“The well is about ten yards deep.” No emotion in Gabe’s voice. It was flat as placid water.
“Excellent.” Carefully, Bastian stepped onto the first stair. “See you at dawn.”
Lore could feel Gabe’s eyes burning into the back of her neck, scrutinizing, knowing there was something she hadn’t told him.
Something she wouldn’t. Even if his silence, his unwillingness to ask, made her conversely feel like maybe she should.
The top of Bastian’s head slowly disappeared as he wound around the stairs. Lore climbed up on the well’s lip.
“Lore.”
She half turned. Gabe stood with his arms crossed, a handful of inches shorter than her from this new vantage.
“I didn’t want to leave,” he said finally. “Last night. I didn’t want to stop.”
Her fingers twitched, half a reach. She clenched them tight. “Then why did you?”
His eye flickered away. “Because it didn’t feel… right, being with you. It felt dangerous. Something I should get away from while I had the strength to do it.” He worried the corner of his lip with his teeth, as if he wasn’t sure how to phrase it. “It felt like a mistake, but one I’d made before. One I knew would end badly.”
And he was trying to tell her something, here, something that skirted the edges of what she’d felt since she met him—the instant connection, the ways it felt like she knew him and Bastian both on some cell-deep level that couldn’t be explained. But only one word stuck out to her, and that one word made her recoil.
“A mistake,” she repeated softly.
Gabe flinched, as if he hadn’t realized how it sounded until he heard it in her voice. “Lore, I didn’t mean—”
“You made it very clear what you mean.” She put her foot on the first step and climbed down, chased by the sound of Gabe’s sigh.
Every part of the catacombs looked the same. The walls, stone-built and old-bone-dry, narrowing and expanding with no rhyme or reason, as if someone had marked them out to the pattern of sick lungs breathing. The dirt floor, ground up with bits of rock. The scent. Empty and ozonic and stinging her nose.
She could feel Mortem, sense it phantom-limb-close; death in all this stone, death from the bones of revenants who’d crawled here to die. People with no one who cared enough to burn their bodies.
It surprised her, to sense so much Mortem with Bastian close by. But whatever dampening effect he’d had on her ability seemed to have lessened in recent days, until it was barely a concern at all. Instead, his presence seemed almost to clarify her senses, make Mortem seem sharper, like he was a whetstone to its blade.
Her mind turned, inexplicably, to her birthday. Consecration. The darkness of the moon covering the sun. She glanced at Bastian; there, in the corner of her eye, a glimmer of gold that slid away from her gaze when she tried to concentrate on it.
Lore shook her head.
A haphazard pile of old wood, dried-out plant stalks, and twine waited at the end of the narrow stairs. Bastian lashed the material together into a torch and held the pearl lighter to its end, catching flame. He passed it to her wordlessly.
Lore took the proffered torch. Panic bubbled just beneath her breastbone, oil in a too-hot pan, leaping up to burn her. Now that she was here, in the dark, every sense screamed for her to turn around, clamber back up the stairs to open sky and clear air—
“Lore.” Hands on her shoulders, warmth and the scent of wine. “Breathe.”
She did, slowly. In and out, keeping her eyes on his, whiskey-brown and very close.
When she had herself under control, she stepped back. His hands fell.
Bastian nodded, picking up material to make his own torch. “So. Which way?”
Lore closed her eyes and let her interior map of the catacombs fall into place. It was like a grid laid over the inside of her eyelids, a dark spiderwebbing tangle. One spot in the map throbbed, a darkened heart of Mortem concentrated in a single place. That’d be where the bodies were. Close to that knot, two sparks of white light—she and Bastian. So all she had to do was find a path in all those jagged lines that connected them.
Looking at her map was like looking at a maze from above, gazing down into a pit of tangled string or exposed vein. Far below, barely a glimmer, she saw another handful of white lights, so few of them now. Another knotted, throbbing storm of Mortem.
The Night Sisters. Nyxara’s corpse. There in the strange subterranean cathedral at the bottom of the catacombs, there next to that obsidian tomb. Lore could see it, now that she had it fixed in her mind, see it as if she stood beneath the crystalline stalactites herself, the walls flecked in constellations of mica, the gleaming block of the tomb, a deeper dark than even the catacombs themselves…