Labyrinth Wolves (Into the Labyrinth Book 2), page 27
FORTY-FOUR
Father Flint moved first. He approached Leif, leaning heavily on his cane, and came so near that I could smell the scent of pine. His skin was the darkest shade of stone I’d seen, and etched in wrinkles.
He lifted a body finger, and pressed it to Leif’s chest. “Blood of the Wolf.”
“What does that mean?” Leif asked.
“It means you have labyrinth blood in you. And that blood, like all else in this cursed place, is drawn to Dimitri. You will know how to find the center. Follow your instinct.”
I frowned. “I would like more than instinct. Leif just agreed to give his life to bring down Dimitri. We need more.”
“She’s not happy,” Aurelia Brightspire laughed.
My gaze swung to her. “Of course I’m not. Guard my heart? You are stealing him from me.”
“Pledge yourself as his wolf then, and you’ll stay with him forever.” The petals that made up her dress moved as she giggled. “Or perhaps he will make you a Stone God too, and you’ll be our queen.”
“I hope not,” Belladonna said. “I’m the pretty one here. She’d make a fine wolf though.” Her eyes lit up, and she clapped her hands. “Then she and the redhead could be together! I was always rooting for him.”
My stomach soured.
Leif’s voice was rough. “Is there anything else you can tell us about the source of Dimitri’s power? What does it look like, and how do we take it?”
“It is bright,” Lady Luck said, her voice soft as falling dice, “and magnificent, and everything you’ve ever buried beneath your nightmares.” She twirled a silver coin between her fingers, the glow of it catching firelight that wasn’t there. “It is also where her father is. Find one, you find the other.”
Her gaze flicked toward me, a faint smile curling her lips—pitying or cruel, I couldn’t tell. Then, without another word, she tipped her coin into the air and vanished in a swirl of glittering smoke, the coin never landing.
Above us, Thief perched on a beam, legs dangling. He let out a sharp, delighted laugh that echoed off the walls. “You’re going to love being king. Except when you don’t.” He gave a mocking salute, then leaned back into the shadows and disappeared.
Only Father Flint remained.
He took a slow, creaking step backward, the tip of his cane dragging across the stone with a sound like bone on bone.
“Look for a crown,” he rasped, “forged of molten silver and living fire. It burns, but it never dies. You’ll find it buried in the roots of a tree older than the labyrinth itself.”
His gaze drifted toward me then, and he tilted his head as though remembering something long lost. “Your father sleeps at its base. Trapped in the trees. You cannot free him without killing Dimitri.”
Leif took a step forward. “How do we claim the power?”
Father Flint’s mouth twitched in what might’ve been a smile, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “You must bleed yourself onto the magic. Not a drop. A vow. The kind of blood that means something. That’s how you harness its magic.”
“But we aren’t harnessing it,” Leif said. “We’re stealing it. Every last ember. It all goes with us.”
The old god gave a slow nod. “Aye. And for that, you’ll need enough to drown the roots.” He turned with effort, his movements slow, as if time were dragging him back into the earth. “Good luck, son.” Then Father Flint dissolved into the air like breath in winter.
One by one, the girls disappeared in spirals of light and flower petals.
Lawson was the only one remaining. I waited for him to disappear, but instead he sighed. “Dimitri will come at you with everything he’s got. It’s a handful of wolves, a lot of madness, and a knowledge of the labyrinth unlike any other. The Silver Queen will be forced to pick his side, even though she marked you. If he presses her, she always choses him.”
“Noted.”
“Delilah, for her credit, can forgive you for not freeing her four years ago if you come through on this. I will speak with her to be sure she is on our side.” Lawson ran a hand down his jaw. “As for the rest of them, they don’t care which way this falls. It is all entertainment. They will help, but not at the cost of themselves. You don’t matter enough.”
They were cold words, no matter how kindly he spoke them.
“Doubly noted.”
Now his pale eyes found mine.
“I’ve had the pleasure of knowing your father for the last eight years. Well, pleasure on my end at least.” He grinned, though I wasn’t breathing. “He’s a good man. I hope this ends well for him.”
I reached for the hilt of my dagger, if only to have something to steady myself. “Is he in pain here?”
Lawson’s expression was of pure regret. It took him a while to find words. “Eight years in the labyrinth is a lot for a mortal. It’ll be good for him to be freed. And I know he longs to meet you.”
“Thank you.”
Lawson gave us another look, then we were alone in the clearing.
“We should go. We have four hours before we need to meet the others.”
I reached for Leif’s hand. “Wait.”
At the touch, he stilled like something fragile had brushed against him. I let my fingers linger, then slowly drew them back. “We might have our differences but I don’t want to lose you to the labyrinth.”
His gaze, usually so guarded, softened as it met mine. “You aren’t losing me,” he murmured. “I’m saving you.”
“Prettier words for the same thing. You’d be trapped here forever. There’s still time to say no.”
He didn’t argue. Instead, he slipped his fingers into his coat and drew out the name card the labyrinth had given him. He read it aloud. “The labyrinth remembers its own. And it will call him home, bone by bone.” His expression was resolute. “It’s inevitable, Serenity. I walked in here knowing I wouldn’t walk out. The best thing I can do is save as many people as I can before I go.”
“I don’t accept that.” I stepped closer. “You, me, Harald, Tove, Clark, my father—we all live through this.”
I wanted to offer some brilliant strategy that would save us all and stitch the seams of this unraveling story. But I had nothing. Only a frantic, aching heart and the crushing fear that hope was slipping through my fingers.
“I can’t lose you,” I whispered. “Who’s going to fight me for the islands? Who’s going to block my trade routes and send spies to steal my maps? Who’s going to keep score when we argue, and pretend not to care when he’s losing? I need you.” My anger at him had simmered. I wasn’t certain when it happened, only that the idea of losing him to the labyrinth tore something inside of me that hurt more than anything he’d done. He reached for me. One hand cupped my face while his thumbs brushed away tears, the one slid into my hair like he was memorizing the shape of me.
“You know what else is inevitable?” he asked, voice thick. “Us.”
I closed my eyes as he leaned in. His forehead touched mine, and his next words trembled against my skin.
“I love you, Serenity Montclair. That will not change, even if my skin is made of stone.”
I opened my eyes, searching his face, desperate to keep him here—to make him stay. “But you won’t be with me.”
“I’ll be right here.” He took my arm gently and traced the lines of the heartbeat tattoo inked there. “Right next to you. This heart, always beating for yours.”
A tear slipped down my cheek.
“That’s not enough. I don’t want to destroy Dimitri if it means losing you.”
His smile was soft. “It’s the only way to save your father.”
I stepped back, just enough to look him in the eye. “Let’s call you becoming a Stone God plan B,” I said. “We must go to the source of magic anyway to save my father. Maybe while we’re there, we find a different way to defeat Dimitri without sacrificing one of us in the process. Maybe we break the rules, and all walk out.”
A faint smile tugged at his mouth. “Everyone walking out. That sounds really good.”
“No heroic dying to save everyone unless it’s necessary,” I warned. “Promise?”
“It’s is—”
“Leif.”
He sighed. “Fine. Promise.”
It wasn’t enough. Not even close. But night had fallen like a curtain, and Dimitri’s wolves would be hunting. I didn’t want to give them a reason to close in.
“We need to move,” I said, glancing toward the trees. “Before the labyrinth decides we’ve stayed too long.”
We grabbed our bags and moved through the trees in silence, the crunch of frostbitten grass beneath our boots the only sound between us. Light filtered down in pale ribbons, casting strange patterns over the forest floor.
Leif walked slightly ahead, pausing now and then to glance back at me before choosing a path. Sometimes we took the left fork. Sometimes the right. We didn’t speak of why. Instinct ruled now—the instinct of the Blood of the Wolf.
“What does your instinct feel like?” I asked, brushing a low-hanging branch aside.
Leif stepped around a root. “Just a sense. I’m half-worried I’m wrong and I’ll lead us into an array of arrows.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time this labyrinth has shot arrows at us,” I said, ducking beneath a tangle of vines. “At least we aren’t chained at the ankle this time and suspended above the world.”
“Ah, but that was so fun.”
I chuckled under my breath. “Speak for yourself. I wanted to kill you.”
“I seem to remember you trying shortly after,” he said, casting a sidelong glance through the trees.
“If you’re talking about turning you into stone, that doesn’t count.”
“You could have killed me if you shattered me when I was stone,” he said, flicking a fallen leaf from his shoulder. “Admit it, you wanted me to chase after you.”
I gave a faint smile, the moon catching on my teeth. “Fine. I admit it.”
“Knew it,” he said, smug as ever, the shadows swallowing his grin.
I followed him deeper into the pale woods, where the air felt stretched thin and the silence carried weight. Somewhere ahead, the trees bent tighter together, forming a narrow corridor of bone-white limbs.
Then, after a time, I said, “Did you ever think the Stone Gods were real? Before you entered the labyrinth, I mean.”
“No. I thought they were stories told to keep kids from going into the woods at night. The Silver Queen always felt like a metaphor. Dimitri like a threat to make us behave. And Belladonna Bloom? I thought she was invented by drunk sailors who couldn’t explain why they sank.”
I nodded. “I had enough trouble believing in the labyrinth. Haven is so far away from most of the Hundred Islands, that for a while, I thought the Quarter Labyrinth was a myth…until one man went and came back with tales of it.”
“How far did he get?”
“He didn’t even get in. But for Haven, we lived on his stories for years.”
It wasn’t lost on me that if the Quarter Labyrinth hadn’t appeared so close to Haven last time, Clark and I never would have made it. For a while after, I’d wondered what life would have been like if we hadn’t gone into the labyrinth at all. But now I knew. My father, my future, it was always tied to this place.
Leif reached out to move a branch aside for me. His fingers brushed mine in the cold.
We stepped beneath a twisted arch of trees with limbs knotted like ribs, and the air grew thin.
I took one step into the clearing—and the world shifted.
The trees were gone.
Gone, too, was the path, the snow-flecked branches, the ache in my legs from walking. I stood instead in a place untouched by time or season. Darkness pressed close, smelling faintly of rust and rotting velvet. The silence here was thick enough to drown in.
A gilded cage rose from the darkness, each bar wrought in gold so polished it gleamed faintly in the black. It had no door. No lock. Just a cruel, perfect circle—shaped more like a shrine than a prison.
Inside it knelt a man. His clothes were tattered, the remnants of something once fine. His back was bowed and his shoulders too thin beneath a dark cloak. His hands trembled as they curled around the bars.
He looked up.
Unkempt dark hair fell across his brow. His face was drawn with hunger and exhaustion, a ghost of a man, but it was his eyes that struck me cold—murky green, like sea glass. And yet… something in them was familiar. Something in the shape of his jaw. The stubborn angle of his chin.
My heart stilled.
This was him.
My father.
The man I’d spent my whole life chasing, hoping, loving.
“Father.”
He stared through me, lost in some fog of memory or madness. A voice, smooth and aching with honeyed venom, whispered into the vision. “This is what you stand to lose.”
Delilah.
“If you are hoping to scare me, this won’t work,” I told her.
“Scare you? I don’t think that’s possible. You have far too little fear. No, I want to remind you what you fight for. Leif will lose himself to the labyrinth anyway, he’s already unraveling. Take what you can, take your father, and live.”
“I thought you’d be nicer when we were on the same side again,” I said. I couldn’t stop staring at my father’s face.
Delilah laughed. “Stone Gods are never nice, darling.”
The vision began to fade.
“Tik tok. Tik tok.”
“Wait.” My voice broke in the hush. I wasn’t ready for my father’s face to disappear. My heart pounded as if it could keep the vision tethered to this world. I lurched forward, desperate to hold on, to memorize every line of him before he vanished.
My hands closed around the cell bars.
Agony answered.
The vines seared into my skin like lightning, white-hot and merciless. I screamed and stumbled back and clutched my hand to my chest. The vision shattered and the cold of the labyrinth rushed back in.
I barely felt my knees hit the ground.
Leif was kneeling at my side. “Serenity,” he breathed. “You’re okay. I’m here.”
Pain clawed its way up my arm. I bit back another cry. The skin of my palm was an angry red and blistering.
“Delilah—she—” My words caught behind clenched teeth. “She showed me my father.”
Leif’s brows drew tight. He tore a strip of fabric from his shirt and began wrapping my hand with steady fingers. “Then she burned you?”
“I did that to myself.” I swallowed hard. “I saw him, Leif. I saw my father.”
He looked up, and something in his expression softened—a quiet gravity in his eyes that made it harder to breathe. “Is he okay?”
I nodded, just once. “He looked lonely,” I whispered. “And tired. But alive.”
The words should have comforted me. But they only fed the storm building in my chest. The sight of him, so close yet unreachable, ignited something deeper than longing. Desperation. Rage. Resolve.
Leif finished tying the cloth around my hand. The fabric wouldn’t ease the burn, not truly, but I didn’t stop him. The act said more than words ever could.
“I have to get him out,” I said, voice barely above a breath.
I’d prepared for the labyrinth to be taxing. We’d trained almost every day, and my body was much stronger than last time. But the labyrinth didn’t ask for my strength. It was taking my mind. I felt like I was being pulled in a thousand directions and hadn’t the capacity to think properly anymore. I could only see. See Clark. See my father. See Dimitri breaking us. But I couldn’t fix any of it. Too many people needed to be saved and I wasn’t sure how to help them all.
Leif slipped a finger beneath my chin to tilt my face upward until my eyes met his.
Then all I could see was him.
The pale light filtering through the trees caught in the strands of his hair. His stormy gaze held mine like an anchor in a sea that wouldn’t stop shifting.
“We will find him,” he said.
I repeated his words in my heart until they felt like truth. Then I let them carry me, lifting me to my feet one breath at a time.
“How long was I out?”
“Only a minute,” he said. “Still plenty of time to find Thief’s temple.”
I nodded, though the world still felt thin around the edges. “I hope Harald and Tove had a good conversation with August. I could use some good news.”
Leif offered a crooked smile. “Then let’s go get it.”
Thief grew up as boys often do—with a knack for trouble. Whatever scheme danced through his mind, he followed it. And more often than not, it was the thieving kind. When the labyrinth opened on his island, Thief saw it as a golden opportunity. A maze filled with riches, with Pearls too distracted to guard their purses? It was a thief’s paradise.
He slipped through the shadows, quick as a whisper. Before long, his pockets jingled with stolen coins. He dreamed of wealth beyond measure, a boy well on his way to becoming rich. But fate has a way of weaving threads unnoticed.
Deep within the labyrinth, Thief stumbled into Dimitri’s temple. Tokens lay scattered at the altar, offerings from desperate souls seeking the god’s favor.
And, of course, Thief took them too.
Dimitri watched the boy’s escapades with amusement, enjoying the daring of his nimble fingers.
But when the boy dared to steal from the god himself, amusement turned to wrath.
In retribution, Dimitri transformed Thief into a Stone God. He gave him the labyrinth as his playground and whatever riches he desired.
But there was a price.
No longer could Thief take what was not freely given. He could not steal from the mortals who wandered the maze. Instead, Dimitri decreed, he must trade with them—bargain for what he desired.
And so, Thief remains within the labyrinth, surrounded by treasures, yet longing for the thrill of the steal. A lesson etched in stone.
For even the cleverest hands cannot outwit the gods forever.
