Page 110 of Incoronate
“Jemma.” Trace pushed up onto one elbow, the disorientation clearing from his face as his eyes moved over me, then around us, then back to me. “What’s going on?” He was already reaching for my arm, already trying to make his voice steady for my benefit. “What happened? Where are we?”
Dominic was already on his feet.
He turned in a slow, full circle, his jaw tight, his eyes moving across the landscape with the kind of methodical attention that meant he was cataloguing everything. He looked at the sky. He looked at the ground. He looked at the distance, at those shapes that had fooled me into thinking they were hills, and something changed in his face. Every line of him went very still.
He didn’t say anything, but I knew he knew.
He always knew.
“We’re trapped…he tricked me. He, he—” The words came out broken, stumbling over each other. “He said William wanted a meeting. I didn’t want to go. He threatened to use Cinderdust on you, and I…he…we…”
“Hey.” Trace sat up fully and caught my chin between his fingers, tilting my face to his. “You’re freaking out. Breathe, okay? Just look at me and breathe.”
“I can’t breathe, Trace. I can’t!” A sob cracked through the middle of it. “We’re in Sanguinarium!”
Trace froze as I continued crying and hyperventilating.
“Sanguinar—” He cut himself off as though the very idea of it were preposterous. “That’s impossible, Jemma.”
“Is it?Is it?” I sucked in a ragged breath, gesturing at the horizon with a hand that wouldn’t quite stop trembling. “Because it doesn’t look impossible from where I’m sitting. Those aren’t hills, Trace. They’re mountains of bodies. Bodies!”
Trace’s gaze moved past my shoulder, slowly, the way you looked at something you were bracing yourself to confirm. His eyes tracked the distance, and I watched the moment it landed, the flicker in his expression flattening into something carefully contained.
“We’re in a fucking vampire graveyard with no way out!” I shouted, my voice coming out far too loud and fast to be helpful in any way at all.
“Come on. Look at me,” he said, turning away from the horrifying hellscape and focusing his eyes on me. On calming me. He picked up my hand and squeezed it, letting his energy flow into me through our bond. My skin insanely hummed at the contact. “That’s it. Just breath, nice and slow.”
The crimson sky sat above us, indifferent and absolute. Somewhere in the distance, those shapes rose against it and didn’t move. I made myself stop looking at them and did what he told me to do, focusing only on his face and our bond and the way he pushed his calming energy into me.
I hated that it worked, hated how badly I needed it to, but I kept my eyes on his and followed the rhythm he was setting,one breath and then another, my chest gradually loosening its grip on itself.
“What are we going to do?” The question came out far more hopeless than I intended, scraped hollow by everything clamoring underneath it.
Trace exhaled, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “I’m not sure yet.” His forehead furrowed as his gaze flicked briefly to the landscape again before coming back to me. “Have you tried porting out?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t done anything except this,” I said, and made a vague gesture at myself, sitting on the ground with a tear-streaked face.
Something soft moved through his expression. “Alright. Let me try.”
He looked up at Dominic, who gave a short nod, and then Trace closed his eyes. The air around him went still, the space almost seeming to draw in on itself. A beat passed. Then another.
Nothing happened.
His jaw hardened. He opened his eyes and looked out at the ground a few feet away, studying a bare patch of earth as if committing it to memory. He inhaled once, sharply, then shut his eyes again.
Nothing.
He opened his eyes. The look on his face was one I recognized: the familiar stillness of someone absorbing something they didn’t want to be true. “It won’t hold,” he said. “I can’t move through space or time. Nothing’s connecting.”
“Oh, god.” My stomach dropped clean out of me. “We’re never getting out of here!”
“Angel.” Dominic’s voice was low and controlled, but something in the tone of it made the back of my neck prickle. “I need you to keep your voice down.”
Trace looked up at him. “Why?”
Dominic’s gaze moved across the landscape in a long, careful sweep before it came back to us. He didn’t answer immediately. He was still watching the distance with those dark, assessing eyes, the way he watched things he hadn’t finished deciding about yet. “If she was able to be ported here without needing to be a Revenant or incapacitated then it only stands to reason that she’s likely not the first or the last.”
“You’re saying we’re not alone,” surmised Trace.
