To Scale the Emerald Mountain (The Willowbane Saga #1)

EPILOGUE

LOCANE

I wait in this godsforsaken cell staring through the bars.

Hot desert sand hisses as it seeps through holes in the walls, adding to the miserable, dry heat of the air. Dry grit coats my nasal passages. My skin is cold and sickly against the shackles of iron around my wrists, ankles, and the suffocating collar around my neck.

Straining, I pull my muscles tight—trying to give my withering skin any distance from the draining metal keeping me in a constant state of nausea and emptiness. My tongue feels as if an icy hole is being burned through it with the iron gag in my mouth.

I don’t know how long I’ve been here. There’s no window to the sky outside to count days or nights. I only know it’s been too long.

Rahleigh nearly failed with the blood magic she used on the group of guards keeping watch over me. The dark pull took one so strongly, he stayed behind while the others left, muttering incoherently about destiny as he tried to free me. He refused to leave and got caught, leaving no mystery to the motivations of the ones who had disappeared. One guard relayed a message from Rahleigh before he left, saying that she was coming.

She still hasn’t come .

I can only hope she used some of my blood stored away to temporarily tap into my gift to control them, rather than succumbing to the pull to taste Alec’s instead.

Bubbling anger wells in my gut. I stare through these fucking bars, stifling me as fiercely as the irons that hold me.

Sniffing loud, I pull a cold drip back into my nose. I was horribly ill from the power drain, crashing harder than ever due to the enhanced blood magic, relying on it for months. Being put in irons in that state—unable to heal and refill naturally—has left me sickly and weaker than what irons would normally do, being denied myself by my brother.

If I wasn’t mad before, I certainly am now.

I grunt, trying to force down the acidic fury that creeps in regularly. Fury at how horribly we failed to accomplish any of our goals. The girl was just too strong. All of Rahleigh’s research on her proved wrong.

Fucking Rahleigh.

My arms strain with the itching restlessness creeping in. Iron chains clink as they pull tight. I relax and jerk forward hard, making the chains sing with ear shattering noise, echoing against the stifling heat. It does little to ease the tension in my body, and I grunt in frustration.

The airwaves calm back to their near silence, the hiss of the sands singing to me their whispered songs of sickly solitude; their deafening, maddening tunes of chained isolation.

A new sound reaches my ears, a soft padding towards the large steel door in sight, just out of reach. My fury swells to new crests when the door swings open. Rahleigh enters, dressed in a tight, black pantsuit. Gold jewelry adorn her ears, wrists, and delicate fucking neck .

She pushes the door wide slowly, lazily. Two of the cursed guards enter and unlock the sliding cell door with a loud clank. I stare daggers at the woman ahead of me as they work to undo my chains.

“You’ve looked better, Lo,” Rahleigh says.

I sneer, biting down on the iron gag.

She laughs as I start frantically straining on my chains in my haste to be free. The guards turn to her, their master, and she nods. They work faster, and within moments they have me free. Rahleigh walks towards me in the cell where I lean over, panting and swallowing the urge to be sick. She yanks me up by the scruff of my dirty neck and removes the iron gag before she latches a hand around my wrist.

“You know we can’t jump from here,” I seeth through gritted teeth.

Crushing nausea hits with the overwhelming freeing sensation taking over in the absence of irons—my wells of magic immediately begin to refill.

“Oh, I’d guess that we can,” Rahleigh smiles brightly at me. “They want you to get away.”

We disappear into the void and reappear at her apartment in a crowded, less affluent part of the city.

“What happened, Locane?” she demands, slapping me hard across the face when we land. In my weakened state, I stumble and growl.

“You were supposed to get what we needed from her then kill her!” She slaps me hard again as I right myself. “They completed their mating! He will never be the same now!” Rahleigh screams in my face. She tears at her hair, the cool indifference she exuded in the cell completely disappeared .

I spit a mouthful of blood at her feet. “Oh, fuck off. This is bigger than your unrequited love.”

Cracking my neck, I roll my shoulders. Sickness and euphoria mix and churn within me as my body begins to heal itself, unreal power hurtling and crashing into my quickly replenishing wells.

“You were meant to wield all of the gems!” Rahleigh screams.

“And I will,” I tell her confidently.

The power of whatever gem they have foolishly absorbed is channeling through my bond with my identical twin, straight to me; fierce and hungry beams that launch at me, solidifying in their new home. The power surge of Ellya’s enhanced electricity and Sight takes root within, and the new sensation of physical magic nearly brings me to my knees.

Rahleigh releases her hair and lifts her head to me slowly, outraged. “They have the emerald,” she says, her eyes ignited with angry fire.

I laugh as her face morphs to shock when she turns her attention to my hands.

“I am aware,” I tell her darkly as blood-red electric currents shoot from my blackened fingers and snake across the backs of my hands.