Free Web NovelChapter 220: Chapter 220: Arriving At The Seraphine Court
Eve’s POV
They left at dawn.
Silas was at the door when they came down. He’d been there for a while...she could tell by the way he was standing there.
He didn’t say much. He looked at Damian first, then Damon, something passing between the three of them that didn’t need words. Then he looked at Eve.
He pulled her in once. Held her for a moment.
She felt the bond between them...warm and steady and present.
He let her go and stepped back. His face was composed. She knew what was underneath it.
She picked up her bag.
They walked out.
Raphael had chosen the east courtyard for the portal.
Something about the stone there....old enough, he’d explained the night before, that it remembered when the boundary between realms was thinner than it was now. The explanation had made partial sense to Eve. She’d nodded and let him continue.
They assembled in the gray morning light. Eve, Damian, Damon, Raphael, Elena. Five bags between them. Raphael had been specific about what to bring...nothing unnecessary, nothing that marked them as people who had packed for uncertainty. They were arriving with intention, not luggage.
Damian stood with his arms loose at his sides, scanning the courtyard. Damon was eating an apple he’d apparently brought from the kitchen.
Raphael stood in the center of the courtyard and went still.
Then he raised his hands.
The air changed first. A pressure shift, subtle, the kind that preceded a storm except there was no storm coming. Then a sound....low and continuous, below the range of comfortable hearing....and then light. Gold and green, Raphael’s colors, threading through the air in front of him like he was pulling something open that didn’t want to be opened.
His jaw tightened.
The light pushed back against him. He pushed harder.
"Is it always like this?" Damon said quietly, beside Eve.
"No," Elena said. "Distance makes it harder."
Raphael’s hands were shaking slightly. Not much. Enough to notice.
The light split open.
Not dramatically....no explosion, no rush of wind. Just a tear in what was there, widening slowly into something that looked like a doorway except the other side wasn’t the estate wall. It was somewhere else entirely. Gold light. Architecture that didn’t match anything Eve had seen in the human world....high and pale and old in a way that had nothing to do with decay.
Raphael lowered his hands. His breathing was controlled and slightly too deliberate.
"It’ll hold for ten minutes," he said. "Move."
Elena went first, stepping through without hesitation. Damon went second....he paused at the threshold for exactly one second, looked at it, and then walked through.
Damian touched Eve’s arm briefly. "Together."
They stepped through.
The other side hit her immediately.
The air was different....denser, more present, like it had more substance than anything she’d breathed in twenty-three years of human life. The light was gold rather than gray. The stone beneath her feet was pale and smooth and very, very old.
She stopped.
Just for a moment. Just long enough to stand in it.
Her body knew this place. Not her mind....her mind had never been here, had no memory of corridors like these or light like this or air that felt like it recognized her back. But something underneath her mind, something that lived in the part of her that had received her parents’ knowledge through dreams, had been here before.
Or had always been here, in some form.
"Eve," Damian said. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com
"I know," she said. "I’m fine."
She wasn’t fine exactly. She was something else....something without a clean name. Standing in her parents’ world for the first time, with the gold light overhead pulling at something in her chest like a tide responding to the moon. freeweɓnovēl.coɱ
She breathed in once.
Then she started walking.
Raphael came through behind them. The portal closed immediately after a soft sound, barely there, like a door settling into its frame. He stood still with his eyes closed for a moment. Recovering.
"Where exactly are we?" Damon asked. He was looking at the corridor....high ceilings, pale stone, sconces that held light without flame or any visible source.
"The outer threshold," Raphael said. "Neutral ground. No faction controls this space."
"And from here?"
"Seraphine’s people meet us. We go directly to her chambers before we enter the outer halls." He opened his eyes. His color had evened out. "We don’t walk into those halls without establishing our presence with her first. The order of things matters here."
"Everything is the order of things with Court politics," Damon said.
"Yes," Raphael said.
Footsteps from the far end of the corridor.
Two figures moving quickly....dressed in deep blue, Seraphine’s colors, their pace efficient and deliberate. They stopped in front of the group and inclined their heads toward Raphael.
"Lord Raphael." The taller one, a woman with close-cropped silver hair. "Lady Seraphine is expecting you. She asks that you come directly. There have been developments in the outer halls this morning."
"What kind of developments," Damian said. Not a question exactly.
The woman glanced at him. Then back at Raphael.
"The Revolutionary faction has been active since dawn," she said. "Unusual for the hour. Lady Seraphine believes they received word of your arrival."
Raphael nodded once. "Lead the way."
The figures turned. The group fell in behind them.
Eve walked and kept her chin level and her pace steady and her expression somewhere between neutral and certain. She thought about what Raphael had said the night before...you cannot look like someone who is there to rescue a friend. You have to look like someone who has come to claim a throne. She turned it over in her mind and held onto it like a handle.
Damian moved up beside her. He didn’t say anything, just adjusted his position so he was slightly ahead of her left shoulder. Protective without announcing it. She’d watched him do this in rooms full of pack members and political representatives and people he didn’t trust. It was automatic.
She found it steadying.
Damon was on her right, his apple apparently abandoned somewhere in the transition between realms. He glanced at her sideways.
"You good?" he said quietly.
She thought about Silas at the estate door in the gray pre-dawn. The bond between them, warm and constant, present even now on the other side of a portal and whatever distance existed between realms.
She reached for it. Found it immediately.
There.
"Yes," she said.
Damon looked at her for a moment.
"Actually yes," she said.
"Okay," he said, and faced forward.
Ahead of them the corridor opened into something larger. The sound of it reached them first....voices, movement, the specific noise of a place that never fully went quiet. Eve kept her chin level and her pace steady.
The Seraphim Court.
She was here.
