Rayna sat slumped against the palace wall. A torch marginally lit her windowless cell’s interior. Rough-cut granite block walls surrounded the concrete slab floor. Only a crossbeam secured the heavy wooden door on the other side, but that was as good as a time-locked safe to Rayna. The hunters had dragged her up many flights of stairs, so she had to be in one of the towers.
She rested her head against the wall. The last time she felt this awful was when Estella died. At that moment, her life disintegrated. That point of desperation was just that, a single fleeting point. In minutes, she’d found a solution. She’d ravaged the medicine cabinet, mixed her fatal martini, and followed her sister over. An escape presented itself immediately.
This time was different. There wasn’t the dimmest hope that she or her sister would ever leave this palace. Not while their souls contained an amp of energy. Dreamwalker or not, Pete would never get past the zombie hunters whirling around the palace walls.
Losing Pete’s key was an even worse blow. He said it was a guide to a safe place, hidden from Cauquemere. Not any longer. When Cauquemere finished with it, it would make Twin Moon City look like paradise. And if Pete was there when that happened…
Pete’s death was too horrible to contemplate. She had more than enough known disasters without adding those that were only possible.
Now, instead of being an asset to Estella outside the walls, she was a liability within, a powerless pawn in Cauquemere’s game of control. Nothing she had done, even the life she sacrificed, had made the situation better. Instead, she’d made it all far worse.
She stretched out on the stone floor. The cold soaked through her clothing and made her spine ache. She thought how awful it was to be unable to die.
Estella sensed Rayna’s presence in the palace. Once, she had yearned to feel her so close. Now the sensation filled her with dread. One slip from Estella, one hint of subterfuge, and Rayna would pay the price. Estella had gone from shielding her sister from Cauquemere’s eternal torture to ensuring it.
The glimmer of hope that Pete had lit was extinguished. He had only the heart, not the skills, of a great dreamwalker. He’d be no match for Cauquemere. He’d benefitted from the shield she’d thrown up around Rayna. Now hunters would track him seconds after arrival in Twin Moon City. He’d never make it into the palace as anything but a corpse, or worse, a captive.
How long could she last here, conjuring evil around the clock? She stared at the gaunt faces and ragged, gray hair of the other dreamwalkers at her table. She’d eventually look like them. Worse, she’d feel like them, all the humanity and all the passion within her crushed under the weight of the misery she inflicted on others.
She wondered if miracles ever found their way this deep into hell.