The Rejected True Heiress (Liora and Callum) novel Chapter 513

Zane’s POV

Climbing the tower was the easy part.

From down in the alley the tower had looked impossible, like a sheer column of white rock running straight up into the low clouds without so much as a window box to grab. I’d been climbing for years, sometimes challenging myself with the slickest surfaces I could find, but this had looked different, designed to keep people like me out.

But up close, I quickly realized that there were seams between the bricks where the mortar had worn down, and every few feet someone had carved a symbol into the stone, leaving grooves just deep enough to wedge my fingers into. Old warding script, probably. Something meant to keep things out.

It made for excellent handholds. I doubted the witches who carved it would appreciate the irony, but I supposed that wasn’t my problem right now.

Below me, the royal city was now small and far away. The market stalls were specks. The signup booths with my face plastered all over them were nothing but smudges of color.

Somewhere down there, Liora and Callum were getting ready to make a scene loud enough to drag every set of eyes in the academy toward the front gate, and all I had to do was be up and over before they did.

No pressure or anything.

A gust slammed into me about two-thirds of the way up and I flattened against the rock, fingers screaming, my cheek pressed to stone that was ice cold even in the morning sun. I held on, breathing hard, waiting for the gust to die out. The clouds were close now. I could feel the dampness of them on the back of my neck.

Far below and off to the left, something boomed.

I climbed faster.

The opening, when I finally reached it, wasn’t really a window. It was a vent, a tall slit in the stone just barely wide enough for my shoulders, set below the point where the tower vanished into the cloud cover. The light Liora had spotted from the ground still burned somewhere above me, but this was as high as I needed to go.

I jammed my fingers into the slit, hauled myself up, and folded my body through.

Inside, the academy was darker than I expected. Torches sat in iron holders every twenty feet, but the light didn’t seem to go anywhere. It just pooled around each flame, then disappeared into the darkness like it was being swallowed whole.

The place was quiet, too. I’d expected the sounds of footsteps of many mages moving around, perhaps voices. Not even the torches seemed to flicker. I kept my feet light, making only whispers across the polished stone floors, and even that seemed too loud.

Most of the rooms down the long, winding corridor I found myself in were locked. The few that weren’t held nothing worth the risk—an empty classroom, a storeroom full of cleaning supplies and strange things in jars. I was starting to wonder if I had climbed in on the wrong level when I found a door at the end of the hall standing half open, faint blue light leaking out across the floor.

I should have walked past it. Marcus wasn’t going to be sitting behind an unlocked door with the thing cracked open for me. But the climber in me had never once met a space it didn’t want to look inside of, and the light was the wrong color, and five seconds to take a peek wouldn’t hurt.

I poke my head in through the crack.

It was a long, narrow room, shelved floor to ceiling. Every shelf was full of objects that immediately struck me as magical in quality.

Rings. Daggers. Bottles of shimmering liquid. There was even a whole row of little hand mirrors, which I suspected were the same as the one Liora had told us about. At one point, I spotted a skull with something growing out of the eye sockets.

The blue light was coming from a basin in the middle of the floor, the water lit from the bottom, throwing rippling shadows up the walls.

I didn’t know why I reached for the basin. Maybe because curiosity killed the cat. Maybe my hand was moving of its own accord. Maybe it was calling to me, pulling me toward it before I could think twice.

I walked across the room, reached out, and touched the water with one finger.

A single ripple danced across the surface.

I didn’t decide to run, and yet, suddenly, I was. One moment I was standing in the middle of that room, and the next I was tearing down the corridor toward her, the ringing and the alarm and the entire reason I’d scaled that tower scorched clean out of me.

Marcus didn’t exist.

The plan didn’t exist.

There was only her voice up ahead, around the next corner, calling for me, and the dumb, desperate certainty that if I could just reach her in time then I could save her—

The torches went out just as I went skidding around the corner.

A moment passed. Silence fell.

The torches flickered back to life, all at once, revealing seven, eight figures, all standing around me in a circle, robed and holding their hands out, palms flat.

In that instant, the regret and the pain, all of it, every last drop, hit me so hard I fell to my knees. I felt a tear slip down my cheek as it struck me. Mia wasn’t here. She never was. And I was the fool who fell for it.

Something cold clamped down over me, like the air gone solid around my limbs, pinning my arms to my sides and locking my legs in the kneeling position. I couldn’t move, but maybe I was just in too much distress to try.

The witches closed in on me, dark robes swishing around their legs.

“I’m sorry, Mia,” I whispered.

No sooner had her name left my lips for the last time did the world go dark again.