Cole stared at the flames, his eyes wide. “It’s the fire,” he said in a breathless voice. “It attracts despair.” Even though he was saying the words, he was staring at the spot where the Wanderer had burned as if he couldn’t believe it.
Max stood nearby. “Coming straight from the Ring of Wind, it must’ve taken the Wanderer by surprise. He couldn’t fight it.”
Cole nodded. “It’s a good reminder. We have to be ready to feel the effects of the fire.”
I looked from Cole to Max and back to Cole again. “You mean … the Wanderer felt so much despair that he just voluntarily jumped into a wall of flames?”
Nobody answered me.
“How does fire do that?”
Cole finally tore his gaze from the wall. “It’s Everneath fire, which means it’s linked to emotion. Fires destroy things completely. Even the things that survive it are still changed on an elemental level. They are brittle and broken and ready to snap. In this way, fire is so similar to despair. If unchecked, despair will consume every other emotion, leaving them all only fragile shells. Fire in the Everneath draws out the fire of despair inside of you.”
“We have to move,” Max said.
I looked at the narrow pathway, trying to forget the sizzling sound of skin burning. The flames shot out from the walls at random intervals. There would be no way to anticipate a sudden flare bursting from one side to the other. I couldn’t see how we could avoid getting burned, no matter how hard we tried to stay in the middle.
The little spark of energy I had left turned to ash in the face of the fire. There was no way we wouldn’t burn.
My shoulders sank. The adrenaline that had kept me going up until this point was gone. Drained.
Cole stood beside me as if he could read my thoughts. “We stay in the middle, Nik.” His face was a sober mask. “We can do this. We just have to stay focused.”
I closed my eyes. “How?”
“Same as we’ve been doing this whole time. We follow your tether.”
My tether. My gaze went from the tether at my feet to the scorching pathway ahead of us. I was going to lead us down it, knowing the whole time that Jack hadn’t shown up in my dreams last night. Would Cole follow if he knew the truth? Or would he say it was a lost cause?
I allowed myself only a moment of guilt that I was keeping the secret from Cole. Maybe Jack wasn’t dead. But Cole would never attempt the Ring of Fire on a “maybe.”
“Which way, Nik?” Cole asked. I looked at his face. He trusted me now, I thought. He would expect me to tell him the truth.
I glanced at my tether. “That way,” I said, pointing down one of the fiery corridors.
Cole nodded. “Let’s move.”
The going was slow. Max stayed in front, I was in the middle, and Cole brought up the rear. Our steps were careful. One wayward mistake and our shirts would get singed.
At first I was good at dodging the sparks that flew our way and staying in the middle. But the extra effort took its toll on me. After a particularly narrow section, I blinked a little too long and stepped to the side.
I heard the sizzle before I felt it. Somewhere near the right side of my face. Cole tackled me to the ground, escaped out of his leather jacket, ripped off his shirt, and smothered the flames on my arm. The whole thing took place in about a second.
When the flames were out, we sat there panting.
And then the pain hit.
I screamed and tried to rip off my sleeve, but Cole grabbed my wrist and pinned it against my side. “You’ll rip the skin off too,” he said.
I strained my neck, trying to see the damage; but the angle made it difficult. The fire had gotten my upper shoulder and neck.
“Is it bad?” I asked through clenched teeth.
“No.” But the tightness around his eyes told a different story. “You feel the pain, right?”
I nodded, unable to get a normal sound out.
“That’s good. If the burn was really deep, it would’ve destroyed your neurons, and your brain wouldn’t get the message that it hurts.”
I blew out a few breaths. “My brain definitely got the message,” I said with a whimper.
“Good.”
He helped me up, guiding me toward the center so I could avoid the flames that seemed to be reaching for me now, as if they were attracted to the burn. Cole put on his jacket and threw his shirt into the flames. Again I tried to crane my neck to get a good look at the damage.
“Stop looking at it,” Cole commanded. “Focus on walking.”
I turned to face him, and he raised an eyebrow at my appearance. “What is it?” I said.
He bit his lip. “It’s okay. I always thought you should have short hair.”
My hand flew up to the side of my head. I felt brittle, curly strands that fell away as I touched them.
Cole looked at me anxiously, probably wondering what my reaction would be.
I gave a halfhearted laugh, which dissolved into tears. I turned away. Seriously? It was the hair I was crying over?
No. The hair was just the breaking point.
I sniffed. And then I sank to the ground. The movement was the exact opposite of what I was telling my muscles to do. My brain was screaming at them to walk, but I couldn’t move any farther.
Cole immediately crouched down and put a hand on my shoulder. “It’ll grow back, Nik.”
“It’s not about the hair.” I shoved the palms of my hands into my eyes, plugging the tears.
He put his arm around me, careful to avoid the burn, and let my head fall on his shoulder. “I know you’re tired. I’m tired too. You don’t have to think about making it through the labyrinth or conquering another ring. All you have to think about is putting one foot in front of the other.”
“I’m trying,” I said with a shaky voice. “It’s my stupid legs. They won’t … w-w-work.” Now I was stuttering. What was my problem? It was Jack we were trying to save, and Cole was giving me a pep talk?
And yet here we were. My arm felt as if a pit bull had sunk in its teeth and refused to let go. My legs felt like two barrels of cement, and Cole could make me bald simply by blowing on my hair.
But my exhaustion went even further than that. “Cole, is this the despair?”
He sighed. “Don’t think about it.”
“I can’t not think about it.” The words were harsh and sharp.
Cole winced at the acid in my voice, and I noticed the evidence of the fire’s work on his face. The darkness in his eyes. The accentuated shadows under his cheekbones. The defeat in his posture.
Max had signs of it too, in the frown lines that ran deeper than usual.
But neither of them was incapacitated by it. I wondered how bad I looked, with half of my hair and the smoke still rising from my arm.
“Well, that’s just great. How are we supposed to rally against all this despair?” I said.
Cole’s lip twitched microscopically. “Now, Nik. That’s the despair talking. Don’t think about it.”
“But—”
“Did I ever tell you about how I became an Everliving?” he interrupted.
“No,” I said. “You never wanted to talk about it.”
“Did I ever tell you I was a Viking?”
I lifted my head off his shoulder and wiped underneath my eye. “No.”
“You’re going to love this story.” He smiled despite the strain on his face and hoisted me up to a standing position, which I wouldn’t have thought was possible until I was actually standing. “This story has everything. Intrigue. Tension.”
“Romance,” Max interjected.
Cole rolled his eyes. And with his hand on my good shoulder, he turned me around and pointed me in the right direction, then gave my back a gentle nudge and got me going again.
“And it all started centuries ago, with a little blond boy skipping through the fields of Norway.”
I turned and gave him a quizzical look, but he waved his hand in a Watch where you’re walking sort of way.
“Yes, Nik. This jackass—who according to you has no morals—was once a little boy.” His tone was light, and it was working. I was putting one foot in front of the other.
“How does a Viking get mixed up in the Everneath?” I said, my voice sounding noticeably stronger.
But he was quiet for a long time. I glanced backward to see him rolling a small, flat rock between his fingers as he used to do with his guitar pick. I realized he was probably struggling to carry on just as I was. Max called over his shoulder, “Just tell her, Cole.”
Cole threw the rock, pinging it off of Max’s head. Max gave an exhausted laugh and rubbed the spot the rock had hit. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“Why would you be embarrassed?” I said.
Max answered. “He came over for a girl.” He sounded as if he were ten years old when he said it.
I stopped. “What?”
Cole kept walking, making no attempt to slow down. I started up again.
“You were in love?” I said.
“Yes,” Max answered, and at the same time Cole said, “No.”
I smiled. “This is getting good. I’m totally focusing.” And it was true. I was. The pain in my shoulder seemed duller and the cement in my legs more manageable. “Keep going.”
“He fell for her hard,” Max said. “She came up in a skimpy little Viking outfit—”
“Shut up, Max!” Cole said, exasperated but grinning. “I’ll tell the story.”
“Good,” Max said.
“Her name was Gynna, and she wasn’t wearing a skimpy little Viking outfit. There’s no such thing as a skimpy little Viking outfit. Vikings are cold. Anyway, I was working as an apprentice to one of the merchants in my village when she showed up one day. And it went on from there.”
He was quiet again, and it sounded as if he was finished. But I wanted more. “That’s not a good story. That’s girl meets boy. I want the meat.”
“There is no meat.”
I whipped around, and Cole nearly ran into me. I put a finger on his chest. “For a split second there I forgot about the blistering pain in my shoulder and the fireballs licking at my feet. Unless you want to make a permanent home in the Ring of Fire, you’d better keep talking.”
A smile played at the edges of his lips. “Whatever you say.”
I turned around and started walking again, and Cole continued. “Gynna came to our storefront. She looked lost. She had a bag full of money, all sorts of coins from all over the world. Coins I had never seen. Master Olnaf ordered me to take her to the back room, where we kept all of our reference books, to try to document each of her coins. We spent a lot of days in that room.”
“Is that a euphemism?” I looked back.
He raised an eyebrow. “If by ‘euphemism’ you mean we spent hours and hours researching the origins of ancient coins, then yes, it’s a euphemism. Anyway, she seemed interested in me. She was the first person to ask me questions about my life, my family, my dreams. And every time she was near me, my worries seemed to disappear. Now, of course, I know she was able to siphon off the worst of my emotions. But at the time I was fooled into thinking it was friendship.”
“You mean love,” Max interjected.
I glanced back and caught Cole glaring at Max. “Yes. I was in love with her. And when she asked me to follow her to the Everneath, I didn’t hesitate. I had no family. My parents were dead, and my brothers had been shipped off to different parts of the country.”
“So she took you to Feed on you?” I never would’ve imagined that Cole had been through a Feed.
“No. She took me for the sole purpose of bringing me over. To become an Everliving. But it wasn’t long before I realized why she had done it.”
“And why was that?”
“She wanted out.”
I paused. “Out? Out of what? Out of the Everneath? Couldn’t she just go to the Surface?”
“She wanted out of … immortality.”
“What do you mean?”
He exhaled. “She didn’t want to live like this anymore. She wanted to break her own heart.”
“Well then, why didn’t she? Didn’t she have a pick, or something, like you?”
“Yes, but simply breaking her Surface heart wouldn’t kill her. Everlivings have two hearts.”
I stopped dead in my tracks and stared at him. “Two hearts?” Was that why the Wanderer had used that odd phrase Surface heart? “You mean you have more than one heart?”
“Yes, that’s traditionally what the number two means. When we become Everliving, our hearts split in two, creating a Surface one, which we carry with us, and an Everneath one, which goes straight to a vault held in the High Court. They are two halves of a whole heart.”
“So … that night at your condo … when we tried to …”
“Kill me by breaking my heart? I remember. No, even if you had broken my pick, you wouldn’t have killed me. All you would have done is made it impossible for me to travel back and forth between the Everneath and the Surface.”