Getting Closer

‘December 27th, 2018’

‘North Pole’

Eve

As soon as Llinos teleported us to the North Pole, we landed on ice.

I looked around. All there was, for as far as the eye could see, was ice.

“We’re here,” Llinos sang out, and Raphael and I locked eyes.

I was too anxious to feel excited, anxious that Barron had tricked us again. That Whitethorn was a decoy.

Or worse, that Snow was here, and she was okay, but she knew that I’d failed at protecting her. And she’d never forgive me because of it.

Or the worst option… that Snow ~was~ here… but she was hurt beyond measure.

Raphael wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Come on,” he said. “Where’s Whitethorn?” he asked Llinos.

Llinos pointed at something in the distance. It looked big, like a wood cabin.

We started walking toward it.

As we got closer, I could sense insanely intense power coming from inside. A type of power I’d never felt before, not even when I’d come across Barron.

“I feel it too.” Llinos nodded at me before I could say anything.

We approached the door. I looked back at them.

Raphael took a step closer to me, as if to say that he was ready. But Llinos just shrugged. “I’m not coming inside.”

“What do you mean you’re not coming inside?” Raphael demanded.

“I said I’d take you to Whitethorn and then to Barron. I’ve taken you to their doorstep. Don’t mistake me for a good Deity, now, pretty boy, because that I am not. I am neutral, through and through. Do something for me and I’ll do something for you. But that is it,” she said, and a moment later, she was gone.

I didn’t have time to worry, not about how we’d fare once we got inside or about how we’d get back home once we defeated Barron.

No, there was no time left. Because Snow was inside, and she’d been waiting long enough.

I took a deep breath, and then I shoved the door open and stepped inside.

Raphael and I looked around, dumbfounded. It was dark and cold inside, but completely devoid of anything.

“This can’t be right,” I whispered. But then I walked farther into the cabin, and I felt something. Something magical.

“Wait a second,” I exclaimed, walking right over to the cabin’s corner.

I closed my eyes and started kneeling to the floor.

Then my eyes flashed open, and I was knocking on the ground.

I heard the hollow sound. Raphael did too. In the next instant I was pulling the trap door up, tossing it over with a thud.

There it was.

The cabin had a basement.

He looked at me, and I nodded. Without wasting another second, I started walking down the stairs below the trap door.

As dark as the cabin was, the staircase was even darker. Pitch-black would still be too light to describe it.

The darkness was thick and all-consuming, like it was sucking the light out of us as we descended farther.

“You okay?” I heard Raphael ask from behind me.

“It’s dark,” I said. “Hold on,” I told him, concentrating on my right hand.

I watched as it sprouted a flame, immediately illuminating my surroundings.

After drinking the pyromancer’s blood, I’d inherited his power. I just hadn’t found a good time to use it yet.

“Better?” I asked him, holding the flame above my head.

“Thanks,” he said back.

We continued down the stairs for what felt like tens of minutes. With the light, I could see it was a spiral staircase, but it didn’t seem to have an end.

My impatience was turning into frustration, and I knew I was going to lose it if we didn’t reach the end soon.

But then something happened. Something was charging at me. A face. A man.

“AGGGHHHH!” he screamed as he lunged up the stairs, right into me.

I pushed the fire in my palm into his face and he screamed again, louder, as his flesh seared.

I leapt onto him.

“EVE!” Raphael yelled from behind me, but I ignored him.

I tumbled down the stairs with Whitethorn rolling with me, and when we got to the bottom, I threw my scythe ring into the air. Ready to finish this once and for all.

“Say goodbye, Whitethorn.”

His eyes bore into me then. They were bright red, looking every bit as demonic as the smile on his face.

“He was a good boy,” Whitethorn said.

“What?”

“He was a very good boy,” he repeated. And then he started to laugh. A guttural, deep, evil laugh.

I couldn’t take it. The laugh was consuming me. I heard it in every cell in my body. It was causing my head to spin, my sight to blur.

~What is he doing?~

I felt hands around my neck, and they started to squeeze.

“EVE!” Raphael called to me again, and it was enough to remind me of the scythe in my hand.

My vision was fading. Everything was fading. But with everything I had, I thrust the scythe into the body on top of me.

“URGH!” he yelled as he stopped laughing, as he rolled off me.

~Thud.~ His body landed on the cold basement floor.

Silence filled my ears. My vision came back, and my head stopped pounding. Raphael was running to me, grabbing me, picking me up. “You did it. You killed Whitethorn.”

But I didn’t have time to feel happy. Because that was when I looked around us, in the dusty basement. And that was when I saw it.

The crate that spanned a third of the room.

It had metal bars on every side, and they went all the way up to the ceiling.

And inside the crate?

A young girl.

She had blonde hair and pale skin.

I ran to her, gulping back air, and realized she looked about fourteen. She was beautiful.

“Why, hello, Eve,” I heard from behind me.

I whipped my head around, holding the flame in the direction of the voice, and there was Barron. Sitting on a rocking chair, rocking back and forth without a care in the world.

“You killed my pet.”

“Are you waiting for an apology?” I lifted my finger and pointed at the crate across from me, where Snow was locked inside.

My finger traveled along the crate’s circumference, and as it did, the metal bars sliced open.

The bars dropped to the ground, freeing Snow from captivity. I could see her eyes widen. She didn’t know what was happening.

She didn’t even know who I was.

~How can she?~

Before I ran to her, before I had the chance to get emotional, I pointed my finger right at her. Focusing, I sent some force into her psyche, strong enough to knock her out.

~Yes, I knocked out my own daughter.~

So she wouldn’t have to see what was about to go down.

“Was that your mommy of the year move?” Barron asked, slowly clapping his hands together.

I turned back to face him, taking a few calculated steps closer. I noticed Raphael standing near the base of the staircase, waiting to see what I did.

As soon as I noticed him, Barron did too. “Ah, you brought your lover. All alive and well, I see?”

“Screw your mission. Screw you. I’m taking Snow with me. This is all ending ~now,~” I thundered. Barron just smiled.

“I don’t think so. Not that easily. Now tell me, Eve, does your little Alpha boy know everything?”

I stared right at Barron.

I’d been waiting for this moment for nearly five centuries. I wasn’t about to look away.

“He knows enough.” I glared.

“Well, why don’t we go ahead and fill in the blank areas?”

“What’s he talking about, Eve?” Raphael asked, walking over to where I was.

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“No, I think we should talk about it now,” Barron exclaimed, clapping his hands together.

“I think you’ve done enough talking,” I said, lunging for the Deity.

But before I could traverse the room and reach him, he locked his eyes on me, freezing me in my tracks. The same way he’d done when I was fifteen years old.

“Now, Eve, you’ve gotten far too confident. You might be a powerful little Devil, but you should remember who I am.”

“Unfreeze her.” Raphael growled, his eyes nearly popping out of his head. I’d never seen him so enraged before.

“Or else what, little Alpha boy?”

That was all it took.

I watched, frozen, as Raphael dove toward Barron, but it looked like Barron couldn’t trap him at the same time as he was freezing me. So Raphael tackled the Deity to the ground.

They were rolling around, each of them landing punches and kicks.

I wanted to be the one punching Barron Von Logia! I’d waited five centuries, and ~for what?~ For front row seats to someone else beating the shit out of him?

But then I watched in horror as Barron slid out from under Raphael, as he took a cane out from behind the rocking chair and pointed it at my mate.

The cane transformed into a scythe before my eyes, just the same way the ring Llinos had given me transformed into a scythe when I needed it to.

Raphael’s eyes widened.

He’d seen me use my scythe before. He knew those weapons were no joke.

“Here’s the deal, lady and gentleman,” Barron announced. “You both know Snow is important to me. She is a worthwhile investment. She will make the best soldier I’ve ever had. When she’s ready.”

“What do you mean, ready?” Raphael hollered from the floor. I was still frozen, so he was asking the question for me.

“You see, she’s been in this cell for almost five centuries now. But still, she’s not fully let go of her old life.”

My heart sank.

My nightmares had been right. Snow had been trapped right here for almost five hundred years.

Barron continued. “Because she is so powerful, I can’t control her completely—not how I’d like to, anyway—until she lets go of her past.”

~So Snow has been fighting Barron off in her own way.~

I felt pride swell through my veins—so much pride I thought it was going to rip through me, and that was enough to break me free of Barron’s hold.

I broke out of the freeze, and I lunged for him once again.

He didn’t see me coming this time, so I managed to knock him back to the ground.

I heard Raphael come toward us from behind me, and then he was holding Barron’s shoulders to the floor, letting me send punch after punch into Barron’s face.

“You BASTARD!” I screamed out. “THIS LITTLE GIRL HAD MORE FIGHT IN YOU THAN YOU’VE EVER HAD! YOU TRIED TO STEAL MY DAUGHTER, TO MAKE HER YOUR SOLDIER, AND SHE BEAT YOU! SHE BEAT YOU!”

But then Barron disappeared.

In the span of an instant, he was just… gone.

“Where’d he go?” I demanded.

Raphael looked around, just as confused as me.

“Take her,” I said, motioning to Snow. “Take her and shift and run out of here! Get her back to the Pack House!”

“No, Eve, I can’t leave you.”

I grabbed his hands, kissing him quickly one last time.

“If this is the last thing you ever do for me, it will be enough. Do you understand me? This is all I need. It’s all I need from you.”

Raphael nodded. And then, before I could change my mind, I ran up the stairs and out of the cabin.

When I was back on the ice outside, I called out. “Barron! It’s just me now. Come out!” I waited.

There was no response. So I tried again. “You want to fight fair? I’m ready to fight fair.”

I scanned the ice. Nothing.

“Okay, let’s fight fair,” a voice said from behind me. I turned around. And there he was.

“Raphael’s leaving the wood cabin with Snow now. Turn around and see, or don’t. It doesn’t matter. What matters is you know that I’ll never stop hunting you three.”

I didn’t turn around.

I wasn’t going to take my eyes off Barron Von Logia until I had him defeated.

“You’re all talk.”

“Oh, I do lots of acting. It’s just behind the scenes. Say, 1739, for instance. I was in Madrid. So was Raphael, actually. What a coincidence. Only, it wasn’t a coincidence. See, I had Anthony Whitethorn with me. I believe you met him. He was the memory thief. He stole one of Raphael’s memories.”

I could feel my heartbeat quicken. Immediately I knew what Barron was about to say.

“The Angeline memory,” I choked out.

“That’s right. He stole the Angeline memory.”

“So Raphael has no idea that we met in the 1500s. That he took my virginity and left me.”

“None at all, Eve. None at all.” Barron cleared his throat, pulling his cane out from behind his back. “Now, are we going to fight or what?”