“No.”
“Did Vojalie or Davido tell you she was there?”
“How could they have known?”
“I don’t know. Vojalie sees the futures.”
“The woman doesn’t know everything. She said nothing about Isobel. But Davido said she knew something bad would happen if you didn’t keep your head together right now. Okay, maybe that wasn’t how Davido expressed it, either. But you have to remember. I’ve known you a long time.
“You’ve got a short fuse like Mastyr Stone. I admire the hell out of you both, but, brother, you’ve got to rein it in and start thinking straight.” He frowned and squinted his eyes. “There was something else I was supposed to tell you. Right. Okay. Listen up. Davido said if you weren’t careful right now, and ordered your steps properly, you’d lose Holly forever. Those were his exact words. He seemed to stress the bit about ordering your steps.”
For whatever reason, Rez looked down at his feet.
When did anything good ever come from acting out of rage? He recalled Holly’s shoes and her resolve.
Through a sheer force of will, he let his anger drain out of his mind and out of his body. It leaked from his boots into the grass, twigs and acorns beneath the ancient oak. He was sure the earth below fissured from the strength of his rage.
Air flowed into his lungs from the first deep breath he took, then another and another. His mind loosened and new thoughts emerged.
What had Holly said? He needed to figure out where the cavern was then he needed to contact Stone and get his combined forces over there.
As reason returned, he grew very still.
Both Holly and Oregis, perhaps even his mother’s spirit, had been right. He could not have handled seeing his daughter trapped like an animal behind a glass wall.
He would have lost it.
All three of them would have died in the process and Isobel would have remained a slave forever.
He valued who he was as a warrior. But this recent outburst was the flip side. The same powerful battle energy he could focus during an encounter with the Invictus could also become a mindless beast of fury. No proper, reasonable direction could be set in such a state. Chaos and death would ensue.
He chose to heed Holly’s words and focused instead on figuring out the location of Cruce’s cavern-based camp.
Chapter Thirteen
Still beneath the oak tree, Rez met Oregis’s gaze. The gremlin floated in the air three feet away.
Rez closed the distance. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Oregis nodded solemnly. For a sexed-up bastard, he could be wise.
“Think about the cavern. Did you notice anything unexpected about the geology, any striations we might have seen in the past, any unusual layers of different kinds of rock? Anything?”
Oregis looked away, his brow pinched. His eyes shifted back and forth rapidly as though reading line after line of material.
Rez knew what he was doing. He was sifting through every cave he’d ever been in. Oregis had a gift for finding precious gems of all kinds. He’d once located a deposit of sapphires in a cavern system Rez couldn’t have entered without blasting out several yards of rock. Being gremlin-sized had worked for Oregis.
Time pressed on Rez. Maybe it was having taken Holly’s blood, but right now every second mattered.
Oregis turned back to him. “During the miles we traveled, we climbed pretty high in that tunnel.”
“I would agree.”
“I keep thinking about the view from Holly’s house, up there on the mountain.”
“The snow-covered peaks. Holly and I saw something similar from Cruce’s bedroom. The same view could be seen from the Invictus camp.”
“Right.” Oregis ran his thumb and forefinger the length of his tall right ear. “I remember a similar range that ran across the northern part of the realm and had a view of snowcapped peaks. But the view was from the north as opposed to the south, like Holly’s view. It was a few years back. But what it had in abundance was crystal, all colors.”