I paused. “Seriously? You just ran away and left Tessa to die, and now you’re all brave and taking the high road? Is that what you do, leave your people to get slaughtered to save your own manky skin?”
He growled. “Sinner.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
As I stepped to the side, he did too. Right. Fine. He wanted to fight while a bone-eating monster was feet away and could decide it now needed two more bodies to tear apart? Great. Wonderful. Just what I needed while my damn chest was on fire.
Prick. I prided myself on working through the pain. Act now, pay later.
A hiss from behind me. The big guy shifted from trying to be a hard bastard to a cowering mess within the click of a finger.
Oh, bollocks.
There it was, standing tall on its freaky legs. This was all sorts of bullshit!
Twenty
Dean
I arrived at Flevopark, the police now gone from this area after the search for Jake had brought up nothing.
They’d be back, though. Lars would be coming after me, and I couldn’t have that. I needed to do this, to be sure. This was the only information I had.
The temperature had dropped considerably, ground frost already taking hold. But the sky was so clear, the moon blindingly bright, a rich blanket of stars spread across the inky black of the evening sky. It would’ve been a nice evening to take a walk, to enjoy the prettiness of nature with the ones I loved.
Focus. Focus.
There wasn’t a soul in sight.
Those purple pods were still sat along the tramlines, gleaming in the moonlight. I immediately headed down to the carpark, following the flyover. At the tram turnaround was a fence with a hole in it that’d never been fixed in all the times I’d visited here. I slipped through and cut across the packed mud between the pillars holding up the road above me.
Each pillar was taller than the next as the flyover grew in height, and the next one I walked around revealed the first of five watery sections with a mud path to link them.
Clicking on my torch, knuckle dusters fixed to my hands, my potion belt loaded with exploders, and a dagger in my other hand, I jumped down from the concrete ledge around the bottom of the pillar onto the path. I cast the beam over the frost-tipped reeds on both sides, the muddy water still and frozen in places.
I climbed up the ledge on the other side, satisfied this section had nothing to tell me and repeated the process again.
Every section was pretty much the same as the last in terms of aesthetics, though there were different graffiti on the pillars.
Jake had to be here. If he wasn’t, I’d be back on the streets, searching. I’d go to every corner of the Netherlands if I had to. I had to bring him home for me and Louise to cuddle all night.
Jake was a fighter, always had been since I’d first met him. Even when his weaknesses had threatened to derail him, he’d battled on, determined to be better, to be alive.
Those Conclave bastards wouldn’t have him.
In the fourth section, at the end of the mud path and to the right, hidden slightly by some bent reeds, was a mound of dirt. At first, that’s what it looked like. My torchlight then revealed an opening that was big enough for an adult human to crawl into.
Would the Conclave take him in there?
Only one way to find out.
Torch in my mouth, I went in headfirst. The muddy tunnel was sloped, freezing cold and wet, and I slid down about six feet in an angled trajectory into a wider part that started to curve downward.
I crawled on, my trusty torch guiding my way forward through the dark. Utter silence engulfed me as the tunnel spiraled deeper and deeper.
All I had to go on was this location. I had to see this through to the end, no matter what. It was a potential, and that potential had to be explored. Not doing so could be catastrophic and was a fool’s game.
On the last part of the spiral, the tunnel widened farther into a chamber, and I could stand up. There were two options for me. A new tunnel to my right or a wooden door to my left.
Where had I crawled into?
The dark oak door had an arched top, with an ornate black knocker styled to be a crown of leaves. I looked closer, seeing that it wasn’t truly black. The true color was beneath layers of dirt, a spec of it shining through. Silver?
I pushed on the door. It didn’t budge, heavy and cold. Trying the knocker didn’t work either. Nothing was happening that way.
As I went to head into the tunnel opposite, a bright wave of silver light passed over the door, revealing glowing silver letters inscribed on the wood. They shone for ten seconds, then faded.
I was sure they were Gaelic.
I touched the door a second time, running my hand over the wood where the words had been. It was as cold as it’d been the first time my skin had made contact.
I ran my hands over the knocker, and the wave of light passed across the wood once again. I read them quickly, my fae nature allowing me to understand Gaelic—it being the original language of the fae, and the basis of most of the other fae languages and dialects.
‘The city between is closed.’
The city between? What did that mean?
I brought the letters back up again for a third time and snapped a picture with my phone. I’d study this later. This wasn’t the way to finding Jake. This was something to do with the fae. The Conclave wouldn’t be involved with the fae—they loathed us just as much as any other supernatural.
The tunnel it was, then. I carried on, walking through the dark, those letters blazing in my mind. What city? It must be
