Vengeance Throne (The Callistra Chronicles #2)

THIRTY

Chapter Thirty

Pasiphae waited. And waited. And waited.

In reality, it was likely that less than half an hour had passed since Stavros had left. But Pasiphae was in a room with no light and no way of tracking the passage of time, and with her own anxiety bearing down on her, the seconds seemed to draw on like frightful eternities, each one longer than the previous.

"That's it," she said to herself, rolling up her sleeves. "I'm getting myself out of here."

She paced back a few steps, steeling her bones to become hard as rock. And then she ran at the door, striking her foot hard against the metal, the sound echoing thousandfold into the room.

As expected, the door didn't give, so Pasiphae tried again, harder. Each time her foot came bouncing back with a mind-numbing strike of pain, she tried again, and again, and again.

Pasiphae of Eo didn't have magic, but she had been training far prior to her earliest memory. She knew persistence until her knuckles were bleeding, until not a single classmate could best her, until not the strongest witch in Eo could throw a punch at her that she couldn't catch. Even if this world of magic tried to push her down into the ground, she could still tear her way out with nothing save her bare hands.

The door remained locked as Pasiphae swiped sweat from her forehead, but she could now feel a dent curving along the middle. Heaving for breath, Pasiphae staggered back, and begged herself to get it together so she could try one last time.

A scream—a war cry—tore from her throat. When her foot struck the door with her final slam of energy, the metal folded completed and blew off its hinges.

The darkness dissolved immediately, chased away by what looked like white-blue cold fire. Pasiphae's first reaction was absolute shock—she couldn't believe she had actually gotten herself free. As she fell forward with her momentum and caught herself with her palms flat on the ground, her shock gave way to panic, then before that could take root, to cold resolve.

She looked up. She saw: one faery (surprised), one table (round), and her knife (simply lying on the tabletop). She saw two walls and a ceiling, all curving in on each other as if this was not a room but rather a tunnel dug through the dense dirt, and a collection of torches along every metre of the dirt bearing firelight that flickered white instead of red.

Pasiphae's hand struck out against the wall and tore a torch free. Before the one faery in the room had even gotten off his feet—as he had been lounging by the table on guard duty—Pasiphae had already thrown the torch and launched herself forward, skidding onto her knees to avoid the magical blow that would be coming for her as soon as the faery recovered from being hit in the face.

Her fingers closed around her knife. A pulse of relief thundered through her veins upon her reconciliation with a weapon, and then she was slashing the blade directly up, up, up, until it pierced through the unknown faery's chin. It dug deep into his brain and spurted blood all down Pasiphae before he had even thought to defend himself.

As the noble collapsed into Deaths, his magic was released as a tangible shockwave. Unlike those of the knights, when this faery's essence rocketed into the aether, it was intense enough to physically hurt Pasiphae. It seemed to enter into her lungs as she inhaled, rummaging through her organs in search of a home, before exiting just as quickly when it could not take root.

The process exhausted her and left her cold, but Pasiphae forced herself to stand up as the faery slumped onto the floor in a puddle of crimson. She forced herself to grip the knife tighter and keep moving.

There would certainly be more than just one noble faery guarding her down here.

"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I did what I had to do."