A Shade of Vampire 40: A Throne of Fire(16)

“Ruby told us.” I rolled my eyes. “Everyone thought you might be an Acolyte.”

“What?” he asked. “I only went along because I thought if I saved Ruby or Hazel it would guarantee my position—I’ve wanted to be lieutenant of the Hellswan army for as long as I could remember.”

Julian shook his head, clearly thinking along the same lines as me—Ragnhild had nearly got himself banished, never mind demoted.

“Maybe just tell the truth in the future,” I muttered.

Ragnhild looked like he was going to chastise me, but at that moment, the two guards appeared back from the cliff. They looked more puzzled than frightened—maybe nothing had happened?

“There’s definitely something down there,” one of the guards explained breathlessly, “but you’ll have to see it for yourself…I can’t see any obvious danger—though the sea, it’s still frozen.” He shook his head, disbelieving. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“All right.” Ragnhild nodded his thanks. “We travel down to the cove. Is everyone ready? Weapons to hand. You three”—he looked down at us with thinly veiled distaste—“you go last. And if I tell you to get out of there, you do what I say, understood?”

“Understood,” Julian replied firmly.

“Then let’s head out.”

Ragnhild led the procession, following the rocky path down to meet the shore. I could see the extent of the earthquake’s devastation—though it had left the actual cove alone, the cliff had collapsed in some parts, and the passage, carved over time into the rock, had become much more narrow. We followed him in single file, Julian leading the three of us. Yelena reached back and grabbed my hand in hers, squeezing too tightly.

Footsteps were made as quietly as we possibly could, with only the occasional snap of a dried twig or the slight slide of loose gravel.

Soon Ragnhild had passed through the passage, and we followed him out onto the curve of the cove.

“I can’t see anything.” I nudged Julian for him to move out of the way as Yelena dipped back behind me.

Julian didn’t answer me. His eyes were fixed ahead. At first I thought he was looking at the frozen ocean—the tidal wave suspended in mid-air, looking as if it would crash down and drown us at any moment. Without waiting for him to move, I pushed my way past him—and stopped.

Where the Acolytes had been chanting on the shore, there was now a thing. A black heap a few feet high. Out of the top a dome rose—it was made up of the same semi-translucent material as the barriers the sentries made, but inside it, sparks of electricity ricocheted off the surfaces like lightning. It looked like there was a storm inside the dome, and in the center, one thick rope of energy—blindingly bright, all the colors of the rainbow shooting through it.

“What the hell is that?” I breathed.

“I have no idea,” Ragnhild replied, glancing down at me with an unreadable expression. “Nothing good.”

“It looks like a…conductor or something,” I whispered. “But where’s the energy coming from?”

“The bodies.”

Ragnhild looked back at the dome. I was confused—what bodies? I crept closer, squinting against the light of the dome. Oh. The black heap. It was made up of the bodies of the fallen Acolytes…maybe even Queen Trina too, though I couldn’t make out any individual figures. But the dome suddenly made sense—the ‘lightning’ was being sucked from the dead, and pouring into the larger conductor in the middle…but where was it going? Down into the earth?

Ragnhild’s hand landed heavily on my shoulder, making me jump.

“No further, Benedict.”

I stood still.

“We’ll go around the edge. I want to get a closer look at the stones,” Ragnhild continued in a low tone.

I nodded, following the rest of the guards and Julian as we quietly crept around the edges of the cliff, heading toward the sea. As we passed the dome, I could see that the dead Acolytes had been piled up in an almost perfect circle…who had done that?

As we neared the frozen sea, I started to feel uneasy.

There’s something here.

It wasn’t the dome, but something else, coming from the sea. I couldn’t even begin to describe it, or really understand why I was feeling the way I was—I just knew that there was something, something, waiting for us by the water.

“Ragnhild,” I hissed, “I don’t think we should go any further.”

He looked back at me, his face a ghostly white. He could feel it too. I turned to Julian. His expression was tortured, like he had just come face to face with some unspeakable fear. It was the stuff of nightmares, like when you thought there was something looking out at you from the closet in the middle of the night, and though you couldn’t see anything, you knew it was there—waiting, watching you in the dark.