Total pages in book: 158
Estimated words: 145341 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 727(@200wpm)___ 581(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 145341 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 727(@200wpm)___ 581(@250wpm)___ 484(@300wpm)
Afanasiv saw the uneasiness on her face. “You cannot. We need to take precautions. A part of you will be with me, so you’ll know if you will need to escape quickly. This is a dangerous place. I cannot emphasize that enough. I have demons in me; you do not.”
Vasilisa nodded. “Go then. Hurry back to me.”
He turned away from her, one of the most difficult things he’d ever had to do. He knew what it was like in the underworld. It hadn’t been easy escaping. He’d been there with his physical body. This time he was only taking his spirit. That gave him both advantages and disadvantages. He lay down on the cot, stretching out to full length, and—without allowing further thought on the subject—shed his physical body.
Vasilisa touched his mind. Afanasiv felt her entrance, that sweet feminine brush along the walls of his brain. So light. Not tentative. She was never that. She knew what she wanted, and she acted with confidence most of the time. She generally filled every empty, lonely space with her energy, making him feel whole and complete. Right now, she found a very small space, barely there, and fit her spirit inside it.
He moved fast. He knew exactly where the fault line was, and he hastened to it. Vasilisa would be exposed, alone out in the wild while she sealed the long fissure and then set the safeguards for the cabin. Afanasiv wanted to quickly disappear into the underworld so she wasn’t exposed aboveground for too long.
He didn’t wait or hesitate. A single spirit, one already possessing demon properties, would slip past the guardians easily—and he did. The fetid odors didn’t get to him the way they had his physical body when he’d been there before. He could separate the smells of blood and sweat and agony, even fear and terror. There were levels of all of those things and scents to each that could easily debilitate one.
In his spirit form, he was wide open to the suffering and agony of those held in the underworld. He felt anguish and fear bombarding him from every direction. The hopelessness of those in torment and misery was debilitating. Worse, those sounds and feelings, amplified by his ability to feel emotions, triggered pieces of his memories to come alive to taunt him. His lifemate hadn’t gone back far enough. There had been more than one visit to the underworld, and there had been many reasons to shut, lock and barricade the doors to those memories.
He knew where the prisoners were kept, at least the ones that Lilith took an interest in. These prisoners weren’t the lucky ones that were kept in cages and mostly forgotten. These were men and women and sometimes even children she had tortured for her own pleasure or because they committed some infraction against her. He hurried past several sentries, down a long corridor, until he could hear the moans and despairing cries of the captives locked in their cells.
He stopped his forward progress near the cell of a young woman dressed in torn clothing. Her dress had once been a beautiful gown, one she might have worn to a party, but it was in tatters and smeared with blood in some places, and in others, the blood was thicker and much more of a bright crimson. She rocked herself back and forth in an effort to self-soothe or run away from the pain she obviously felt.
“Karine, you must look at me,” a male voice commanded.
The girl shook her head. “Don’t talk to me. You’re an illusion. I refuse to do one single thing you want me to do. I will not believe Grigor would turn on his people. I will not believe he would go back on his word to me. Beat me to death. Kill me right now. I will not do what you want me to do. I will not say what you want me to say.”
Afanasiv liked her at once. She was a spunky little thing. He even saw the glow that Grigor had told his twin brother about. She did shine from the inside out.
“I am only here because I thought I would be able to rescue you from this terrible place,” Grigor explained. “My aunt Olga seems to have betrayed our family.”
Karine’s gaze leapt to Grigor’s face. For the first time, she looked as if she had hope. “Grigor? Is that really you? You came to this awful place to rescue me?”
“It wasn’t one of my better ideas,” he conceded. He looked around him. “They’re watching us and recording everything we say and do.”
“What do they want?”
“I don’t know yet. But something from my family. I think my older brother is here as well. I didn’t see him, but I swore I heard him at one point. If they have him, they have a tiger by the tail and don’t yet know it.”