PROMISE

CHAPTER 18

Hain woke to cool air on his face. Dim light seeped through his eyelids and they fluttered open, his head feeling as though someone had packed the space between his ears with all the cotton in the world while he slept.

Hain drew himself up from where he lay, his muscles protesting with each flaring fiber, and took in his surroundings. Around him, smooth walls the color of pale lilacs flanked him on four sides, each of them windowless, though one held the faint outline of a door. A thigh-high cabinet sat in one corner, a wide mirror and what looked like a wash basin set upon it. Stacked towels flanking one side of the wash bowl. Overhead, a recessed hole shone with a light that gave off a faint, buzzing sound.

The memory of the tent came to him then. He'd woken to Lilith. They'd spoken, and she'd told him that she'd followed him in the Godless. That she'd saved him.

Saved him, it seemed, only to hand him over to the Vrai woman.

The Vrai, he thought with a sickening feeling that felt like poison in his blood. She'd come at him with her needle, and he'd attacked her. Broken free from her and Lilith. Fled from them through that maze of tents before coming upon something he'd never thought possible. Something that should not have existed.

A haven in the Godless.

He remembered a grassy field binding the haven as far as he could see, and a scar of black road knifing through the green. The three of them–Hain, and Lilith, and the Vrai–had walked that road, its surface broken and pocked with weeds like fever blisters pushing through flesh, until they'd come to the haven itself. The haven that shouldn't be. The enemy haven.

Shadow clung to his memory beyond that time. Hain sat back on the bed and felt the pressure of his situation like a crushing weight on his chest. The enemy had turned his friend against him. Lilith, his best, and really only friend.

Despair washed over him. Lilith had been his guide through the Godless, his only real hope for finding Sam and stopping him. For saving Aedan. For stopping the war that was to come. But all of that was done now. Because even if he did escape from this haven, what chance did he have of stopping Sam on his own?

Hain thought back to the night he'd returned to Echo from the coast. Lilith had stood fast beside him and Sam outside the Keep against the Empees, and then again after the Bishop's treachery. She'd been a shield against Hain's own cowardice. Never wavering. Never thinking about what it might cost her.

Something warm flickered inside him as he thought of those times. Lilith had been what a friend was supposed to be. And not just when he'd deserved it. No, he thought. She'd been there when he'd needed it.

And now she needed him. The Vrai had twisted her mind into believing she was doing the right thing by keeping him in this prison. But if he could get to her–if he could just talk to her–then maybe he could break whatever spell they'd worked over his friend. Nothing else mattered more than that. Not stopping Sam. Not getting to Aedan. Not even freeing Echo from the Vrai. All Hain cared about in that moment was being the friend Lilith deserved.

How precious that you would hope to do something other than run and hide, the oily voice in his mind spoke with its slick, slithering tongue. But you will never free your friend of this place, Hain. Because it's bastard's blood pumping through your heart. Craven's blood. And it will out in the end.

Hain wanted to shout back at the voice, but a heavy clunk at the room's door threw the thought off its tracks. He looked up, and felt a sudden jolt as a Vrai moved into the room. White fingers, thick as tree branches wrapped over the edges of a tray, steam curling from it in wispy tendrils.

Hain felt his heart skip a beat as he looked at this newcomer. The Vrai was big as any he'd seen in Echo–nothing like the female who'd come with Lilith into the tent–and the backs of his hands bore the snarling wolf heads of his race.