Torn(61)

“Drink.”

“Yeah,” I said, testily. “I get it. What is it?”

“It will either kill you or help you.”

Beside me, Kiera shifted.

“And I won’t know until I drink?”

“I shall give you reassurance,” the guardian said. “What you seek—I do not wish it released. From that, extrapolate my nature and determine if I would kill to protect my treasure.”

“Great. Logic.” It’s times like this—trapped in a cavern with a goblet full of possible poison—that I really regret dropping out of high school.

I looked to Kiera, but she just shrugged. Apparently, this one was up to me.

“Okay,” I said, thinking it through. “The gemstone is part of the Oris Clef, and we know that it will lock hell wide-open. You’re hiding it, so you’re one of the good guys. Good doesn’t kill. Except I don’t believe that. I think good will kill to protect. I think good has. And I think good should.”

“You are wise.”

“But that means it’s poison,” I said, and waited for confirmation. I got none, so I continued. “Or you could be a demon who wants to keep the Oris Clef yourself. And you would kill to ensure it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

“You are astute. Will you drink?”

“You just said that either scenario means poison,” Kiera said.

“Yeah,” I said, lifting the goblet to my lips and looking hard at Kiera, willing her to remember what she’d seen that night outside the dance club. “That’s what I said.”

“Ohhhh.” I saw her slow smile as she remembered. “I really do have one hell of a cool partner.”

But I didn’t hear any more. Because I drank. And, once again, I died.

The first time I’d died and come back, I’d felt the serpents of hell twisting themselves around me as the EMTs worked me over. The last few times—and I did seem to be making a habit of dying—there was only blackness. A dark, lonely emptiness that seemed almost more frightening than hellfire because it truly meant what I suspected: I was tainted. And lost. And utterly alone in a cold, dark place. The kind of place where demons dwelled. The kind of place that had the demons inside me waking up and moaning, keening for release into the cold, dank dark.

Whether I would be ultimately redeemed or lost remained to be seen, but as the demons within writhed and clattered and begged for release, I knew that at the very least, right then, the dark inside was winning.

And then, with a jerk, I was alive again, the dark vanquished, and the lights of the crystal cave so bright it was blinding.

I wanted to soak it up, to revel in it, but there wasn’t time. Kiera had taken the gemstone from the goblet and was slapping my face, trying to hurry my revival.

“He disappeared,” she said. “You drank, and he poofed. Man,” she continued, rambling on. “That not-dying thing comes in pretty damn handy.”

“It has its uses,” I agreed, still a little freaked-out by the fact that I’d been dead, but conscious enough to think deep thoughts about the state of my soul. “Let’s get out of here.” In truth, the whole place was giving me the willies.

I slapped my hand over the symbol, hoping to call Clarence, but nothing happened.

“Maybe the portal’s back on the other side?” Kiera suggested.

“Let’s go.” I hesitated only long enough to slip the gemstone onto the necklace and replace the whole thing over my head. Then I looked down at my arm, expecting to see and feel the third symbol lighting up.

“Weird,” I said, as we squeezed out from the keyhole-shaped doorway and back into our original corridor.

“What?”

“Last time the second symbol lit up when we got the first piece. But now that we have the second, the third symbol’s not doing a thing.”

She peered at my outstretched arm and frowned. “Maybe because we’re so deep underground?”

I shrugged, doubting that. I didn’t think my arm operated on the same theory as cell phone service.

What I was really wondering was if Deacon hadn’t already found the third relic. Because if he had—and if he’d hidden it in another dimension—then my arm wouldn’t burn. I could only find things in this world, after all.

“Is that the portal?” she asked, peering at the stone wall.

I looked but didn’t see anything, and said so.

“No, I feel it,” she said, pressing her hand to the stone wall. “Don’t you?”

I stood still and realized that, yeah, I felt it, too. Like the rumble of an approaching train. The portal? Or something more sinister?