The Rose Society (The Young Elites #2)(61)

“North, south, west, east,” he murmurs to himself as he goes. “The Piazza of Three Angels, the Canterino Canal, the statue to Holy Sapientus.” The landmarks appear in his mind in a map. He inches along in the blackness, completely blind. Glittering threads of energy flicker all around him, connecting everything to everything else, however faintly. He reaches out and tugs gently on them, feeling the way the energy of the air connects to the walls, to the aboveground. If there were even a bit of light, he knows he would see his breath rising in clouds before him, warming the icy air.

“Left. Right. Right. Straight.”

The labyrinth continues to branch as he goes farther down. He has never been here during such heavy rain before. Sometimes, water sloshes up to his knees. If parts of the tunnels are flooded, I might trap myself in a corner and drown. Raffaele forces the thought away and replaces it with a still surface, a calm to keep the panic at bay. He keeps moving, relying only on his hand on the wall and the map of threads in his mind. How did such a storm like this come so suddenly?

Left. Left. Straight. Right.

Abruptly, Raffaele pauses. Frowns. It lasts only an instant, a fleeting moment of someone’s energy from the surface. He waits for a second, reaching tentatively out with his own power. Strange. And familiar.

But the feeling has already faded away, and the storm returns in full force.

Raffaele hesitates awhile longer, until the water forces him to continue moving again. He shakes his head. The threads of energy in the storm are overwhelming in their power—they must be distracting him. Or perhaps it is the thought of what he is about to participate in, what may happen in mere hours.

The thought of Enzo returning.

Raffaele pauses again, steadying himself against the wet walls, and closes his eyes. Again, he thinks of the calm surface. He stills, then continues on.

Finally, he reaches a spot in the darkness where the tunnel ends in a wall. Beyond it is an overwhelming pressure, the unmistakable energy of countless drops of water all tied to one another, the lake in the center of the Estenzian arena. Raffaele pauses, then heads back several paces until he finds an uneven set of stones, the hands of Moritas posted at the end of every catacomb path, and then the tiny, winding steps beside them that lead up to the surface.

He emerges into the dark recesses of the arena’s enormous canals, but after so long in complete blackness, the night almost seems bright. The sounds of the storm are suddenly deafening again. Raffaele gathers his soaked cloak tighter, then walks on silent feet up the canal’s steps to the surface.

He is alone here. The other Daggers are nowhere in sight. He folds his hands into the sleeves of his cloak, shivers, and reaches out with his energy to sense whether or not other Elites are close.

Then, he frowns. Something stirs in the air, strings pulled taut.

They are here. At least, someone is.

The energy draws closer. It is a dark, familiar energy, and Raffaele finds himself resisting the urge to pull away from it. He had cringed when he first felt Maeve’s energy on the day he met her, had shuddered at the connection she drew to the Underworld. He looks down the arena’s dark tunnels that lead to the center’s lake, then out into the storm. She must have just arrived. Now Raffaele can hear footsteps. They are faint and light, the steps of someone slender. He turns all the way to face the approaching energy, then folds his hands before him. The footsteps echo faintly down the tunnel. Gradually, he makes out the silhouette of a figure approaching him. The energy grows stronger. Now he can tell that the figure is indeed a girl.

She stops a few feet away from him. Along with the scent of rain, he also detects the copper smell of blood. Raffaele eyes her warily. In the darkness, he can’t quite make out her face. Her energy is strange, too, familiar in its darkness. Too familiar. It is the unmistakable alignment to the Underworld, to Fear and Fury, to Death.

“Are you hurt, Your Majesty?” he says in a low voice. “Did anyone follow you?” If Maeve was injured in the process of getting here, she might not have the strength to pull Enzo from the Underworld. Worse, she might have been attacked by an Inquisitor, and word of her presence here has leaked out. Where are the other Daggers?

But Maeve doesn’t say a word. She reaches up to her hood, lifts it, and pulls it back. The shadows disappear from her face.

Raffaele freezes.

The girl is not Maeve. She has a scarred half of her face where her eye should have been. Her lashes are pale, and the locks of her hair are bright silver tonight, cut short and scraggly. She stares at Raffaele with a bitter smile. For a moment, it seems as if she were glad to see him. Then the emotion disappears, replaced with something wicked. She holds a hand out toward him, weaves a web of threads around him, and twists hard.

“I’m sorry, Raffaele,” Adelina says.





Once every ten years, the three moons all fall under the world’s shadow and turn scarlet, bleeding with the blood of our fallen warriors.

—The New Atlas to the Moons, by Liu Xue You





Adelina Amouteru


There are no moons tonight to fill the Estenzian arena with silver light. Instead, the lake in the arena’s center, fed by canals, is black and churning with the storm’s fury.

The last time I stood in this arena, I was a spectator in the audience, looking on as Enzo stepped forward to challenge Teren to a duel. They fought here. And it ended with me hovering over Enzo’s dying body, sobbing, trying over and over again to hurt Teren in any way I could.