath. “Could’ve been worse, I guess.” She turns to Val. “How did you know what to do? How to help me?”

“Decades of training.”

Drooping from the energy drain, she clasps the arm of the nearest Dragon for support, still talking to Val. “Will you teach me more?”

“One thing at a time.” Val turns his attention to me. “Let’s get Abby through this first.”

Zane and Akers lead me to a muddy gray pool, boiling beneath the entrance to a tall cavern. The mud pulls and spits in and out of the cave like the breath of an enormous beast, and smelling just as bad. We step over a short fence and climb the hill to stand above the sloshing, belching water. “That’s not a portal,” I say.

“I know.” Zane frowns, an I-warned-you look in his eyes. “The portal’s inside the cave.”

Zane’s
  brow creases as I gape at the gurgling mud. “Is that water or acid?”

“A mixture of both, and it’s around two hundred degrees, so you won’t be swimming.”

“How, then?” I bite my thumbnail. “How do I get inside?”

Val and Zane exchange a look. “Any ideas?”

“Probably something to do with the Keys.” Val blinks, glancing at my ring.

I point at Gabe’s hovering contraption, now green in the weak sunlight. “What if I borrow one of those disk thingies?”

Zane shakes his head. “Solar-powered. They’ve run all day already, and I’m afraid you’ll lose the charge in the dark. Also, you don’t have the clearance you’d need. Even crouching low you’d still have to skim the water—and the acid content will dissolve the disk.”

A breeze winds around my legs, raising goose bumps on my skin. I zip the coat up to my chin. “There has to be a way.”

Jen throws up her hands. “I know. Rose can just talk it into submission.”

Rose snorts. “Yeah, like that would work.”

The Dragons do their murmur-whispering thing again, and I decide I’m really sick of people having muted discussions right in front of me. Finally, Eric hops over the railing and climbs the hill. “What if I
freeze the surface of the water? At that temperature I could only ice over a small area at a time, so I’d have to go with her.” I blink and he shrugs. “It might work.”

Val rubs his whiskery chin, looking skeptical. “Are you sure you can handle it? It’s a lot to ask—even for someone with experience using his power, which isn’t necessarily you.”

Eric shrugs. “You have a better idea?”

“What about the acid?” I ask, wondering if Eric’s ability is as sporadic and unpredictable as Jen’s. “Wouldn’t the acid burn your skin?”

“Not if I don’t touch it. I’ll have to really focus, the way Jen did.”

I catch up to Eric and turn him to face me. “Are you sure you have to go with me? That you can’t freeze the surface enough from the edge? All I need is a path.”

“I’m sure,” he says, annoyed.

I really, really need him to understand what he’s getting into. “They could kill us both.”
Probably will.

His head droops and he lets out a weary sigh. “You really have no faith in me.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t have a lot of faith in anyone right now. This whole thing is just ... a lot.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Ya think?”

After another short conference in which it is decided this is an option worth exploring, Zane and Val lead Eric and me to the edge nearest the cave, warning us to be careful. Eric grasps my wrist, a strange light in his eyes. “Ready?”

I blink and nod, but say, “No.”

He holds the palm of his free hand over the water, cold seeping into my arm where he touches me. A patch of thick ice forms and Eric guides me onto it, leaning over to repeat the action so we can take another step. For every foot we move forward, one behind us melts, and the faster we go, the thinner the ice. There is no turning back.

We slide across the smooth surface, Eric gripping my wrist and me shivering, trying really hard to concentrate on keeping my balance and not falling into the boiling acid.

When we’re halfway across, Rose yells, “Um, Abby? Turn around.” I glance behind us and see that the single square foot I’ve considered our safety zone has completely melted, leaving us standing on a ribbon that feels awfully thin. Thin enough that I can feel the heat
through the soles of my boots as the last of the ice disappears. We probably don’t even have a minute before we’re dumped in the acid.

The mouth of the cave is still several feet away, but hot clouds of steam billow in our faces. “Can we hurry this up?” I choke.

“Doing my best here,” Eric snaps. He does manage to freeze a larger section this time, which—hopefully—buys us a few more seconds. Still, it’s not enough. I’m having visions of what it will feel like to be boiled alive when we finally duck under the top edge of the cave and Eric stops.

“What?” The energy inside the cave is anything but calm, and that scares me as much as being boiled alive.

“We can’t go any farther. This must be the portal, because I feel like an invisible wall is blocking me.”

From the outside Zane yells, “Are you in?”

“Not yet!” Eric answers. “Give me the ring.”

My stomach clenches at the thought. “No.”

“I have to get in somehow. The necklace, then.”

I lower the zipper of my coat enough to touch the warm stones. Powerful, yes, but I’m far less connected to the pendant than to Gram’s ring. As long as I have my ring, Gram will be with me. I unclasp the chain and drop the pendant in Eric’s hand. With a triumphant smile, he shoves it in his pocket, but nothing happens. We still can’t move forward.

Val calls, “Abby, are you in yet?”

“I don’t know what to do,” I shout. “We’re both holding a Key and nothing’s happening.”

The section of ice on which we’re standing shifts, cracks, and Eric refreezes it, but I can feel how his terror mirrors my own. Voices blend together, trying to send words of advice or encouragement, but I can’t make sense of them. Then, as if I’ve called her to me, Gram’s voice is here, whispering in my ear like the wind in the trees. Like a song driven into the cave from the awful steam that blocks the entrance.

Concentrate. Work from the heart. Pull the broken energy inside you and send it back whole.

Closing my eyes, I think of Kye and take a breath of rotten, stinky air, pull it inside me, and let it swirl into my core until it’s fresh and clean. My ring hums, emitting a sound I’ve never heard or maybe never recognized—birdsong and harps, the fluttering of down in a
comforter, the pop and sizzle of water hitting an open flame. Soft music and loving voices and the sunrise breaking through the clouds at the end of a storm. The sound of a rainbow.

With the help of the power swirling around us, I release the energy, and in a blinding flash of light, Eric and I are shoved forward, tossed to our hands and knees on solid ground. Rock, not ice. The noise from outside is now behind us, muted and distant as the portal shimmers, shrinks, and then disappears altogether. The acrid smoke that blew in my face moments ago is now gone.

“Wow.” Eric pushes himself to his feet, wiping his hands on his jeans. “That was ... interesting. How’d you know what to do?”

I brace my palms on the cave wall to pull myself up. “I don’t know. It was just ... there.” Once again, geothermal activity heats the place like an oven. After I wipe my hands on my coat, I tug it off and tie it around my waist.

We’re on a ledge made of slippery black rock. Steam and water surge in and out from the mouth of the cave. We can see it, but not hear it. When I swipe the air near the portal, my hand meets resistance.

The cavern opens into a corridor, which branches off farther in. Sunlight filters down the hall from behind us and is the only light by which to see. “Do you think they know we’re here?” Eric sounds nervous.

“I don’t know,” I murmur. “But let’s not alert them, just in case. We should try to be quiet.”

His breath tickles my ear. “What are we looking for, exactly?”

“Kye. We’re looking for Kye.”

A hint of something—anger? jealousy?—flashes in his eyes, but he banks it. “And then what?”

“Then we’ll see, I guess.” My sweaty feet slip around in the borrowed boots, which sometimes catch on the hem of my dress and threaten to trip me. Landing face-first on rock isn’t a pleasant thought, so I hike my dress higher with one hand and support myself on the wall with the other.

When we reach the split, we have two choices. To our left, the opening leads down another long corridor, which is black as space without any stars. From somewhere far away, we can hear water dripping, and a strange, unnatural-sounding hum. On the right, smoky black mist swirls around and around.

Though sweat beads on my forehead and at the nape of my neck, the mist sends a chill into me. An awful moaning wail hangs in the air, not really continuing from one ear to another or rippling up and away from the source, but rather circling as if caught inside a cold, wet whirlwind. A strong metallic tang coats my tongue and I swallow, shivering.

Instinct—or maybe fear—tells me to go left, so we head into the blackness of space. Eric digs in his pocket and produces a cell phone, but when he tries to turn it on, nothing happens. He presses button after button, but his phone appears to be dead. He swears under his breath. “What I wouldn’t give for a flashlight right now.”

“A flashlight would be rather handy.” I remember saying something similar to Kye in New York, and what happened not long after that. “Oh,” I twist my ring. Nothing happens, so I close my eyes and concentrate really hard on sending energy into it, sighing in frustration when that doesn’t work either. With no other choice, we continue down the tunnel, feeling our way and learning the real meaning of true dark. Eventually, a speck of gold glimmers in the distance. Eric grabs my shoulder and covers my mouth. “Shh. Someone’s coming.”

The beam of light grows bigger and is accompanied by the unmistakable sounds of footsteps and murmuring voices. We flatten ourselves against the wall, holding our breath. The voices become more distinct as the light draws nearer. “Don’t know why we can’t just kill him.”

A lower, gravelly voice responds. “How many times do I have to tell you, the kid’s leverage. He’s our bait.”

“I know, I know,” whines the other. “I don’t understand why we didn’t just take the girl to begin with.”

A loud harrumph. “Told you, the Keys can’t be teleported like furniture or people. We tried it with the other two. Doesn’t work.”

I suck in my stomach, trying to blend into the wall as the men come closer. About fifteen feet away, the light arcs around, glinting off something on the floor, and then fades, and so do the sounds.

Eric leans into me, bumping his nose on my ear. “Did they go down a hall?”

“I think so.”

“Should we follow?”

I run my tongue around my teeth, swallowing salty fear. “Yes. I’ll lead. Hold on to me.” I feel the air with my hands, waiting to meet the wall, and slide my foot toward the direction in which the lantern disappeared. Eric holds on to my shoulders, his footfalls matching mine. Slide, stop. Slide, stop. Slide, stop, until my fingers brush smooth stone, and then we move sideways, using the wall as our guide. At last, more light flickers in the distance and I follow it.