Chapter 98: Wildlife

Chapter 98

Isabella seemed to had vanished from the face of the earth, tucked away in a pocket of reality that his current, weakened senses could not pierce.

“I can’t find her,” Lucain voice was thick with the restrained agony. “The air is empty, Clara. The bond is screaming, but it’s screaming from nowhere. It’s as if she’s stepped outside of time.”

The only thing keeping him calm was the fact that she was still alive, the agony pushing through the bond. He turned his crimson gaze toward the witch, who was still catching her breath, her hands stained with the soot of his agony.

He knew his own limits; he was a king of force, of shadow, and of blood, but he lacked the delicate, weaving intuition of the craft.

To find someone hidden, he needed a different kind of sight. “Clara,” he said, his voice dropping into a commanding register that brooked no argument.

Every thought in his mind was now a singular line pointing toward the woman he had lost. “I need you to look where I cannot. My senses are blunt instruments against whatever shroud woven. Use the blood on this floor, use the echo of the ritual, use the very earth you just fed my pain to—but locate her.”

He stepped closer, his scarred chest heaving. Clara looked up at him, seeing the terrifying focus of a man who was seconds away from tearing the world apart just to see if she was hiding in the wreckage.

She didn’t speak; she simply nodded, her hands already beginning to move in the air, weaving a new, desperate pattern to track a soul that had vanished.

She knew that every second Lucian spent standing in that silence was a second closer to him losing his mind entirely. She scrambled toward the center of the room, her fingers trailing through the dust and the ash of the failed ritual.

Using a shard of broken chalice, she began to carve a precise circle directly into the stone floor.

“If she’s not on this plane, then she’s being held in a pocket—a fold in the veil,” Clara muttered, her voice tight with focus.

“Caleb, your dead brother, I guess is a creature of the in-between now. If he’s taken her into the Demon Realm, my normal tracking will slide right off the surface. I need something that transcends realms.”

She finished the circle and looked up, her eyes bright with a dangerous sort of magic. “I need blood, Lucian. Not the blood from your nose or the stains on the floor. I need it fresh, from the source. Your blood is the anchor to her soul. If she’s rejecting the bond, that blood will boil when it gets close to her frequency. It will act as a compass through the dark.”

Lucian didn’t ask questions. He didn’t care about the toll. The thought that Caleb—that pathetic, resurrected ghost—might have dragged his mate into the Demon Realm made his vision swim with a murderous heat.

He knew how the denizens of that lower plane felt about his kind; if Isabella was there, she wasn’t just a captive, she was a target.

He stepped into the center of the carved circle and with a swift, brutal motion, he ran his thumb over the edge of his own sharpened canine, slicing the pad open.

He held his hand over the center of the stone, watching as the thick, unnaturally dark crimson droplets began to fall.

“Drop it in the center,” Clara commanded, her hands hovering over the perimeter of the circle. “And Lucian… think of her scent. Don’t think of the rejection. Don’t think of the pain. Think of the woman you accepted.”

As soon as the blood hit the stone, the circle ignited. The blood vibrated against the stone like a living thing.

Lucian closed his eyes, his breath hitching. He forced himself to bypass the stinging in his neck, the hateful echoes of her rejection, and the image of her choosing his brother.

He went deeper. He looked for the girl who had looked at him with a lifeless eyes when he first drained her. He looked for the heartbeat that had once raced when he stood too close.

Suddenly, the blood in the circlebegan to spin, faster and faster, until it stood upright in a thin, quivering needle of crimson.

“There,” Clara whispered, her face beaded with sweat. “She isn’t in the Demon Realm, Lucian. Not yet atleast.”

Lucian’s eyes snapped opened to the raised blood. The crimson liquid was floating and he didn’t wait for Clara’s permission.

Driven by a primal, magnetic pull that surpassed logic, Lucian reached out. His hand, pale and stained with the remnants of the ritual, hovered for a fraction of a second before his fingers clamped around the quivering liquid of his own enchanted blood.

The moment his skin made contact, the room buckled. A surge of raw energy traveled up Lucian’s arm, causing his veins to blacken and bulge.

He didn’t flinch. Instead, he leaned his entire weight into the contact, slamming his palm down onto the center of the carved circle with a strength that shook the very foundations of the East Wing.

CRACK.

The sound wasn’t that of breaking stone, but of breaking reality. Under the pressure of his touch, the floor beneath his hand peeled away like layers of wet parchment.

The physical world of the mansion—the dust, the cold stone, the smell of ancient wood—began to bleed into something else.

The stone groaned and groaned, the circular carvings widening into a gaping maw. Lucian felt the shift in his marrow.

The “Dead Space” that had been hiding Isabella was no longer a theoretical coordinate; it was a physical barrier he was currently crushing with his bare hands.

Through the widening rift in the floor, he didn’t see the Demon Realm. He saw the flicker of orange candlelight.

And he smelled it. The jasmine was back, but it was scorched. It was being overtaken by the scent of wildlife.

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