Eve’s POV
The passage was exactly as advertised.
Narrow, dark, forty years of disuse sitting in the air like sothing physical. They moved through it in single file.....Eve first, Damian behind her, Damon last...with only the faint light from Damian’s phone kept low and pointed at the floor.
Nobody spoke.
The floor plan was in Eve’s head. Forty ters, internal staircase, third level, east corridor, room at the end. She counted steps without aning to.....the sa way she’d counted minutes after Maya disappeared, her brain finding small asurable things when everything else was too large.
The staircase was stone. Old, uneven, the kind that had been built before aesthetics were part of the consideration. They went up in silence. One flight. Two.
Third level.
Eve stopped at the door at the top of the stairs. Pressed her hand flat against it and felt for anything on the other side....energy, presence, movent.
Nothing imdiate.
She looked back at Damian. He nodded.
She opened the door.
The east corridor was dim and empty.
Wall sconces at intervals, low, the kind of light that existed to prove the darkness wasn’t total rather than to actually illuminate anything. Stone floor. Four doors on the left side. One door at the far end on the right.
Room at the end.
They moved quickly and quietly, close to the wall, the brothers flanking her without discussion. Damon checked each door they passed.....listening, assessing.....and shook his head at each one. Empty. Empty. Empty.
The door at the end had a ward on it.
Eve felt it before she saw it.....a faint resistance in the air, specific and deliberate, the particular signature of sothing that had been constructed carefully rather than thrown up quickly. Malachai’s work. Or soone working at his direction.
She stopped in front of it and put both hands flat against the wood.
The ward pushed back against her imdiately.
She pushed back.
This was her mother’s technique.....not the blunt approach of trying to overpower it, which would take more energy than she had and make noise besides. The patient approach. Finding the architecture of it. Following the lines of it the way you’d follow the seams of a garnt, looking for the place where it had been joined. Where the construction t itself.
There.
She pressed her awareness into that point and felt the ward shudder.
There you are, sothing in her said, in a register that wasn’t quite her own voice and wasn’t quite not.
She turned the seam.
The ward ca apart quietly....not shattered, just unraveled, each thread releasing in sequence. It took forty seconds. It felt like longer.
Then it was gone.
She tried the handle. Unlocked now, the ward having been the only thing holding it.
She opened the door.
The room had a window.
That was the first thing she noticed, the gray pre-dawn light coming through it, falling across a narrow bed, a small table, a chair.
Maya was in the chair.
Not on the bed, not asleep....in the chair, fully dressed, arms crossed, with the specific expression of soone who had been waiting and had decided that waiting upright was more dignified than waiting horizontal.
She looked at the door when it opened.
She looked at Eve.
She looked at Damian and Damon behind Eve.
She looked back at Eve.
"You brought both of them," she said.
Eve stared at her. "Maya...."
"I’m just saying." Maya stood up, brushing down her clothes with the casual efficiency of soone preparing to leave a mildly disappointing restaurant. "I’ve been sitting in this room for four days and you show up at....." she glanced at the window, ".....what ti is it, five in the morning? With both of your extrely large husbands and no snacks." She picked up a small bag from the floor beside the chair....packed, Eve realized, already packed, like she’d been ready to leave the mont the door opened. "I expected at least a granola bar."
"You packed a bag," Eve said.
"I’ve been packed since day two," Maya said. "I knew you were coming. I just didn’t know when." She looked at Damon. "Hi."
"Hi," Damon said. He sounded genuinely delighted.
"We need to move," Damian said. Not unkindly. Just.....they needed to move.
"Right, yes." Maya crossed the room toward the door. Then she stopped directly in front of Eve.
She looked at her.
Eve looked back.
Maya’s eyes were red at the edges in the way that ant she’d been crying at so point, probably more than once, probably in the hours when the stubbornness had been harder to maintain. Her hair was less organized than usual. She had a small bruise on her wrist from sothing she’d probably knocked against in the dark.
She was the best thing Eve had seen in four days.
"Hi," Maya said, quietly this ti.
"Hi," Eve said.
Maya grabbed her hand. Held it too tight. Didn’t say anything else.
Eve held it back just as tight.
That was the whole mont. Three seconds in a doorway while Damian watched the corridor and Damon stood ready and the pre-dawn light ca through the window behind them.
Then Maya squared her shoulders and said "okay let’s go" over.
They moved fast.
Maya matched their pace without complaint....better than Eve had expected, her legs steady, her breathing even. She held Eve’s hand the entire length of the east corridor, which made moving slightly awkward, but neither of them adjusted it.
Down the internal staircase. Into the passage. Single file again.....Damian first now, then Maya, then Eve, then Damon at the back.
"This passage slls terrible," Maya said quietly.
"Forty years of disuse," Eve said.
"Soone should really...."
"Maya."
"Right. Quiet. Got it."
Damon made a sound behind them that was almost certainly a suppressed laugh.
Damian opened the door at the end and Seraphine’s people were there.....exactly where they’d said they’d be, exactly as Seraphine had said they’d be there. The relief of seeing them was specific and physical.
They ca through.
And the door closed.
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