My reply was on the tip of my tongue when Mela retaliated. "What's your problem, Gray?" She popped a shoulder out, widening her stance. Her features tightened with loathing and disgust. "Nelle Wychthorn is it? She get under your skin?"

I blinked.

She tipped her head back and barked a bitter laugh. The sound of it caused both irritation and unease to rake down my spine. "The great manwhore couldn't get it up to fuck for months on end, and sure," she spat, glowering at me, waving a hand in my face, "it was okay for you to be dismissive toward the Wychthorn Princess, but damned if you'd let anyone else utter a word against her. You're an idiot if you thought I wouldn't see through you, see how you looked at her when you thought no one was watching," she sneered, her soft round nose scrunching. "So go on, tell me what's been eating you, huh? She doesn't want you, Gray? Are you too much of a jerk? A cold-hearted bastard? A giant manwhore for her to fall in love with?" Mela continued, taunting me, baiting me. "Or is the lovely princess sitting at home, all made-up and pretty and starry-eyed, anxiously waiting for you to return from this hunt?"

It was far from the fucking truth and also so horribly close that it was a white-hot branding iron pressed across my heart. "FUCK YOU!" I punched the wall right by her head because I was a fucking asshole with a gaping wound in my heart and I wanted to lash out. My fist hit pure rock. Chunks of debris exploded everywhere as I smashed a hole in the wall. Pain ripped through my knuckles—shredded skin and crunched bone, but I felt nothing.

Mela lunged at me, her mouth parting to snarl—

An awful cracking noise ripped through the passageway. We both froze. Horror clenched my heart, as I watched with dread in the dim glow of Mela's flashlight, a fissure render down the wall right behind her. Rock split apart, the fault line splintering right down the wet walls to the tunnel floor.

The uneven rocky ground beneath us began to quake, tossing us about.

"Oh, shit," I hissed, my body shaking and footing stumbling.

A thunderous yawning sound—

And the floor beneath us gave way.

Fuuuck!

We plummeted. Cool air brushed past, with broken rock and dust.

I grabbed hold of Mela's arm—

Flung her around and twisted us both—

And took the brunt of the fall.

I landed flat on hard jagged stone with Mela's body bouncing on top of mine. The air was punched from my lungs, and my bones cracked and fractured. Fiery pain erupted through my body, setting my mind on fire. Dizzying, blinding-white agony hazed out my vision.

It might have been hours, minutes, seconds later when I came too, I had no idea, but my mother's legacy and something else writhed through my blood, whispering like dry scales winding around bark, as the throbbing ache dulled, and the splintered bones knitted back together.

Mela groaned, pushing off of me to rise. She twisted her torso from side to side, rotated her shoulder, and winced.

Slowly unfolding, I tested and stretched my limbs and shook the dust out of my hair.

There was still fire in Mela's eyes as her gaze landed on me. She was still bitter and hurt and pissed the hells off with me.

I arched an eyebrow. "You can't keep this bottled in Mela." I should know. My guilt and self-loathing and misplaced hate had consumed me.

She pursed her full lips at me, scowling as she shifted away. I got it, I'd been there too, lashing out at whoever was the closest. Her heavy boots scuffed through debris, and the flashlight glanced over the edge of something long and lean and mottled.

Mela flexed a hand, rubbing her blood-crusted knuckles. She gave me a sly look. "I see the pain you're in," she said, with mock compassion. "I know you well enough to read you, Graysen Crowther. So don't make out like a head-shrink and expect me to break down and pour my heart out when you can't do the same."

Her vitriol had me jerking up my head and taking an abrupt step back. I knew I'd been closed off too... Gods, we were a right fucking pair.

But this wasn't about me. It was about her, and her obsession with self-destruction. I tried once more. "It'll end up destroying you. Just talk to me."

She flung her arms open wide. Her voice, loud and sharply honed with fury filled the small cavern and bounced off the roughly-hewn walls. "There's nothing to talk about. Elyse is dead!"

"She's not—"

"Don't you get it? Elyse..."— and she suddenly choked on her name—"is dead!" Her bottom lip wobbled and her eyes shimmered with tears as her expression collapsed into heartache. A heart-rendering sob clawed its way from her throat. "Dead, Gray. Elyse is dead."

Her knees buckled—

I grabbed hold of Mela before her knees hit rock, and I drew her down to the cold floor.

Kneeling on the ground, I held her as she cried, her fingers tightly fisting into my vest. "She's dead, Gray," she wailed.

She sobbed against my chest and her heartache soaked into my vest. "I didn't know," she whispered, her voice breaking, "I didn't know she was a fire-torch. I couldn't get to her in time."

I quietly sighed. "I know. None of us knew. There was nothing you could have done."

We sat in the darkness, while I held her trembling body in my arms as she sobbed and sniffled and clung to me. Both of us were at that point in time, adrift with no one else but each other. And like always, my thoughts returned to Nelle.

Fear, chilling and murky like mist-shrouded moors, seeped into my gut.

I couldn't feel her.

The longer I'd been away, digging around here in the labyrinth of tunnels, the more those filaments of magic connecting us both were fraying and fading. Nelle was drawing away, becoming distant—I could barely feel her. I didn't know if it was because of what I'd done, how I'd ruined what had existed between us, or if it was something else. She was all I could think of down here in endless darkness. The days were being mixed up with nights and time itself had ceased to exist. I kept being reminded of what Nelle had shared with me outside the tithe prison, what it would have felt like for a seven-year-old, terrified and trapped in absolute darkness.

It felt like I was nothing but a whisper of thoughts...

Besides Nelle, there was only one other person that had taken up residence in my mind—Sirro. It was Sirro's last words he'd imparted, almost like a challenge that took up room in my head.

So what will you do, Graysen Crowther? What choice will you make?

Yet again, it was another strange occurrence, why Sirro had just given me a name and nothing further. Yezekael. The first person I naturally asked, after the meeting with the Horned God, was my father. And the name shifted something in his gaze and made the violet of his eyes deepen to almost black. He'd grown silent and still as death. Yezekael's name had shattered his composure, and left behind conflict and confusion.

What is Sirro up to?

That meeting hadn't been orchestrated with Aldert's sudden appearance, but there were other factors that Sirro had seemed to be intent on pushing my way.

My father's gaze had gone distant with memory, then sharpened on me before he explained that Yezekael was a name he'd not heard in a long time. A lesser creature that used to haunt the ancient forest that the Deniauds and the Szarvases estates were on. When my father first met our mother, she'd worked as a servant for the Deniauds. He explained that Yezekael was a winged creature that like to steal things, and dealt in secrets and information, bartering on behalf of other creatures with the Horned Gods. He'd gone quiet in reflection, not sharing much about those earlier days, but he'd given me enough to go on. Yezekael could fly, but now it was trapped, scuttling around in the catacombs like a cockroach. What it had done to offend Sirro, I had no fucking idea.

After finishing up with Sirro, we'd gone our separate ways. Jett, Caidan, and Kenton had gone to deal with the Widowmakers, the Albanian crime organization that distributed our magic-laced drugs on the eastern side of America, while my father traveled abroad to hunt down a beast. The timing of the kill was imperative. The beast elusive. The moment we possessed Brangwene's Hjarte, my father would end the savage creature, and then the last pieces of what we had been collecting over the years would be transported to the Blacksmith.

Mela's hoarse voice jolted me out of my thoughts. Her fingers relaxed from their death grip on my vest and splayed wide. She whispered against my chest, "I might not be right or okay. But I recognize it in you too. What's going on?"

My mouth went bone dry. The air in my chest was too tight. It was a long, drawn-out moment, before I finally confessed quietly, "I've done something wrong for the right reason."

Mela eased herself back, not breaking away, just enough to sit up better and look at me. She cupped the side of my face, her hand was warm against my ice-cold cheek. "That's easy to fix."

I huffed a humorless laugh, my lips thinned as I shook my head—no.

The whites of her eyes were bloodshot and rimmed in red. "Do something right for the right reason. Fix it."

It was too hard to even look at my friend as I said the words, my voice cracking, "I-I had to make a choice."

Now it was her to huff a humorless laugh. "I'm sick of choosing. I'm sick of one or the other. Why can't you have both?"

"Because there are two choices. Only two."

"Fuck off," she spat. The vehemence in her voice was enough to startle me into jerking my head back up. Her gaze was unblinking and forged in steel. She tapped the flat of her palm lightly against my cheek. "There's always a third choice, Gray—don't choose."

As her words rolled around my head, I stared blankly at my friend.

Don't choose...

And there was a fluttering idea, a thread so thin I could barely see let alone grasp it, but I mentally reached for it—

Then her voice cleaved it in two, and it was gone.

"How did you break the tunnel?" she asked, looking up and frowning. She placed a hand on my shoulder and used it as leverage to gingerly rise. I grabbed hold of the hand she offered and got to my feet.

Shrugging, I shook my head. I had no fucking idea. Though I had superior strength, it was nothing like that. I flexed my hand, the wounds on my knuckles encountering rock were healed, leaving behind only the residue of blood crusting the skin. So caught up with my fury, I hadn't even been aware of what was hissing through my blood at the time.

The soles of my boots scraped against stone as I shifted around, taking my surroundings. We were standing in a small cavern, a burrow perhaps.

Lesser creatures hunted their kind or dragged down mortals from the city to nests down here. Kekenns in particular. Trouble was, we hadn't encountered Yezekael just yet. We'd picked up several scents and tracked down mindless creatures. But yesterday, we'd picked up a trail that led us down deeper and deeper. Maybe it was Yezekael, maybe not.

As my gaze swung wide, I realized this wasn't a krekenn nest, and as I dragged in the scent—the same one Mela and I had tracked yesterday—I knew deep in my gut, this had to be Yezekael's.

A second later Mela voiced the same thought. "Yezekeal," she hissed out, shooting a glance at me over her shoulder. She'd moved to a wall and slowly walked along the length of a rock face that had been gutted out and turned into shelves. Her flashlight bobbed with her motion and skimmed a collection of odd bits and pieces covered in a thick layer of dust.

I strode to the center of the chamber, my boots crunching over stone and things that snapped, to something that took up a good chunk in the burrow. A nest had been built from the age-mottled bones of mortals and otherworldly creatures with shredded fabric, feathers, and matted fur softening the ramshackle structure. As if Yezekael was a magpie and liked to keep shiny, sparkly things close by, were treasures stolen from those it had killed and consumed and tucked within the macabre nest. My gaze was drawn to something that shone dully. Curious, I bent down, picked it up, and dangled the length from my dusty fingertips. A necklace. An expensive golden chain with interlinking diamonds crusted with dirt. As the length of gold and gems spun around, it spun something in my mind. A spark of a thread I followed. A necklace. Maybe it was thinking of my mother, maybe, but a thought jarred my mind.

My mother...my aunt.

Years ago, Aunt Valarie had given my mother a necklace as a gift—a simple pearl pendant —and my mother loved it so much she wore it every single day unless she was going out to meet with another House. Then, she'd wear one of those priceless pieces of jewelry from our treasury. Last week my aunt was wearing the necklace she'd given my mother...

Which meant...

I sucked in a sharp breath.

Hellsgate...

My mother hadn't been wearing the simple pearl necklace the day she was stolen by the Horned Gods. Which meant, she'd had to have met up with someone important from one of the Houses that day.

Just what had my mother been up to in Ascendria before she'd collected me from Upper House Novak? Who had she gone to see?

Mela's voice broke through the silence of the burrow. "It's been abandoned," she said, shifting her tall, curvy body to face me fully. She lifted a hand, gesturing about. "Yezekael's not been here for quite some time."

Maybe it had been driven out. Who knew?

'The trail we picked up yesterday is fresh," I replied.

She slowly nodded. "It's down here, somewhere, but at least now we know for sure." She walked toward me, the yellowed torchlight limning the edge of the nest.

"There's no point staying here any further. Let's get out of here for a few hours, and have a drink." She nudged me with her elbow, barely playful, but better than what she had been half an hour ago. "I think we've both earned it."

Yes, we had.

A few hours later, after traveling through the rabbit warren of tunnels, clambering up maintenance shafts on rickety and rusty ladders, and climbing up the endless steps of stairwells with dull and fizzing overhead lighting guiding the way to the underground subway, finally, the paint-peeled heavy door that would lead us out of the catacombs was just ahead of us. Our cell phones went off in a flurry of notifications. We'd been out of contact for a few days now. I dug mine out of my daypack I'd reclaimed along our journey, and fished out a bottle of water too. Both of us were filthy, and I figured we could grab a room at a hotel, clean up and maybe Mela could have some sleep on an actual bed not the shitty bedroll in the fridge-like conditions down in the catacombs.

Sweat glanced along the back of my forearm as I used it to wipe my forehead, pushing my dirty tousled hair back, and cool, refreshing water quenched my thirst as I guzzled half the bottle down, while flicking through my messages and phone log.

There were a series of business calls and messages to attend to, then Ferne... She'd sent several messages, a fuck load of them, and the nature of them grew more and more urgent for me to contact her.

Unease iced my blood.

Just as I pressed the button to call her, she called me.

"Hey," I greeted her, dragging a hand through my hair.

It wasn't Ferne on the phone it was Penn. Except, this time her normally quiet and softly spoken voice was leaden with worry. I instantly tensed.

The words rushed out over the crackling line. "You need to come home. Now. Right this minute."