Eslym shifted below to the catacomb and inside the cell lined with iron. She was torn about this. She felt wicked. She told herself these sort of things were necessary for the good of the whole, but the words didn’t ring true in her mind.
She looked at Crystal, the Dark King’s consort, encased in the Dragon’s Breath netting and saw that even unconscious the woman twitched with pain.
It hurt to see her thusly.
Would Frankie also be subjected to such agony?
Pestale had said Crystal would sleep and not feel a thing. Why had this not happened yet? Why, even while she was unconscious was Crystal making such whimpering sounds? It was heartbreaking to hear.
She stared at Frankie, not encased imprisoned with the torturous netting but lying there looking as though she was near death. She couldn’t bear it if anything happened to these two brave females. But perhaps she was being fanciful? Perhaps?
She had a job to do.
She lifted Frankie’s arms and used what had once been part of the Golden Wiele to shackle both Frankie’s wrists above her head. Its properties had been altered into a chain of sorts, a chain layered with Dragon’s Breath.
Frankie was unconscious and yet she writhed in agony. She could not deny this to herself any longer.
Not supposed to hurt like this. Pestale had said…it wouldn’t hurt. He said they would sleep peacefully. He said he just wanted them out of the way. Had he lied? Or was he simply mistaken. If she told him they were in pain…would he fix the situation?
Iron lined the walls of the cell Crystal and Frankie now shared. The Fae would never find them while they were encased within its walls, because even the Dark King himself could not see beyond iron walls.
Had Pestale tricked her? Was Frankie right? Had he lied to her to get her to inject so much of the serum into Frankie’s blood? Would it kill her?
She hurried through the tunnels, leaving Frankie’s scent everywhere as per her instructions from Pestale, but it felt wrong, all wrong.
No—oh please no, she thought as she closed her eyes. Pestale hadn’t tricked her into doing this, had he? Had she been blind? Perhaps he had just been mistaken about the dosage? She would tell him and he would make it right.
A moment later, she left Crystal and Frankie in their iron cell and shifted to Pestale’s castle.
* * *
Graely felt it the moment it happened.
“Frankie,” he murmured out loud. His mind linked with hers, and was horrified.
Poison.
The word slammed into his brain.
Trinity! She was at Trinity. Without thought he shifted, and was in time to see Frankie slumped against her roommate. Her roommate—Fiona.
The girl looked different, she was dark-haired…And then suddenly she shifted away with Frankie.
“What the bloody hell?” he growled out loud. A bolt of searing fear torched his brain.
Pestale was behind this. That girl…what was she? Where had she taken Frankie? “Frankie!” he called desperately both out loud and with his mind.
He searched with his link for her, but it was as though she had vanished into the dark. He couldn’t connect with her.
He sniffed for her scent and tracked the residue left behind from shifting. It was odd as he got off a ‘wolfen’ odor as well, and tracked it into the underground. But the girl or whatever she was had already covered her tracks, leaving Frankie’s scent throughout an intricate trail through the catacombs.
All at once Graely realized, Frankie was once again, a prisoner somewhere in an iron cage. He wouldn’t be able to track her any further…her scent was everywhere but, he would have no way of knowing exactly how to pinpoint her location. It could take days.
He wanted to punch something.
Instead, he shifted to the castle in Conglam and found his brother standing in the war room with a map of Dublin spread out on the long oak table.
He took the twenty feet that separated them as though he was a madman unleashed and pushed his brother’s naked chest as hard as he had ever done and shouted in Pestale’s face, “What have you done with her?”