The Wandering Tale of Grigori Verlaf

Chapter Thirty-Three: Distractions

Chapter Thirty-Three: Distractions

The hum in my chest had increased to the edge of pain, making me wince with every frantic throb.

"They're close," I said aloud to myself, my hand rubbing absently at my chest above my heart where the hum was strongest. I smiled faintly at the thought.

I'd been tracking Arien's children in earnest for nearly two weeks now, traveling most of the distance on foot and all of it alone. Dmitri had intended to come with me, but the situation in Lunandra made it necessary for him to stay behind at the last minute. I winced, remembering the blank look on Kiela's face when she discovered Ambrose's betrayal.

I shook my head, clearing the thoughts away. As awful as his abandonment of his wife and son for a much younger woman was, I needed to focus on Arien's children right now. Aiden and Arabella, I reminded myself, concentrating on the names Dmitri had given me.

I frowned as the humming grew slightly weaker and turned, pacing back across the clearing that had been troubling me for the past half hour. With the strength of the hum here, they should be fairly close by-I should hear voices, catch glimpses of them through the trees. At the very least, the hum should take me straight to them.

Instead, I walked back and forth across the circular area that the hum in my chest informed me was their location, and the children were nowhere in sight.

"You have a seriously twisted sense of humor," I said aloud to the sky. I could almost picture Starine laughing at me from above.

I leaned against the trunk of one of the many trees surrounding this clearing, my gaze focused on the center where the thrumming in my chest reached its crescendo, and several things happened nearly at once, in such a succession that only years later could I ever establish an order.

From behind me, there was a faint click and the tree itself shifted as I set off a hidden mechanism I failed to identify.

Before me, the ground began to open up, presumably caused by the mechanism. The earth, I noticed, is fake, replaced by a clever forgery to hide the mechanics at work in this place.

The air became suddenly putrid with the stench of death, decay, and excrement, and I wrinkled my nose against the undesirable odors, unable to help my automatic shying away from the smell.

A staircase began to unfold as the gap in the ground widened, leading down into the dark stench.

And before I could take even a step forward to explore this place of rot that I knew, without knowing how I knew, contained Arien's children, a sharp crack echoed in the clearing beside me, at once recognizable and unfamiliar from long absence.

"Fletcher?" I said, my tone questioning despite myself. "What are you doing here?"

For once, there was no humor in the Old Fey's eyes. "Drolla sent me," he said simply, his answer producing more questions than it answered. "I've been looking for you for hours."

"I'm not obligated to obey Drolla anymore," I said, even though I didn't know how true that statement might be.

He waved aside my objections. "Not for him, for her," he said, and my heart sank in my chest as I realized what he meant.

"He found her," I breathed, taking an unconscious step toward Fletcher.

"No," Fletcher said, shaking his head. "She found him."