Chapter 165 Chains of Blood: Part Two

Chapter 165 Chains of Blood: Part Two
POV: Lucian

The chain anchors were blood-magic constructs embedded into the stone at a level that suggested they had been built into the cell's construction rather than added after the fact. They were not improvised. They were designed, the specific difference between a thing made for a general purpose and a thing made for a very specific one.

He was the specific purpose.

The recognition did not produce the fear it might have produced. It produced something closer to clarity, the specific quality of understanding a situation's architecture even when the architecture was not in your favor.

He spent time examining the anchors with the enhanced perception the Moonstone had confirmed was his in ways even he had not fully understood before the trial. Each anchor had a frequency, the blood-magic expressing itself as something between smell and sound and heat, and the frequencies were all calibrated to the same thing.

The wolf-Lycan combination of his bloodline.

Which meant they had not calibrated for the third moon.

He was still working through the implications of this when the door opened.

Lior came through it with the quality of someone who had been moving carefully for a long time and had arrived at the destination the careful movement was organized around. The wounds from the Thorn Pass battle had partially healed, the speed of the healing different from what pure vampire healing would have produced, influenced by the wolf nature that Lucian's blood had woken and that apparently had its own opinions about recovery pace.

Those gold eyes found him and did the thing they did, the relief and the guilt arriving simultaneously in the specific proportion that situations like this produced.

"You found me," Lucian said.

"The mate bond pointed at you," Lior said, already moving to examine the chain anchors. "I have been in the fortress for two days. Looking."

"Two days," Lucian said.

"They moved you three times in the first twelve hours," Lior said, working at the nearest anchor with tools from the concealed pockets that the vampire apparently maintained as a standard operational practice. "The bond provided location continuously but reaching the location was the problem."

"This is a trap," Lucian said. "They let you find me."

"I know," Lior said, still working. "I am doing it anyway."

One anchor released. The crack of the blood-magic giving way was audible in the cell and in the corridor outside it.

"Even if we free the chains," Lucian said, "we are in the deep levels of Thornhaven Fortress with blood-magic barriers preventing pack bond contact, which means Araya cannot coordinate rescue from outside, and the barriers also prevent shadow-walking past certain points in this level."

"Not all of them," Lior said, moving to the second anchor. "I have been mapping the barrier gaps for two days. There is a path. It requires specific timing and specific route and it requires you to be mobile."

"Then we need to free the chains," Lucian said.

"Yes," Lior said.

The second anchor cracked.

The footsteps in the corridor were not the footsteps of the guard rotation. They had the quality of something organized for a purpose rather than something performing a schedule, and the purpose was legible in their cadence before the cell door opened.

Kaelen entered.

Behind him, six guards who had the specific equipment of people who had been briefed on the full capability of what they were guarding and had brought the appropriate response to each element of it.

His crimson eyes took in the scene with the quality of someone who had predicted it and was watching the prediction confirm itself.