An explosion startled everyone, even Angel. A plume of black smoke rose from the town. Levi was quick with the reassurance: Mace was attacking the main gate. He would keep Amal’s defenders busy now that we were here.
“He said to move our asses. He’s not doing our job and his own.”
“This way.” Angel slipped into her Alpha role and turned to the cliff, slate gray and morose in the storm light.
Below, men battled on the narrow bridge. Bodies fell—those at the top, swarming down—defenders and not Mace’s wolves. He drew the enemy’s attention, buying us time. I turned to the steps carved into the rock, narrow and steep. I put a foot on the first step and heaved my body upward.
We climbed while I refused to look down. Despite the glacial wind, sweat pooled at the base of my spine. Against my back, the bow and arrows reminded me of what lay above and what was happening below. I curled my fingers over a lip of rock, pulled myself up, each step higher, steeper than the last. Muscles in my thighs quivered by the time we reached the flattened top of the parapet and rolled over the rim.
I flopped on a rough walkway hugging the cliff face—and if this was a backdoor to Amal’s kingdom, then it was close to useless, cluttered with rocks and the remnants of birds and predators alike. Snow dusted the gray stones, accumulating in the corners and cervices, but at least the wall blunted the angry wind.
“Keep low,” Angel hissed for my benefit. “Move quickly.”
Levi was already crouched and moving. The others spoke through a pack bond.
“You think she’ll have guards stationed?” I whispered to Angel’s back while mist closed in, turning everything a milky white before vanishing.
Her voice was strained. “I don’t think she’ll waste the manpower. Not for an air shaft leading into the dungeon.”
“Aren’t we too high for a dungeon?” The talk of dungeons sent alarm down my spine.
“Dungeon isn’t the right word.”
“Give me some right words.” My voice was gravelly as I crept behind her.
“Everything beneath the glacier was hewn from the stone centuries ago. We’ll be going in through an exterior section with barred cells and solid oak doors. Where she experimented and kept the resulting monstrosities until that shit went down with the Cariboo males all gathered. The monsters got loose, swarmed. I popped in once, after it happened…”
I choked on her use of the word popped, like she’d popped into the grocery store on her way home to pick up some milk. “Find anything interesting?”
“One or two poor souls, abandoned and still in chains. Too far gone to think about starving to death. I ended their misery. Saw too much damage for Amal to repair, not after that escape. She moved everything else deeper beneath the glacier.”
“How deep?”
“Get through the great hall and find out.”
I slid my fingers along the arctic stones. “That’s your plan?”
“It’s fluid.”
We were silent after that, moving stealthily. Ahead, a rectangular opening cleaved a solid wall, impaled with bent steel rods—a grid—demolished when something large escaped. I followed Angel inside, careful not to snag my clothes. Levi maneuvered behind me. Then the three men climbed through with enough athletic grace to prove they’d done similar things in the past.
The musk of a dungeon hit hard, reeking with vicious memories of wet straw and slop buckets. I pressed a palm across my nose to blunt the stench. Behind me, Levi gagged; he turned it into a cough while I refused to think about a grate in the floor and the sad pile of clothes that had once been banshee girl.
“Amal’s part vampire,” I whispered over my shoulder. “I’d expect no less from her.”
“Maybe they can’t smell things.”
Shadows loomed with unexpected shapes, making haste precarious. Faint light from the outside highlighted messy webs draping in the corners and over fallen wooden beams. The cold was so penetrating, I no longer noticed.
I listened to the breathing, and each footstep that scraped hollowly against the stone—mine, because the Blackfish moved like assassins. I was clumsy by comparison. We passed cell after cell. Sad, silent, each one a Memento mori.
Like the rune stone, created by a selfish woman, ambitious, cruel, and judging by the evidence surrounding me, Amal had not changed.
She learned nothing about love or compassion in her centuries of immortal life—what failles were fated to learn. The way dread lords were fated to find the wolf-less girl and heal what had been broken.
And I wondered if living a fated life meant paying the price. If great courage and fierce convictions paid off in the end. If it countered the numbness in defeat. If it was enough to give up everything for heroic love.
If devotion was not really an obsession.
