Chapter 21: We Will Find You.

Lily's pov.

I hear Sapphire whimper in my head, curling into herself. I feel so much rage and anger. I crumpled the paper in my hand, dropping it to the ground. Creed picks it up and starts reading, I see his expression shift to anger and pity.

“So she’s really been captured by him after all, let’s search the rest of the cave and chest, maybe there’s something here that’ll help us find a path leading to her, even just a small clue could go a long way.” Creed says. Always the one trying to look at the better picture; shining light on a crappy situation.

“Yeah..” I said absentmindedly “let’s look.”

After what felt like hours of searching, I finally came across something. My mothers spell book, it has her name on the front in bold black letters. Athena kingslyn. I guess that’s her real last name. The book looks ancient, in an intriguing way, old leather binds the pages together.

“Come look at this.” I call over to Creed. Skimming my fingers along the cover. It’s so beautiful, I start skimming the first few pages seeing simpler spells like, blindness spell, forgetness spell, protection spell, as I keep scanning each page the spells get more and more complicated.

“What did you find?” Creed asks when he gets up to me.

“My mothers spell book… there are some very complicated spells In this.” I whisper out loud.

Creeds pov.

Lily can’t peel her eyes away from her mothers spell book. She keeps grazing her fingers along the seams and sides, she keeps muttering words along the lines of, amazing, wow, huh, I can’t believe this… I myself can't believe it either, I have no idea what’s going on and how important this spell book really is.

“Are you okay?” I ask Lily while placing my hand on her shoulder, she flinches slightly, startled because she was so caught up in her mind.

“Oh me? Yes, yes, I’m fine.” Lily mutters still engrossed in flipping through pages on the spell book. I sigh but walk away to continue our search around the cave, making sure we don’t miss anything. I’m looking along the cave's walls, not missing a single detail, when I come upon a spot that looks like it’s been touched frequently. I run my hand along it, pushing and grabbing trying to see if it’ll open a secret passage or something.

‘Maybe it’ll open for our mate, the blood magic could be keeping it locked, if it’s really there.’ Hunter speaks in my mind.

I can’t help but feel satisfied with his answer, I was truly blessed with an intelligent dragon.

“Lily, come over here. I might’ve found something.” I called over to her. She yells back a simple answer before finally putting away her mothers spell book and moving towards me.

“Do you see this?” I point towards the one spot on the cave wall, where it looks frequently touched. “It looks like someone’s even touched it within the last few days.. Hunter actually is the one who thinks there’s blood magic involved, maybe when you touch it it’ll open a secret passage, like when you touched the chests and armoires.” Lily's one eyebrow goes up slightly and she rubs her hands together, reaching one out towards the wall. When she slightly grazes her hand along it, it suddenly opens with alarming speed.

“Holy crap!” Me and Lily say in unison. Lily and I both start laughing, Lily squeezes my hand a bit before venturing her way towards the secret passageway.

“It looks and smells like some people went through here not too long ago..” Lily says while inspecting every last thing. “If I’m right they came through around three days ago. If we don’t hurry, all scents will die off and we’ll never find her.” Lily says worriedly.

“Let’s keep going then.” I encourage her.

Lily and I make small chit chat as we scan our surroundings, noting everything we see or find. Lily, not wanting to get distracted or forgetful usually just responds with mhms, yup or okay. I don’t mind, really, she’s trying to stay on her best game to find her mother, I would’ve done the same for mine.

“Creed over here, come look at this.” Lily yells over, I stop what I’m doing and go towards her to see what’s up. What Lilys looking at makes me kind of confused. It’s a painting, an older woman who kind of resembles Lily in a way, with some salt and pepper hair.

“I don’t know who she is, she does look a lot like me, I just have no idea who she is.” While Lily is speaking I notice how the eyes look weird.. moving. The eyes are moving!

“Lily..” I pause trying to think of the right words to use. “Can you keep talking?”

“What? What am I supposed to talk about..” she nervously laughed. While she’s nervously rambling I continue watching the eyes, they are definitely moving.

I put my hand over Lily's mouth, silencing her. I see her eyes widen in shock and I chuckle a little before gesturing towards the painting with my head, Lily turns her head back towards the painting and that’s when she notices the eyes. She moves closer to the wall, grabbing onto the sides of the painting slowly pulling it off of the wall, when the painting is fully away from the wall you can see the painting eyes were two small cameras, somewhere around here should be where the video feed is being kept.

“Keep searching, there’s a room around here somewhere, there’s video feed And if we find it maybe there’s more cameras around and it’ll show us who took your mother and where they went to. “ I say while scanning my surroundings.

We’ve been searching for a few hours now, with Lily having to look everywhere, even where I’ve already looked in case blood magic is involved, it’s been taking us three times longer to do anything. We’re both growing extremely frustrated, I can hear Lily sigh, losing hope. We don’t give up though, we keep going.

“Let’s check over here.. “ I point towards the one corner on the left, it has a spot in the bottom right corner that’s sticking out slightly, unlike anything else on the walls. Lily stops what she was doing collecting herself before coming over.

When she gets in front of the spot, she starts moving her hands around the area, trying to trigger any blood magic that might’ve been placed here, at first nothing happens and we both almost heave a sigh of disappointment but before we do, lily touches the small part on the bottom corner of the wall and piece by piece it starts shifting, until a small doorway is opened.

“There’s no way I'm fitting through that.” I blurt out. Lily laughs at me while holding her side.

“Yeah, I don’t think so either, I’ll go in and check it out, I’ll call out to you when I get in.” Lily says.

Lilys pov.

The look on Creed's face when he realized he wouldn’t be coming into the hidden room with me was comical. I’m squeezing my way  through this narrow passageway, thinking how smart my mother was to have done this; she was prepared, she knew what would happen one day.

I finally make it to the end where the surveillance footage is, I look around the small, cramped room noticing there’s four screens for four cameras, one is back where the painting was, one is pointing directly at Creed from the outside of this hidden room, the third is pointing towards what looks like the exit of this hidden passageway, I can see Creed pacing back and forth outside.

“I’m okay! There’s four cameras in total!” I yell out to him. You can see him physically relax on the camera when he hears my voice. “The last one looks like it’s pointing outside at the exit.” I squint at the screen noticing more blood on camera three and four. “We need to hurry and go Creed, it looks like they left!”