Page 56 of Broken Hearted
I pushed my way beside him, hugging the wall, and my mouth opened in shock when I caught sight of what was before us.Oh, no, was right. How could we make it through a maze that size in time?
“Eight minutes. We should split up, but I can’t bear the thought of you getting lost in there,” he declared.
He grabbed my hand tightly, and I peered out at the labyrinth before us. We were standing atop a set of stairs that led down to a cave with high stone-walled passages that twisted and turned and went on and on into the distance. It reminded me of the one I used to run around in as a child, but bigger, and mine was made of ice. And in the very center of the labyrinth in front of us was a blue, glowing crystal of some sort that was hard to fully see from here.
The belly of the sea.
“Can we memorize the path?” I asked trying to spot the openings to the center. Left, left, right. No, dead end. Left, left, left, then right—
“No. We need to just go. Maybe you can use your magic to create an ice stair and we can climb up and see where we are at every few turns.
I grinned. He was a genius. “I can do better than that.”
I moved past him and held up my hands, intending to make an ice shelf that I could push over to the center and then drop us down, but the second I stepped on the top stair, the shard I’d been using as a weapon fell from my palm, melted, the water forming a puddle at my feet.
Adrien frowned, stepping beside me. We both pulled for our magic, but nothing happened.
Adrien shook his head. “We can’t use magic here.”
“But we have to use magic to unlock the crystal.”
Adrien glanced at the center of the labyrinth. “Let’s hope once we get there we can. Come on. Seven minutes.” He grabbed my hand, and we ran down the steps and into the unknown.
Chapter Eighteen
Adrien kept his hand clamped around mine as we raced through the labyrinth.
Left. Left. Right. Left. Right. Dead End.
Right. Left. Right. Dead End.
Right. Right. Right. Dead End.
Anxiety churned in my gut as the minutes ticked by, and we kept hitting dead ends.
Finally, I came up short, forcing Adrien to stop. “This isn’t working,” I told him. “We’ll never find the right path like this. At least not in time.”
“You’re right,” Adrien said, running a hand through his damp hair. Worry was etched into the dips and contours of his face. Neither one of us knew what to do, but we had to figure it out, and fast.
I don’t know what made me think to do it, but I reached into my satchel and pulled out the Shadow Heart. My eyes grew when I saw a faint light in the middle of the black crystal. A spark of blue that pulsated like a weak heartbeat.
I took three steps forward, and the pulses quickened.
“Adrien!” I spun back to him, holding the Shadow Heart up between us.
“Keep going,” he said. He’d been watching over my shoulder.
I nodded and turned back around, heading in that direction. The light within the Shadow Heart started to intensify as well as the speed of the beats. I jogged past a turn and the glow dimmed, and so I backtracked and it brightened, seeming to urge me in the right direction.
My own heart rate started to pick up as I dared to hope that the Shadow Heart was leading us where we needed to go. Adrien stayed on my heels as I followed the crystal’s directions. We made two right turns, three left turns, and then another right and suddenly we were there, in the center of the maze and facing the large blue crystal I’d seen before we entered the labyrinth.
The Shadow Heart was now so bright that it cast a blue light over me. Its frantic beats matched my own. But now that we were here, what should we do?
The Wise Ones had been frustratingly vague in their instructions. They’d only told me to take the Shadow Heart to the belly of the sea and combine my magic with my mate’s. But I didn’t know any specifics. And all of this would only work if Adrien and I truly were mates.
Were we supposed to place the Shadow Heart somewhere? How did we combine our magic? Did we need to somehow push our magic into the Shadow Heart or just meld our magic together? I had more questions than answers, and that made me feel like even though we’d come this far, we were still going to fail.
As I stood steeped in indecision, Adrien was inspecting thelarge blue crystal, running his hands over the smooth and angular surface. He seemed to have found something because he stopped and called me over. I was at his side in an instant.
