The Community Series, Books 1-3

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Nyko skidded to a stopas the cave walls closed in around him, the tunnel narrowing ahead to an impassable gap. Another wrong turn! Dang it! Reeling around, he stumbled back the way he’d come, adjusting his grip on Pandra, propped on his right shoulder, and Faith on his left. Squinting through the deluge of sweat in his eyes, he tried to make out another route through the dim illumination provided by the heat-resistant light strapped to his head.

He found another tunnel and staggered down it. The steady boom of his heart and the whistling of his breath through the chambers of his lungs were the only sounds. He was so weak at this point he’d already dropped Pandra once, and Faith was starting to feel like she weighed one thousand pounds, not a measly one hundred. He should’ve listened to Jacken and fed before going off on this mission. The sky-high temperature inside these Hell Tunnels was rapidly finishing the job that blood loss from his knife wound had begun: utterly depleting him.

The smart thing probably would’ve been to leave Pandra behind and save himself the liability of her extra weight. After all, when he’d found her, she looked pretty close to dead, her nose nothing but a misshapen mass of pulp. But “pretty close” wasn’t close enough for him when it came to dead…although if he kept scurrying about these tunnels like a mouse in a maze, searching for an exit but only finding more cave, then dead, as in completelydead, as in dead as a doorknob dead, would define them all. Soon.

And even though I may have a possible way into O??rat, my ability to grab the women then get back out, with an entire town of Om R?u to face down, is still a huge IF.

A little mission tidbit he was proving right about.

When it came to extracting his objectives, however, Nyko had defied the odds and accomplished that easy as pie. What do you know, but toss a couple flash grenades and every Om R?u in town collapsed to the cave floor, rolling around with their arms clutched over their heads. He’d practically skipped into town, la-di-da…then had almost blown the whole easy deal by freezing up when he saw Faith suspended from a chain, naked, her belly awash with blood. And Pandra lumped on the ground looking very close to dead.

He’d somehow managed to get moving again—maybe inspired by the sight of a barely unconscious Lorke stirring—and grabbed both women. With chaos still reigning around him, he’d run through the dense smoke back into the tunnels, retracing his steps toward ??ran?.

Unfortunately, that’s where the whole easy part of this mission had turned into mud pie.

It had happened about three hundred yards ago, to be exact. The Om R?u, having recovered, had given chase, and in the process of whizzing and wagging through their own well-known tunnels, they’d cut him off from the sole route he knew would get him home.

Now he was staggering around inside a fire serpent’s belly, completely off Thomal’s map, blood loss and dehydration closing in on him at an exponential rate. Awhile back, he was fairly sure the soles of his boots had also seared off.

Footsteps! Ah, crud, someone was coming up fast behind him.

Nyko lurched into the next left, and—

His legs folded beneath him like a broken beach chair, dumping him onto his knees. Faith and Pandra slid off his sweaty shoulders and crumpled into a couple of sad heaps on either side of him. He moaned.

His pursuer slammed to a halt over him, breathing heavily.

Nyko sat back on his heels, keeping his head bowed as he mentally accepted the unavoidable. Suicide missions were supposed to end in death, after all. Too bad he was letting the girls down, though. He really would’ve liked to get them back to ??ran?.

“Off your ass, Nyko,” his pursuer ordered.

Huh? Nyko managed the impossibly difficult task of looking up. Through the hair caked into his eyes with sweat, he viewed his pursuer.

Shon, dressed all in black with darker black spots scattered across his shirt and pants. Blood. There was a smear of it on his chin, too.

“You wanna live?” Shon asked. “Come with me now. Quick.” His younger brother grabbed him under the arm, trying to tug him to his feet.

Of all the things…

“Come on, man! Don’t pussy out on me!”

Nyko didn’t budge. His body felt overheavy, his big muscles no longer an asset, but a burden to his bones and flesh. “B-b-b…” he tried to explain. The words wobbled around on his tongue. His brain vacantly registered the wrongness of the situation. This was Shon, a bad guy now. “B-blood-need.”

“Yeah, that’s kinda obvious. But I know a place where we can take a break and figure this out, all right?” With a teeth-clamping growl of effort that spoke of how little help Nyko gave to his brother, Shon hefted Nyko to his feet.

Too tired. Just want to—

“Christ,” Shon panted. “Try cutting down on the fucking cookies, Nyko, would you?” Shon scooped up Faith and Pandra. “You follow me,” he warned. “Or I come back here and kick in your ornaments.”

Can’t, can’t, can’t…Nyko didn’t know how he could, but somehow he did, one foot miraculously appearing in front of the other as he trailed Shon. Thankfully his little brother traveled only about twenty feet down the tunnel before ducking into a cave opening. Here, Nyko was met with the unwelcome sight of a rocky ramp leading up at a steep grade. Up, up—Nyko huffed and puffed as he climbed, his muscles quivering so much it was like mini vibrator packs were jammed underneath his skin. The one thing that kept him going was the feel of the temperature cooling with each upward step he took. That felt very, very fantastic.

The ramp finally ended in a small, dome-shaped rock room. Nyko and Shon collapsed together, cluttering the cramped space with their rough breathing. Nyko didn’t know how long it took his lungs to return to normal functioning, but when they did, he heard the steady plip-plip of dripping water. He cranked his head to the side. Holy Moly. The cave walls were so slick here that the moist trickling had formed a small pool. Mortal thirst had his tongue automatically trying to dart out and lick his lips, but the desiccated slab merely succeeded in making a crackling sound. That couldn’t be good.

Shon crawled over to the water and cupped his hands in it. “Drink,” he ordered through his own sips.

Nice thought, but…The pool could’ve been a mirage for how capable Nyko was of getting to it. The climb to this room had done him in. He was half-blind with fatigue, his whole body shaking to the point of near-seizures, his heart lollygagging in his chest, a dull thump-bump that threatened to give up completely any second. “What are you doing, Shon?” His voice came out as a hoarse whisper, debility wringing it out.

Lifting off his hands and knees, Shon sank back into a crouch, his forearms braced on his thighs.

“Last time I saw you.” Nyko paused through a stomach spasm. “You shot me.”

“Don’t be a baby. I winged you. Thomal, too.”

Nyko blinked slowly and painfully. It felt like his blood-need was moving into his brain, shriveling it up. “Am I missing a punch line here? Are you, or are you not, a Topside Om R?u now?”

Shon’s eyebrows shot straight up. “You’re joking, right?”

“I don’t hear myself laughing, Shon.”

“Aren’t I here,” Shon countered, “saving your ass?”

Nyko set his jaw, his blood-need drilling out another borehole in his stomach.

“All right, yeah,” Shon conceded. “I was with them at first. But I’ve spent a lot of time with my therapist topside since you last saw me, and…she’s helped me. I mean, I’ll never forgive myself for what I did to Luvera, but Karrell has been getting me through the other stuff, a bunch of Good Will Hunting ‘it’s not your fault’ kinda shit.”

Nyko lay there, his throat cinched tight, strangling on some possible way to express the jumbled stew of anger and wretchedness within him. Finally, roughly, “Would’ve been nice to have been clued in on that a little sooner.”

Shon shrugged, highlighting the fact that his shirt was plastered to his body. “I wasn’t ready to ask to come back to ??ran?, yet. I figured what my therapy actually needed was for me to kill Bollven as payback for his near butt-reaming.” Shon flashed a mordant smile, long canines glistening. “Which I just did.”

Nyko moved his teeth back and forth against each other, his bones hurting, like he’d been chewed up and spit out. “So glad you’ve got that all worked out, Shon, that it was only a matter of you killing your tormentor rather than me being the worst brother on earth!” He tried to swallow, but his throat refused to do its job anymore. “Maybe if I’d known that a little earlier, I wouldn’t have thrown in the towel on my own life. Maybe I could’ve had…I could’ve…” Druggedly, he turned his head to seek out Faith.

She was staring back at him with her amber tiger’s eyes, her cheek pressed to the cave floor.

His heart rocked back and forth against his ribs.

“You came for me,” she whispered.

Nyko wrenched his gaze away from Faith’s and directed his attention to the domed ceiling, a tic in his cheek twitching. He supposed he deserved to hear the astonishment and disbelief in her voice, but it still rammed a ten-foot spike into his pride to know he’d done everything in his power to earn that doubt.

“Thank you.” Faith’s voice sounded small, calling to the Big Nyko side of him, the man who’d devoted his entire life to being everybody’s most dependable good guy and had hated every living second he hadn’t been.

“Don’t thank me.” He dragged his gaze from the ceiling to face her. “I know why you sacrificed yourself to O??rat, Faith. Because you lost everything in your life that mattered. I…I saw it happening to you, but never did anything to help you. I don’t deserve your gratitude.”

She only smiled. “You’re here now, aren’t you?” She cast a quick glance around the rock room. “Where is here, exactly? Are we safe?”

Safe. Ah, yes, all men who could leap tall buildings in a single bound strove to give that to their damsels. A knife turned inside him. “I’m sorry, but no. I…” botched it again. “I wasn’t able to get us out. We’re in some hidden room in the Hell Tunnels.”

“Oh.” Faith’s teeth tugged at her bottom lip. “So what happens now?”

Nyko chugged his larynx until he managed to produce more sound. “You’ll be all right. My brother knows the way out and—”

“Your brother?” Faith peered over Pandra’s prone form to find Shon. “You!” she exclaimed. “I thought you seemed familiar. You must look like Nyko.”

“Like him?” Shon’s eyebrows flew up. “You really know how to hurt a guy, lady.”

Nyko cut back in. “Shon is going to take you and Pandra out of—”

“Whoa, hold up,” Shon interrupted. “What do you mean me? I don’t have the juice for that. I just fought Bollven, I’m fried from these Hell Tunnels, too, and I haven’t fed since yesterday.” He narrowed his eyes. “Which reminds me…why did you keep sending my donor topside to me if you thought I was a bad guy?”

The wheels of Nyko’s mind moved sluggishly toward his memory of the meeting to decide that. “That was Toni. She didn’t want to give up on you.”

Shon pushed his tongue into his cheek. “And you did?”

“You said that you wanted me out of your life forever, Shon! You sat there while Videon prepared to rip my balls off with a pair of pliers, which was my rightful penance, according to you.” Nyko flattened his lips against his teeth, the force of that accusation hurting his chest.

“I’m not leaving without you, anyway, Nyko.” Faith pushed up on an elbow and bent a worried look on him. “It’s obvious that if you stay here, you’ll die.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Nyko said. “I’m too far gone to go any further.”

“You could make it if you fed, though?” She turned to Shon. “Couldn’t he?”

“Faith,” Nyko gritted. “I can’t ask my donor to risk her life coming into the Hell Tunnels.” And even if Ruxandra insisted on coming to his rescue, she wouldn’t make it in time. He was circling the drain here. I’d rather die than do nothing, so if it comes to that, then it does. Good thing he was okay with it.

“Don’t be a hayseed, Nyko,” Shon said. “She’s offering you her own vein.”

She’s…? Nyko jolted his gaze over, saw the expression on Faith’s face, and… “Absolutely not.”

Faith’s brow crinkled, irritation and—please, not this one—hurt creeping in. “Why not?”

“Because…” The first saliva he’d felt in two hours wetted his mouth as his imagination conjured the taste of her—for only the billionth time—her blood loaded up with all her Royal strength and saturated with her unique, delicious Faithness: manna from heaven, surely. “Because…” Because why, again? “The decision to bond is a serious one. You can’t make it to…to save my life. You’d be stuck with me forever afterward.”

Faith gave him a potent glare. “I can make the decision for any reason I want to.” Pushing to a full sitting position, she bunched little fists against her bare thighs. “The manual says I only have to be willing, and I am.”

Willing. The word itself sent a stronger surge of bloodlust biting deep inside him. He stared at the light blue veins in Faith’s throat with animal focus.

“Besides.” She scooted closer. “You owe me a rescue.”

He tensed all over, very aware that—even though her long, coppery hair was stuck to the front of her body, covering her nakedness—she was still very much naked.

“I’m afraid that means you’re back in the hero business. So get over yourself, feed on me, and haul us out of this place.”

His pulse beat in the corner of his left eyeball like a tic.

When he didn’t move, Faith thinned her lids on him. “I’ll make you, if I have to.”

Shon let out a snort.

Faith whipped her head around.

“You weigh, like, three pounds,” Shon pointed out.

Her look was pure challenge. “You might want to back up a bit.” With a flourish, she swiped off the scent-reducing mud from behind her ears.