The scent of dank, stagnant soil filled my nostrils as I stirred. From somewhere seemingly far-off, muffled voices reached my ears, as if I were overhearing an angry confrontation between neighbors in an upstairs apartment.
But when my eyes fluttered open, they may as well have stayed shut because there was no difference between the darkness behind my eyelids and the darkness outside them, and for a moment I wondered if someone had buried me alive. Had it not been for the hard, moist surface pressing into my left cheek, I would’ve sworn I was already dead.
I tried to move my hands, but found that someone had bound them behind my back — and all at once, the fog that’d settled over my mind blasted away and everything came rushing back to me in a wave of panic. Ryder and Marcus were working together, and they’d ambushed Zoe and me, which meant that, wherever we were, Zoe must be nearby.
“Zoe?” I whispered into the darkness and strained to hear a response, but it never came. Despite the fear that writhed in my stomach at the realization that I might be alone, I tried to stay as calm and collected as I could — because if I was going to have any hope of getting out of this mess alive, I had to keep my head on straight.
That started with figuring out just where the heck Marcus and Ryder had taken me, so I attempted to roll onto my back, but with my bound hands made it awkward. Eventually, I managed it, but all I saw was more darkness. Panicked, I kicked my legs around me, desperately trying to shoo away the inky blackness as if it were closing in to suffocate me, and yelped when my left foot connected with something firm.
Tentatively, I reached out with my foot again until it reconnected and nudged, but whatever I’d found didn’t give. It felt too firm to be another person, so I applied more pressure and jumped when something crumbled and poured all over my leg. I bolted upright and scurried away from whatever had just covered my leg and kept moving until my back collided with what felt like a wall.
Using it to steady myself, I pushed back against it while my legs heaved upward. The wall also shifted underneath the pressure, and bits of something rolled over my shoulders as I used every ounce of strength I could find to get to my feet. With solid ground under my shoes again, I sucked in a deep breath through my nose and couldn’t help laughing at myself. It was dirt that’d broken off the walls.
But my laughter quickly gave way to panic again when I realized where I was: the same tunnel where I’d overheard Marcus and Leo arguing in my vision! I didn’t know how or why Marcus and Ryder had moved me there, but as I remembered the details of the vision and matched them to my surroundings, I was sure of it. But where was this tunnel, and where did it lead? If I just started walking, would I eventually find an exit, or were there twists and turns in the path that would leave me lost? Though I strongly considered running for it, I thought better of the idea when I realized I could just as easily run into Marcus or Ryder again, and that was the last thing I wanted.
Given that I had no idea how large the tunnel was or where it led, and that I was literally running blind, I needed to be careful — and I needed to find Zoe. For all I knew, she might lie knocked out on the ground nearby, which would explain why she hadn’t answered when I called out for her; she’d definitely gotten hit harder by the stunning spell than I had.
With no better ideas, I pushed off the wall and carefully stepped around, extending my feet much further forward than I normally would just in case Zoe was there; I didn’t want to step on her accidentally. I kept flailing in the darkness that way for several minutes until my foot finally found something that didn’t feel like another wall.
“Zoe?” I whispered, but got no answer, so I pushed against the object with my foot again, harder this time, and my heart skipped a beat when a groan pierced the darkness and silence. “Zoe!” I hissed, convinced it had to be her. “It’s Selena! Wake up!” I continued with a few more nudges from my foot.
“Ugh,” Zoe groaned over the sounds of her stirring, and I almost started crying because, as bad as things were, at least I wasn’t going through them alone. “Where are we?” Zoe asked groggily.
Fumbling against the darkness and my restrained hands, I sank to my knees to get on her level. “We’re in the tunnel from my vision.”
“What? How?”
“I don’t know, but we’ve gotta find a way out of here before Marcus and Ryder come back for us,” I said as a new sense of urgency washed over me. I didn’t have any idea how long we’d been out, nor what our attackers were planning to do with us when they did check in.
“Shh!” Zoe hissed, and I froze as I heard what sounded like footsteps pounding down the dirt walkway in our direction. “Quick, lie back down and pretend you’re still out.”
Without an alternative, I moved away from Zoe on my knees and tried to lower myself down as quickly and quietly as I could back in the position I thought they’d left me in. My heart hammered in my ears, nearly drowning out the hushed, hissing voices that carried to my ears along with the footsteps that grew steadily louder — and I realized that these were the same voices I’d heard when I first woke up.
“You’ve made a real mess yet again, Marcus,” one of them snapped, clarifying that it was Ryder speaking. “And, yet again, it’s up to me to clean it.”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Marcus whined, sounding more like a scolded child than a grown man, which made it difficult to reconcile the fact that he’d murdered Officer Dunham and attempted to take Blackwood out, too. “Help me, Ryder. You’re the only one who can.”
“Lucky me,” Ryder said, and sighed. “What in Lilith’s name were you thinking, attacking them like that? Blackwood’s going to kill you when he finds out. This is a real wrench in the plan.”
Wait, what plan? Marcus had just tried to assassinate Blackwood, so why would Leo care Marcus had attacked Zoe and me?
“Then we have no choice but to kill them. We can’t leave any more loose ends,” Marcus said, and pure dread poured over me in an icy wave.
“Are you insane? Prison really changed you,” Ryder snapped. “We can’t kill them, especially not the reporter! Do you have any idea who she is?”
“I do, but who cares? What other choice do we have at this point? They know too much. If we let them go or they escape, they’ll ruin everything. You and I will never be free of this nightmare.”
“Don’t say that! We can still turn this broom around.”
“No, we don’t! You and I are dead warlocks walking, Ryder. We’re pawns to Blackwood; we always have been. Once he’s taken everything he wants from us, squeezed us for every drop to his benefit, he’ll kill us like everyone else. Besides, we don’t have much time. We can’t keep fooling him about our indoctrination; eventually, he’s going to figure it out or one of us is going to slip.”
Indoctrination? Simply hearing the word gave me chills, even without knowing what it meant.
Ryder sighed. “Why couldn’t you have just killed him in the square? This little stunt has already made our lives infinitely more complicated, so we might as well have gotten the added benefit of Blackwood being out of the picture,” he said, making my head spin. Wasn’t that exactly what Marcus was trying to do?
“Believe me, I wanted to,” Marcus said, “But it wouldn’t have helped. We need him alive so he can go down for all of this, not us. And that’s exactly why we can’t let these two live. They’ll ruin everything, all the planning we’ve done.”
“We can keep them here until this is all over. Once Blackwood’s behind bars, they won’t be a threat to anyone anymore,” Ryder argued.
“Not unless Blackwood gets them under his spell first,” Marcus countered.
“Then we won’t let him know we have them. Besides us, no one knows the witches are here.”
“He’ll find out eventually, Ryder! He always does. I swear, the man has spies everywhere. I mean, if he can buy off the cops, he can buy off anyone.”
“I hope for your sake you’re not implying I’d double-cross you,” Ryder said menacingly.
“No, that’s not what I meant at all. It’s just that we can’t be the only ones who know about these tunnels. For Lilith’s sake, they run under ninety percent of Starfall, so how could we be? And do you really think Blackwood doesn’t have people patrolling them? For all we know, he could be listening to us right now.”
“You’re paranoid,” Ryder snapped, but I’d gotten hooked on what Marcus had just said: The tunnels ran under most of Starfall. So, how did anyone access them? And where exactly did they run?
I had to bite my tongue to keep from gasping when I realized that must have been how Marcus broke out of jail — and based on what I’d overheard so far, he’d almost certainly had help, either from Ryder or one of Blackwood’s hired lackeys. I didn’t want to believe that there could be a secret tunnel entrance inside or near the SVPD that the cops didn’t know about, but how else could Marcus have escaped without leaving a trace?
“I have every right to be paranoid, Ryder! We aren’t in control of anything, as much as we pretend to be. I have… Gaps. There are a lot of things I’ve done that I can’t remember, and things I wish I could forget.”
“You can’t blame yourself for what happened to Dunham. It wasn’t you. Not anymore than it was Dunham who killed my sister,” Ryder said with a cracking voice, and my entire body went rigid because he’d just confirmed my theory about Dunham killing Rory. He’d also echoed what Marcus had told Zoe and me when we’d spoken to him in prison, but I still didn’t know what the heck he meant when he said it wasn’t really Marcus who’d killed Dunham.
“Blackwood is to blame for it all, not us,” Ryder insisted. “Now get yourself together and help me move the witches before he gets here. We don’t have a lot of time.”