The Connelly Curse by Lily Velez

Author:Lily Velez [Velez, Lily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-03-26T22:00:00+00:00

26

Jack

It wasn’t so much that I awoke.

That implied a gradual coming to, a slow progression in stages.

What I experienced was more a pull, though it’d be more accurate to say I was yanked. Yanked from a dreamless sleep, my eyes snapping open to meet unending black.

Despite the crushing darkness, which pressed in from all sides, I knew that Scarlet was gone. It wasn’t so much that I could no longer feel the weight and warmth of her body against my side. It’s that I couldn’t sense her intuitively.

More specifically, her absence was loud. Loud and pervasive. The sensation was a lot like leaving your home knowing you’d forgotten something but not being able to figure out what exactly. Regardless, that feeling of ‘missing’ stuck with you all day long, dug into you until you could think of nothing else.

Being ‘missing’ in The Cave of Nightmares was the last thing a person wanted to be.

Already on my feet, I surveyed the immediate area.

The fire had long gone out, the kindling cold and charred. Scarlet had left her cloak behind. I retrieved it from the ground, but its woolen fibers were no longer warm. She’d been gone for a while.

Kai was nowhere in sight, and when I tuned into the sounds of the cavern I occupied, all that reached my ears was the steady dripping of condensation from the stalactites above.

Scarlet’s fears had obviously called for her, beckoning her into their arms. I couldn’t imagine what would’ve inspired her to face them alone except the possibility that she hadn’t been in her right mind, perhaps beguiled and lured from her sleep.

If that was the case, there was no time to lose. Producing my fire rock from a pocket, I let it illuminate the darkness and pressed forward down the nearest passageway.

“Scarlet?”

To say The Cave of Nightmares was a maze was very much an understatement. It was a dizzying gallery of chambers, each connected by a network of convoluted, twisting paths that sometimes deposited you into a cavern that looked identical to the one you’d just occupied and other times led you straight to a dead-end. Merely navigating it successfully could drive a person mad.

That, or frustrate them to no end.

When my forward motion was stonewalled for the third time by an unexpected cul-de-sac, I pressed my teeth together and stilled myself, closing my eyes. On an exhale, I let the tension melt from my muscles. I took another breath. I slowly released it. I took a third, a fourth.

Finally, I tuned in.

I tuned into everything, into anything my magic could grasp.

Being that Scarlet’s magic was bound within her, I wouldn’t be able to sense her magical signature. Normally, that would prove an issue. As she’d fallen asleep earlier, though, she’d shivered slightly, and unable to stand the thought of her being even the slightest bit uncomfortable, I’d acted with a knee-jerk reaction, warming her with my magic.

Magic that should still be, theoretically speaking, inside her. Though its warming effects tended to wear off quickly, the magic itself remained in a person for hours.

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