Chapter 17
Naomi
I knew it was too good to be true. We’d been in those dark tunnels beneath the mountain for days and it was really starting to wear on me. I didn’t understand how Krashe’s entire Clan could live in such a place, didn’t they miss the daylight, and the plants?
Worse, at first Krashe had lit the way with torches or his oil lantern.
I’d discovered there was also some kind of light on the hover chair that I could turn on.
Two days in Krashe had put a stop to that and now we only traveled by the faint light of bioluminescence that veined along the walls in thin pink lines.
I was extremely sick and tired of all that dark, but being able to travel with the hover chair had been nice.
We could keep a fast pace, and Krashe remained unencumbered in case we ran into any danger.
I felt a bit more useful when I was hauling the luggage instead of being the luggage.
I felt more like my old, independent self back on Earth.
Now, I was staring with a bit of dismay at the controls of the chair.
A small blinking light had been my constant companion since we’d found the chair on the bottom floor of that ancient hospital.
It had started blinking faster and I had a feeling that was a bad sign.
The controls were more sluggish than before too, which made me think that what little power had remained in the chair’s power cells was about to run out.
I just hoped we’d make it to the exit of these tunnels before that happened.
Krashe had made us travel in complete silence the last two days too, which was depressing and boring.
That sexy interlude when we first entered that tunnel had also been our last. It worried me, were we skirting that close to Naga from the Bitter Storm Clan?
Just the thought of running into more of them made my skin crawl.
I understood that Krashe still thought of them as his friends and family, that he’d even mourned the few that had died during that fight with the huge revenant.
Didn’t mean that I felt the same way. They sucked for hating me, and for wanting me dead.
They sucked for kicking Krashe out and trying to kill him when all he did was love me.
Uh… care for me at least. I wasn’t sure if Krashe even knew the word love, but he knew the word mate, and he loved using that.
The darkness, the silence, and my possibly dying hover chair made me skittish.
Any sound made me startle, even if it was just the drip of water, or the flowing of an underground stream.
So when I heard a noise, I jumped, but then I started to scold myself again for being so jumpy.
Only this time there was no half smirk from Krashe, cast over his shoulder my way.
His hand flew to the handle of his sword and his hand slashed through the air, forcing me to a stop just behind him.
It was reflex to open my mouth and ask what was going on but I silenced the impulse.
Kiwi had been riding in my lap but now he rose on his legs and started lashing his long tail behind him, puffing up his chest and spreading his wings in a silent, but threatening display.
Not that he was ever truly threatening, given his tiny size.
“Stay here,” Krashe whispered and he moved away, his scales sliding soundlessly over the rock floor.
I didn’t want to be left behind, and since my chair moved as quietly as he did, I started to follow.
Krashe moved lightning quick, disappearing around a corner, and I’d just reached it when he returned.
His expression was hard to read in the little light the glowing lines along the wall provided.
I still thought he looked grim. “That was a sentinel, I’m certain he saw us and is racing back to report our position to the Queen.
” Those were dire words by the sound of his gloomy voice alone.
If the Queen knew we’d escaped that first bunch of warriors, heads were going to roll. Ours if it was up to her.
Krashe ducked down, his shoulder brushing the wall on our left.
“We must hurry,” he warned, a warm hand cupping the back of my neck to quickly pull me toward him.
He covered my mouth with his, a rushed, hard kiss that still managed to make my head spin.
He pulled away and turned on his tail, urging me to follow him down the next seemingly endless tunnel with even greater speed.
I watched his back in the dark, another huge backpack had appeared this morning while I’d been sleeping.
He’d fetched it from somewhere while I had been resting, and this one was clearly much heavier.
With our cone of silence in place, he hadn’t told me what was in it, but I was pretty sure it contained the books, scrolls, and clay tablets from his home.
That bag had to be really heavy, but he wasn’t slowing down.
Our pace was nearly a flat-out run or whatever you called that for a Naga; Krashe could be cobra fast when he felt like it.
My hover chair was keeping up but I had a feeling that we were asking a lot of the dying battery.
What would happen if it gave out? I couldn’t keep up without a chair or crutches, Krashe would have to get rid of his precious books again.
Considering how much I’d loved my books back home, I couldn’t stomach that thought.
If we ended up stuck in this tunnel when they found us, a fight would be really tight, and an escape probably impossible. So I understood why he was racing so fast, we needed to find the exit, I just had no clue how long that was still going to take.
So when Krashe suddenly swung aside a thick leather skin, the violet sunlight streaming in totally blindsided me.
We were there? I couldn’t see a thing but Krashe was fine, he had those nifty extra eyelids that apparently helped him with sudden light condition changes.
He grabbed my hand and pulled and then the two of us were on the other side of the leather covering and on the side of the mountain.
Blessed daylight heated my skin, instantly washing away the cold clammy feeling from inside the tunnel.
I didn’t have a chance to really orient myself, or let my eyesight adjust. Krashe was using his hand to keep pulling me forward, urging me along.
Still in a hurry, trying to avoid any of his Clan members that the Queen might have sent after us.
I was still trying to calculate how long ago we’d been sighted when Kiwi launched himself from my lap with an angry screech.
We’d exited on a slope but Krashe had led me out of the exit, along a ledge and now the ground was already leveling off.
Trees that looked like conifers but a deep purple surrounded us, blocking the view up and down the side of the mountain.
It blocked pretty much sight of anything but I just had to chase Kiwi’s flight path with my eyes to locate the danger.
“The Queen herself,” Krashe said in surprise. He was shrugging out of his pack of precious books and raising up high on his tail to tuck the whole thing between the branches of a nearby tree. “Stay behind me Naah-ohmi. They have us surrounded.”
I thought we’d avoided that by racing out of the tunnels like we had but clearly the Queen and the approaching warriors had known exactly where we would go.
They hadn’t tried to cut us off inside, they had found us here.
I could already see them, dozens of sinuous snake bodies coming through the trees.
Their scales caught purple sunlight, glittering in all shades of red you could imagine.
Krashe was right, carried on a raised platform with many soft pillows, shaded by shimmering fabric stretched over poles.
She sat there like the royalty they called her, half a dozen Naga slaving away beneath the contraption to carry her down the slope toward us.
Her thick, fat coils were pale compared to those of the others with her, and she had shaded her head with red fabric draped around her like a cloak with a cowl.
Bitter Storm’s Queen did not like the sunshine, not anymore.
If it was just the Queen and her protective guard racing toward us from above, I knew Krashe would have taken his chances and tried to outrun them.
It wasn’t though, more warriors must have exited lower down, they were climbing toward us from below.
We had nowhere to run to, not even back the way we’d come.
A glance over my shoulder told me that more warriors were coming out of the passage we’d used.
“Now what?” I whispered. It was shaping up to be another one of those near-death moments, and I was thoroughly getting sick of them.
When was that shit going to end? I just wanted to live my life in peace, with my mate and my cute pet sidekick.
Was that too much to ask? Why the hell couldn’t they just leave us alone?
Krashe looked over his shoulder at me, rolling them to limber them up.
His expression was often moody, but now it was downright grim.
“Now, we hope she’ll accept a challenge.
” I didn’t know what a challenge meant, but I really hoped that meant only a single opponent for Krashe, instead of all of them.
Knowing what he’d told me about the current Bitter Storm Queen, I was pretty sure she’d prefer to play dirty in some way.
The horde of warriors that surrounded us looked utterly terrifying to me.
It made me flash back to that moment on the river bank when I’d been captured.
The fear that had faded to numbness when I realized I was about to die.
The horror I’d felt at seeing Kalani and the blue Naga swept away in a hail of arrows and spears, down a frozen river that would kill them if the arrows hadn’t.