The Alpha's Unclaimed Mate novel Chapter 516

Chapter 516: Don’t Die In There (Shockingly Practical)

At the far end of the chamber, mounted into the obsidian wall, a circular frame of runes began to ignite, one by one, until a vortex shimmered to life.

A portal.

The portal was different from Serena’s pink constructs, different from Hyran’s gold, different from anything any of them had built. This was old magic. Architectural magic. Magic that had been embedded in stone and left to sleep for millennia, waiting for the right blood to walk close enough to wake it up, and the right blood had just walked into the chamber covered in ash, vampire dust, exploding fruit residue, and the comprehensive trauma of a group who had been through fourteen near-death experiences in a single afternoon.

Aeron exhaled, staring at it.

"Well... that’s either salvation," he said, "or a brand new brand of nightmare."

"Given today’s track record," Gavriel said, "I’m putting the odds at sixty-forty nightmare."

"Generous," Maelor muttered. "I had it at eighty-twenty."

Serena stepped toward the ancient archway, spine straightening as if some deep instinct inside her recognized the threshold before her mind did. The straightening was involuntary. Her posture shifted from exhausted survivor to something older, something that lived in her blood and activated on proximity to structures built by people who shared that blood.

As she approached, the runes snapped awake. The snapping was aggressive. Immediate. Every symbol on the arch igniting simultaneously.

"That looks like it wants to eat us," Maelor muttered.

He wasn’t wrong. The portal’s energy was pulling at the air around it, a subtle gravitational hunger that was tugging at clothes and hair and the self-preservation instincts of three mages who had been eaten by enough things today to recognize the feeling.

Serena’s eyes flashed pink in response. She stepped right into the center of the sigils, lifted her chin, and spoke in perfect old Fae.

A line of white-blue light ignited across the arch, then another, forming interlocking patterns that pulsed in sharp recognition. The recognition was mutual. The portal recognized her blood and her blood recognized the portal, and the mutual recognition was producing a resonance that hummed in every bone of every person in the cavern.

Gavriel inhaled the moment she finished. He looked at Maelor. Maelor kept his mouth closed, his jaw locked. It dawned on Gavriel that he might not be able to translate due to a blood oath and not because he was a smug bastard.

"The inscription states that only Dragon King descendants with wolf shifts may pass through. The rest will be... denied entry. Violently," Gavriel said.

The translation came from the same unauthorized place as every other translation, the words arriving in his mouth pre-assembled, his brain serving as a relay station for information it had no business possessing. He was getting used to it.

"How do you know that language?" Hyran asked.

"You wouldn’t believe me if I told you," Gavriel answered.

Hyran didn’t press further. But he was absolutely, categorically, without reservation, never letting that go. The never was going into a file that was going to be opened the moment they returned to Drakenfell, and the opening was going to produce a conversation that Gavriel Sterling was going to find deeply uncomfortable, and the uncomfortable was Hyran’s professional specialty.

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