“Son of a—,” a voice curses next to me. I rub my eyes, sore from dirt, and see Armin next to me. We’ve made it inside the village.
“Where are the girls?” I ask him, then look around to search. The ground is muddy and smells of horse and hay. Hildi and Elizabeth are nowhere to be found, but two men in armor stand over us, swords pointed. I hold up my hands in surrender.
“Where are we?” Armin asks and I eye an imposing castle looming in the distance.
“You’re in the Devil’s kingdom,” the guard says.
“Yeah, yeah,” I reply getting to my feet while still keeping my hands visible. “Lucifer’s King, we got it.”
The guards glance at one another. “There’s no Lucifer here,” one says, “just the Prince. The Dark Prince.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Another prince? Did my father have another son?”
The point of the sword levels at my throat. “You think you’re funny? Maybe we should take you to the prince and let you entertain him.”
“Uh, no, that’s okay.” I look at Armin, trying to get some clarity. God knows what kind of insanity my father conjured up in this circle. What we do know is that Hildi and Elizabeth are missing. What we don’t know is which Immortal is trapped here.
With their swords still drawn, the Guards point us in the direction of the castle.
I suspect we’re about to find out.
12
Hildi
“Hildi.” A hand shakes my arm. “Hildi, wake up.”
I shift, realizing I’m lying on my back, and jolt upright. Elizabeth is on her knees by my side. Her pink hair is wild. From the windstorm? “Where the hell are we?”
“I don’t know. The last thing I remember is walking with the guys on the path and then getting into that storm. I woke up over there.”
She points to a cot on the other side of our very small room. Otherwise there’s nothing, and no one else in here. A sinking feeling fills my gut. However we got here, Armin and Luke didn’t make it with us.
I close my eyes and try to feel for warmth in my ring—for the bond with Armin. It’s there—faint but there.
“Can you feel him?” Elizabeth asks.
“How do you know what I’m doing?”
“The mating bond is very real where I come from. It usually comes from here,” she says, touching her chest, “and not from magic, but I imagine it’s not much different.”
“It feels real,” I tell her, and it’s hard not to think about Agis and how he told me that he’d felt the mating bond way before we got to the Academy. It’d been an intense moment—one, I realize in hindsight, where I hadn’t acted rationally.
That’s twice I’ve run off one of the Immortals. Gods, and I thought they were the ones with baggage.
The sound of scraping metal coming from the other side of the door puts us both on alert. I search for my blade but the sheath hanging from my thigh is gone. “No,” I say, mostly to myself. Then I search my pockets for the pouch and book. They’re both gone, too. “No, fuck, no.”
There’s no time for panic as the door unlatches and swings open. A woman stands just outside the entrance. She’s older, with gray-streaked hair, in a long dress made of heavy-looking fabric. It seems horribly uncomfortable. Her face is expressionless as she says, “Come. It’s time for your bath.”
I glance at Elizabeth and mouth the word, “Bath?”
She shrugs and again tries to tame her hair, kind of clarifying that yeah, we both could use baths, except for the fact that we’re in the apocalypse. Baths seem like a luxury we can’t afford while we’re fighting between good and evil. I’m starting to get the feeling these little pitstops between circles are just distractions to keep us from the bigger fight.
Guards follow us down a long, narrow hall to a dark, paneled door. There, the guards stay outside, and we have little choice but to enter behind the woman. If I had my weapons and if the guards weren’t holding pointed swords, I’d consider fighting back. But I don’t and they do, so I don’t resist as we walk through the doorway into a humid room that smells of rose and oils. In the center, build right into the stone, is a large bath—more like the size of a swimming pool. Female attendants stand on the edge, watching us closely.
“Prepare them,” the older woman says. “Scrub them clean and make them presentable for the Dark Prince.”
“The who?” I ask, but the woman has already walked away, the door slamming behind her, followed by the loud click of a lock sliding in place.