I gulped and followed Mueller silently as he stomped off into the darkness without a care in the world. Though I knew I had nothing to fear, I couldn’t stop the shiver that started at the base of my neck and rippled down my back and to the tips of my toes.
We passed so many cells that I quickly lost count, but the good news was that they all seemed empty — until we abruptly reached the end of the hallway and came face-to-face with a hulking, solid steel door.
Mueller raised his ring of keys to the light. “You should step back while I open this. It swings out and there’s another barred door behind it. You can talk to him through that.”
“I can’t go in?”
“Not now. Sorry,” Mueller said as he continued searching. I took a few steps backward, but not far enough to miss anything. I’d just placed the tips of my toes back on the solid ground when I heard a sound that sounded suspiciously like sniffing.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve smelled you, but I would recognize your scent anywhere, Zoe, ma chérie,” a silky voice thick with a French accent cooed from behind me and I screamed and whirled to point my wand’s tip in its direction. A pair of bloody eyes like hot coals in the night raked over me through a tiny slit carved into a steel door not unlike the one that held Heath.
“But what’s this?” the vampire asked and raised his nostrils to the slit to suck in the air. “You smell… different, somehow. There’s a hint of new life.” He drew in another deep whiff. “You’re expecting, aren’t you? C’est magnifique. The scent suits you.”
“Shut it, Valentine,” Mueller ordered and stomped to the door to slam the cover of the slit shut. I stood staring at the space where Valentine Delacroix’s bloody eyes had been a moment prior, unable to gather my thoughts.
“Oh là là! That’s no way to treat a king, monsieur,” Valentine’s voice echoed from inside his cell, but Mueller ignored him.
It’d been nearly a year since I’d seen King Valentine, when he’d attacked and nearly killed me in Moon Grove’s graveyard, and I couldn’t say I was happy to have had another encounter.
“It’s a real tragedy about your friend, Ms. Clarke. Power corrupts even the greatest of men. I should know,” Valentine said and laughed.
“Ignore him. He’s just trying to get into your head. It’s what he does,” Mueller said and pulled me by the arm away from Valentine’s cell.
“Has he been down here the entire time?”
Mueller nodded. “We don’t know what else to do with him. He’s obviously far too dangerous to be free, and there’s no other facility that can safely hold him.”
As far as I was concerned, he could spend the rest of his eternal life rotting in his cell. I shuddered at the thought of how exactly Mueller had kept Valentine alive for the last year since he couldn’t feed. Instead, I focused on Heath.
Mueller finished opening Heath’s cell, and when I spotted him sitting with both hands chained to the far wall, it almost broke me. The sparkle of life and mischief that normally colored his eyes had vanished, replaced by a look of total defeat.
His head shot up at the noise of the cell door opening, and when he saw me standing with Mueller, Heath jerked to life and moved as close to us as his chains allowed. I glanced at Mueller, hoping he’d get the hint to leave us alone, but he shook his head.
“Sorry, no can do. What if he were to hypnotize you or something? You could free everyone down here, and then we’d have a real problem on our hands. Besides, anything you can say to him you can say in front of me. We’re on the same side here, right?”
I nodded. Though I would much rather have talked to Heath alone, I understood the need for caution. “Fine.”
“Here, have a seat,” Mueller said and pulled a wooden stool from the corner in the shadows. I gratefully lowered myself onto it and breathed a sigh of relief as the pressure on my feet dissolved.
“Zoe, I’m so glad to see you,” Heath said, on the verge of tears.
“Likewise, though I’m sure you’ve seen better days.”
He chuckled at the joke despite the situation, and a glimmer of his old joyfulness returned momentarily until he remembered where he was and why. “I didn’t do this. You have to believe me. You do, don’t you?”
I grimaced. “I’m not sure. I want to, believe me I do more than anything, but I can’t ignore how things looked.”
“I understand. You’re right to be skeptical. I would be the same way if our roles were reversed.”
“I don’t doubt it. The thing is, I feel like I know you pretty well now, and I’m having a hard time believing you’d murder your son, especially when you risked a lot to keep him out of trouble.”
“Thank you. I’m so glad to hear you say that. You more than anyone else should know that I don’t have it in me to hurt anyone, much less the ones I love.”
“So why don’t you tell me what happened then?”
“I can’t explain it, really. No matter how many ways I think of to tell the story, I know how crazy it sounds.”
“Try me. I’ve seen some crazy stuff before.”
Heath smiled, his eyes crinkling. “Without a doubt. Okay, I’ll give it a shot, but just hear me out, no matter how bizarre it gets, okay?”
“Deal.”
“Good. I’m sure you noticed the sudden temperature drop in the chamber moments before Adam’s death, right?”
“Yeah, but I thought it was just pregnancy chills. You felt that too?”
Heath nodded vigorously. “It wasn’t just you. That’s why I drew my wand. I couldn’t explain why, but I had the feeling that something bad was about to happen. Every hair on my body was on end.”
“Me too. So far, you aren’t telling me anything too weird.”
“Well, stay with me, because this is where it gets strange. As the candles were flickering, I swear to you and to Lilith on my honor that I saw someone or something moving near Adam, but before I could figure out what it was, everything went dark. There wasn’t anything I could do, and when I heard his scream, I…” he trailed.
“So, what are you saying? That someone snuck over to him in the confusion?”
Heath shrugged. “I’m not sure. They could have. Like I said, I didn’t get a good look at anything, but I could tell from the way he’d died — with no blood or signs of physical harm — that who or whatever attacked him did it with magic.”
“How? Aside from the Council, no one in the room had wands. The gargoyles confiscated them all—” I cut myself off as I realized what Heath was getting at. “Wait, you aren’t suggesting someone on the Council might’ve done this, are you?”
“It’s a strong possibility. The only other person in the room who could’ve used magic was Virgil, Adam’s lawyer.”
“I didn’t know demons had any magical capabilities at all.”
Heath nodded. “They do. They’re one of the more powerful paranormal species, which is part of the reason they rarely mingle with other paranormals. They’re frequently discriminated against and sometimes attacked.”