Rory Blackwood's Arc

Chapter 11 of 13

The passage under the chapel foundation dropped them into cold stone. Rory's boots skidded on wet grit. Kael landed beside her without a sound. The shadow he'd cut into the floor above closed to a thin seam of gray. Void jumped down from her arm and stood at her ankle, tail up, eyes bright in the dark. "Twelve minutes," Kael said. "Then the passage seals." She nodded. The walls were older than the academy above them. Sigils crawled across the stone, some fresh, some scratched over by newer ones. Her grandmother's hand was in there. Rory could feel it like a hand on her back. They walked. The corridor narrowed. The second mouth behind her ribs flexed once and settled. She kept walking. She had rehearsed this. Find the center. See what Convergence was. Get out. Don't die. What she had not rehearsed was the sentence in her mouth. At the end of the corridor a low arch opened into a round room. Two grooves cut the floor and met at a point in the center. Two lines. One witch. She stopped at the edge. "Kael." He turned. His eyes were still full black from holding the passage. The shadows around his feet leaned toward him. "I need to say a thing before we go in." "Say it." She had waited eleven weeks. She had hidden behind sigils and cover stories and Luna's red thread. Her throat closed the way it always closed. She forced it open. "I want you," she said. "Not the help. Not the shadow. You. After this. Whatever's left of me after this, I want it to be next to you." His face did not move. The black in his eyes held. For a second she thought he had not heard her, or had heard her and decided nothing. Then he stepped in and put his forehead against hers. His hand went flat on the back of her neck. Warm through the cold. "Yes," he said. One word. He did not soften it. He did not explain it twice. She breathed out. The second mouth under her ribs did not open. Something else did. A small clean space where a wall had been. Void walked past them into the round room. He sat on the point where the two grooves met and looked back at her. Waiting. Kael's hand slid down and took hers. "Now they'll use it," he said. Flat. Honest. "If anyone hears. My court. Aphrodite. Anyone." "I know." "Still?" "Still." She stepped over the threshold with him. The grooves in the floor lit under her boots, thin and white, running toward the cat. Somewhere above them, in the academy's gothic spires, a bell started to ring that should not have been ringing. Kael's grip tightened. "They know we're down here," he said.