“He is not so important. The keys are.”
If he wasn’t so important, they wouldn’t be doing their damnedest to find him. “You’ve got one key—why can’t you just make a couple more?”
He didn’t answer immediately, but his energy surged around me, singeing the hairs on the back of my neck and making my skin crawl.
Anger. No, not just anger. Fury.
Maybe they weren’t as unemotional as everyone believed—at least not when it came to people thwarting their desires.
“We do not have the key for the first portal. Your father has it.”
No, he bloody well hasn’t. I was pretty sure of that, if nothing else. Whoever had stolen the key was someone entrenched in magic—magic that was dark, ungodly, and bitter. And while the Raziq’s magic was dark, what I’d felt of my father’s wasn’t. Not to the same degree, anyway.
But if my father or the Raziq didn’t have the first key, that meant it had to have been a dark practitioner who’d stolen it from under our noses—and, more than likely, it was the same dark practitioner who’d been buying up the land around Stane’s—a dark practitioner who was also a face-shifter.
As a general rule, sorcerers weren’t able to walk the gray fields, but ley-line intersections were places of great power and could be used not only to manipulate time, reality, or fate, but to create rifts between this world and the next. A powerful enough sorcerer could enter the fields via the intersection and find the gates.
Which is precisely what our thief had done—walked the fields, and permanently opened the first portal to hell.
Still, it must have taken a whole lot of energy…
Shit—why hadn’t we thought of that before? That might well provide a way of tracking down this bastard…
I shoved the thought aside. That was an avenue I could explore later, when every little thought wasn’t being listened to by the Raziq.
I flicked a sideways glance at Amaya. Almost there. “So why not make more keys? I mean, you all had a finger in the pie of the first lot, didn’t you?”
“If by saying that you mean the Raziq as a whole were involved in their creation, then yes.”
“Then why bother with me or my father at all? Why not just make more keys?”
“Because each key was attuned to a specific portal. Unless they are unmade, more cannot be created.”
So my father hadn’t lied—the keys could be destroyed. If nothing else came out of this little session, at least we had that.
Although destroying them would just allow the Raziq to create more—which meant we were damned if we did and damned if we didn’t. Personally, I’d rather see the stupid things remain as they were, lost to everyone, but it seemed I was the only one who felt that way. Even Azriel thought it was far too dangerous to leave them undiscovered.
“Are you going to cooperate?” the Raziq added.
I took a deep, shuddering breath. Thought about consequences. Knew I had no choice.
“No.”
As I said it, I lunged for Amaya. I never got there.
The pain hit like a sledgehammer, knocking me sideways and damn near senseless in the process. I lay on the dirt in a quivering heap, battling to breathe as their dark energy tore through every part of me and my brain felt like it was on fire.
Because this wasn’t just a psychic attack. It went far deeper than that. It was an attack on my body and soul, and it felt like every fiber of my being screamed in agony. Only I made no noise because the sound seemed to be stuck somewhere inside my throat.
The torture continued, on and on, until I was raw and battered and bruised. My skin ran with rivers of blood that soaked into my clothes and deep into the earth, until the bitter smell of it stung the air and burned my throat. And still it went on, until it felt like they were pulling me apart atom by atom, until there was nothing left of me but a screaming, bloody mass of separated particles.
Eventually—mercifully—I blacked out.
But it was a state that lasted nowhere near long enough. As I climbed backed to consciousness, the dark energy of the Raziq still burned at me. It hurt—god, how it hurt—yet within that energy, something fierce and bright burned, calling to me.
Amaya.
She lay underneath my hand. All I had to do was grasp her… and do what?