Page 29 of Captured in Love
A scream pierces the quiet, echoing from the empty stone huts and the tall domed rooftop.
We freeze, and Raphaël’s hand lands on my shoulder, pulling me back. I throw up my shield around us on instinct, ready for an attack.
“What was that?” I scan the city below us for any hint of danger.
Another scream rends the air, and Raphaël shoves me fully behind him.
“Can you make us invisible?” he murmurs. “I hate how exposed we are.”
I purse my lips. “I could, but it would completely drain me. We should just hurry down and get lost between those houses, then we can figure out where it’s coming from.”
I drop the shield, and we scramble over the tall steps and finally descend into a small city square behind some of the domed dwellings. Those screams repeat again and again, and my hackles rise with every sound. Someone is in horrible pain, and we’re not doing anything to help them.
“It could be a trap,” Levi whispers as we make our slow way between the houses. “This is the perfect place for an ambush.”
He’s right, of course, but that doesn’t make the cries any easier to bear. My gaze darts from shadow to shadow, from one blue-flamed torch to another. Raphaël prowls next to me, his lean body tense and ready for a fight. All around us, remnants of a lost civilization lie in ruin.
Levi was right, the city is deserted. We creep down narrow alleys between tall houses. None of the stone huts look inhabited, and their walls are crumbling in places, the rocks succumbing to the wear of time, even though they’re not exposed to the elements. We check a couple of the dwellings, but whoever lived here left nothing behind but furniture with bedding that has long since crumbled to dust and some rusted metal bits. My chest squeezes painfully at the idea that all the people who lived here are now…dead. And we know nothing about them because witches are nothing if not thorough—they obliterated dragons from existence and swept away any trace of them.
“How are the torches still burning?” Raphaël murmurs.
Levi steps up to a sconce mounted on a wall and runs his fingers through the flickering flames. “A perpetual spell. It’s expertly crafted, too. The flames barely give off any heat.”
At that, I stop and stare at the thing. Something clicks in my mind, and I can’t believe I hadn’t connected the dots sooner. “You guys. Levi is right—this is aspell. Which means witches must have made these torches.” I glance at the darkened ceiling far above our heads. “And I think this entire thing is held up by magic.”
“Yes?” Raphaël says, his eyebrows furrowed in confusion.
I motion impatiently at a large dwelling with dragon claw marks scratched in front of it. “If this is a city of dragons, what were witches doing down here?”
The screaming starts again, a long, continuous wail, and I jump then shiver violently.
“I don’t want to know what that is,” I whisper, “but I hope it stops. It’s freaking me out.”
We come up to a canal filled with seawater. It flows slowly through the city, branching apart, then flowing back together between houses. Small fish dart around in it, even though we’re far underground. This entire place is amazing, sort of like a softer, darker, underground version of Venice, and I’d be glad to explore if it wasn’t for the crazy Scottish witches who organized this competition and the creepy screaming currently echoing through the streets.
We check house after house, but nothing at all suggests they’ve been tampered with recently.
“We’re coming up to the central moat,” Levi says at last. “We’re running out of places to check.”
I peer back the way we came. “If you think about it, those Ballendial witches probably wouldn’t just put the tokens in any old house, right? They’re pompous and love ceremony. They have a fucking medieval castle set up as their home base, and the first task’s tokens were hidden in an ancient tomb.” I place my hand on the domed wall of a nearby dwelling, then shake off the dust. “My best guess would be that our destination is somewhere near the center of it all.”
The closer we get to the volcano, the more I feel its strength. The stone floor is warm to the touch, and it rumbles ever so slightly. I have no idea how exactly geothermal energy works, or what kind of natural phenomena we’re looking at here, but I suspect the witches who created this place somehow harnessed the power of the land itself to form the city and keep the ceiling from crumbling down, long after they themselves died. As long as the volcano is active, the perpetual spells will keep renewing themselves.
Those screams of pain are more intermittent now, and weaker, as though whoever is in trouble is running out of strength.
“I don’t like this.” Raphaël’s voice is tense, his stance ready for an attack. “We’re also approaching whoeverthatis.”
A nasty thought occurs to me. “It could be another contestant.” I swallow thickly, forcing down my fear. “It could be Isak.”
Levi and Raphaël exchange a look I can’t decipher.
“If it’s someone who got caught in a trap, we have to help them,” I say. “You know we do.”
Levi blows out a long breath. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
Raphaël offers me a fond smile. There’s literally nothing I want more than to grab the token and escape from this place, but what if it was one of us stuck down here? I’d want someone else to help me, too.
At last, we reach a broad boulevard that circles the raised moat surrounding the volcano. I imagine it was used for gatherings, a flat, empty stretch of stone scratched up by centuries of dragon claws. The air is hotter here, and Levi and I are sweating like crazy. Which is a huge issue because we didn’t take any fresh water with us—we hardly thought we’d need it while diving.
