For the Love of Justice: A Nightwatch World Story by Cassidy Debbie

Author:Cassidy, Debbie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Harmon

The sublevel was its own contained ecosystem. The inmates here had banded together to survive. They’d tapped the pipes to create their own water supply, and there was moss and other nutritious fungi that grew down here. Rodents provided meat, and for the two nightbloods who’d been exiled to death down here, there was blood donated from the inmates in exchange for the high provided by the nightblood saliva.

Dangerous inmates who should have killed each other had banded together to live in harmony, and my cellmate had been here for the longest. Five months. He’d been one of the first to be exiled here and had become the patriarch of this miniature society, but there was more to Daran than met the eye. I could feel it.

He said he was a bastardized fae, but that felt wrong to me. He was hiding something. I needed to find out what because for some reason he’d taken me under his wing, confided in me, showed me his secret.

I stared at the rock wall and the cylinder mechanism built into it. We’d had to crawl through a pipe and crab walk through a dodgy-looking tunnel to get here. The beams above the tunnel entrance looked weak and rotted, holding back crumbling rock. A hammer would bring the whole thing down, blocking us in. But Daran had been confident we were safe.

I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t this ominous-looking mechanism etched with symbols. There was power emanating from the lock, as Daran had called it. Power that set my teeth on edge and made my hackles rise.

“You feel it, don’t you?” Daran said. “You feel the power.” He looked excited. “I knew it. I knew you’d be able to feel it.”

“What is it?”

“A lock without a key.” He scanned the symbols and then pulled a sharp stone from his pocket and walked over to the wall to his right. I noticed the etchings on the wall for the first time.

He tapped them. “I was working through the combinations, and then I managed to decipher the markings on the outside of the symbol. The answer came to me in a dream. I needed blood but not just any blood. It says blood of the unborn and unmade.” He looked at me. “You’re nothing I’ve ever seen. You smell of moonkissed and something other, something unnatural and inorganic. What are you?”

This was a good time to get pissed off, but there was a lock in front of me, which meant this was a door.

“Is this a way out?” I jerked my head toward the lock.

Daran grinned. “Oh, yes, my friend. This is the way out.”

Justice was out there, and I had to get to her. If that meant helping the slightly psychotic creature, then so be it.

“It’s a long story.”

He lowered himself to the ground and sat cross-legged. “One thing we do have, my friend, is time.”

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