Chapter 4: Bloodlines and Foxes (1)

The seam turned out to be a crack in the valley floor that looked, to Iris's professional eye, exactly like the kind of place you put bodies.

"Charming." She peered into the dark. "Is this where you take all your dates?"

"You're the first." Kael was already stepping into the crack, and the dark swallowed him like it knew him. His voice floated back, dry: "Everyone else I brought down here ended up as fertilizer. Watch your step, witch blood. The ground remembers where people fall."

Iris followed him, because the alternative was standing alone in a valley that kept calling her name, and her flashlight beam did very little against the dark that closed in behind them like a door. The seam sloped down, past roots the size of ships, past stones carved with symbols she recognized from her mother's letter — the same symbols, she realized with a chill, that had been scratched on the dead photographer's trekking pole.

"The tunnel is the covenant line," Kael said from ahead. "A thousand years ago, my clan walked this tunnel to meet the priests on the mountain's heart. Now it's empty. The priests are gone. The clan is gone. Only the lock is left."

"Comforting." Iris's boots echoed on stone. "And the thing that calls my name lives past the lock?"

"It doesn't live. It waits." He stopped, and his flashlight caught a wall of carved black stone, veined with silver, rising out of the dark like a frozen wave. "This is the seam's heart. This is where your stone goes."

Iris pulled the black stone from her jacket. It was warm — warmer than it had been all night, like it had been drinking heat from the mountain. She held it up to the wall, and the silver veins in the stone lit, tracing patterns that matched the symbols on the wall exactly.

"Well." She cleared her throat. "That's not ominous at all."

"Put it in the hollow." Kael pointed. A dark socket gaped in the center of the wall, the exact size and shape of her stone. "Then step back."

"Before or after the floor opens up?"

"Before."

Iris pressed the stone into the socket.

Nothing happened for one heartbeat. Then the wall inhaled — a deep, groaning breath that shook dust from the ceiling — and every silver vein on the mountain's face turned white. The ground beneath them shuddered, once, twice, and Iris felt it in her teeth.

And the fog above them screamed.

"What was that?" She was already backing toward Kael. "That didn't sound like a lock. That sounded like a guest list."

The tunnel mouth above them filled with eyes. Hundreds of them — the rogues, the fog-wrapped shapes from her first night, pouring down the seam like water finding a crack. Kael grabbed her and shoved her against the wall, putting himself between her and the swarm, and the black cracks on his arms were already blazing.

"Your stone woke the barrier," he said, and for the first time she heard something like strain in his voice. "Every hungry thing within a mile heard the mountain call your name."

"Oh, wonderful. My blood is a dinner bell." Iris pulled her scalpel and looked around for anything that wasn't a monster or a wall. "Options. We fight a hundred fog monsters in a tunnel with a broken alpha and a knife, or we find another way out."

"There is no other—"

"There is!" A new voice, high and frantic, echoed off the walls. "There is absolutely another way, there's always another way when you're the only person in the valley who knows where the emergency exits are, which is me, hi, don't stab me, I'm saving your life!"

A streak of copper exploded out of a side crack in the tunnel wall, resolved itself into a fox — a fox, copper fur, too smart eyes, tail that seemed to have opinions of its own — and stood in front of them, panting, covered in mud and what appeared to be someone else's blood.

"Rex." Kael's voice could have frozen the tunnel. "You're supposed to be dead."

"Alive! Mostly! Very close to dead, but alive, which is the important part!" The fox's tail lashed. "Listen, Your Scary Majestiness, I have a deal for you. I get you and the walking dinner bell out of this tunnel, and you don't let the fog eat me, and also I keep the shiny rock, no wait, you keep the shiny rock, I just want to live through tonight, is that too much to ask?"

Iris stared at the fox. "You're a fox."

"Spirit fox! Massive difference. Foxes are food. I'm a consultant." Rex's ears swiveled toward the swarm. "And I'm a consultant whose exit strategy is about to be eaten, so if you could decide fast—"

"Take the side crack," Kael said. "Now."

They went. Rex led, weaving through a crack in the rock that Iris would have sworn was solid wall, and behind them the tunnel filled with howls that sounded offended. The fox moved like he'd been born in these walls, which, he announced between breaths, he had.

"Born in the seam, raised in the seam, robbed the seam blind!" Rex ducked under a root. "Don't tell the boss. By boss I mean the scary one behind you. Don't tell him anything. Also, nice to meet you, dinner bell, what's your name, do you have snacks?"

"Iris." She was keeping pace, scalpel out, breath steady. "And I'm not a dinner bell."

"You're literally a bloodline that opens the oldest lock on the continent." Rex's tail flicked. "In fox terms, you're a very loud dinner bell with excellent legs. Where's the rock?"

"In my pocket. It's not for sale."

"A shame. I know a guy who pays very well for rocks that open things. Not that I'd ever sell you out." The fox's ears swiveled forward. "Through here! And don't touch the walls, they bite!"

They burst out of the seam into a wide, cathedral-like cavern, and Iris stopped breathing.

The cavern's heart was a pool of black water, perfectly still, and at its center rose a pillar of obsidian carved with ten thousand symbols — the same symbols, the same pattern, echoed back and forth until the eye lost track. At the pillar's base, a door: black, seamless, and in its center, a hollow that matched her stone exactly.

The mountain had been waiting for her to bring it home.

"Iris." Kael's voice was suddenly very quiet. "Don't put the stone in that door."

"Why not?" She could feel the stone in her pocket, pulling, warm as a heartbeat. "It's the lock. We came to open it."