Chapter 15
"Ancient creatures always think keeping secrets makes them wise. Most of the time it just makes everyone else homicidal." ~Kara
The troll warrior did not elaborate, which, honestly, felt rude considering the whole ominous mountain vibration situation currently unfolding beneath Kara’s feet.
Hurry apparently covered a lot of conversational ground in troll culture.
Nick tightened his arm around her waist as the warrior pivoted on one massive heel and started down the corridor at a pace that bordered on insulting for anyone under eight feet tall.
Kara gathered the front of the heavy cloak in one fist before she tripped over it for the third time in as many days, her boots scraping unevenly against the stone as the floor sloped downward beneath them.
The mineral veins overhead pulsed in time with their footsteps, silver-blue light rippling along the curve of the ceiling like the corridor itself was breathing.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw that Rachel and Gavril fell into step a few paces behind.
Their voices, normally a low, easy thread woven somewhere in the background of Kara’s awareness, had gone quiet.
She could hear the soft scuff of Rachel’s boots and the heavier tread of Gavril’s, the occasional brush of armor against fabric where his hand stayed fixed at the small of his mate’s back.
Farther behind them, Zara walked beside Wadim, her fingers wrapped white-knuckled around his forearm.
Aphid drifted between all of them like a bird that couldn’t pick a branch, sharp eyes darting from the trembling floor to the glowing walls to the warriors clearing the corridor ahead.
The trolls moved deliberately aside the moment Kara and Nick approached.
Heads lowered. Weapons angled away from Kara’s path. Massive bodies stepped back against the cavern walls in perfect, unspoken sequence, as though instinct rather than command had pulled them aside.
Kara’s discomfort climbed another notch.
“Okay,” she muttered as they passed between two warriors with axes that hummed faintly under the silver light. “I officially hate being looked at like I’m either royalty or a natural disaster.”
Nick leaned down without breaking stride, his mouth brushing briefly against her temple. “You’d make a terrifying queen.”
“That is not comforting.”
“You’re armed with sarcasm and unresolved trauma. Entire kingdoms would fall.”
A laugh slipped out of her before she could stop it, quick and breathy and slightly hysterical around the edges.
The mountain pulsed again beneath them.
The sound rolled through the corridor like a giant heartbeat muffled beneath layers of stone, deep enough that she felt it in her teeth and in the hollow space behind her sternum.
Dust drifted from the ceiling in thin gray curtains, settling on the shoulders of the warriors flanking the walls.
Two of them exchanged a look Kara didn’t like at all.
Behind her, Wadim swore softly, the words unmistakably profane even though Kara did not speak Romanian.
She glanced back again and saw Zara’s grip on his arm visibly tightened.
Rachel had gone pale, her healer’s instincts no doubt screaming at her in all the different languages she spoke that something deep beneath the mountain was very, very wrong.
Gavril’s free hand drifted toward the weapon strapped across his back, his stance shifting half a step closer to his mate without ever fully turning his head.
Yeah, something was seriously not okay.
The corridor widened ahead, then opened all at once into the massive chamber they’d entered earlier, and Kara nearly stopped walking on sheer principle.
The atmosphere had shifted completely.
Warriors lined every bridge and stone walkway threading across the chamber, shoulders braced, weapons drawn or close to it.
The blue mineral veins running through the walls glowed brighter than before, their light reflecting off armor and axe-blades in fractured ribbons that slid across the cavern in restless, shifting patterns.
Low voices rumbled through the chamber in the troll language, sharp and clipped now, the sound of people working very hard not to panic.
At the center of it all, the black corruption spreading through the stone had grown.
Kara stopped walking. “Okay, either they have a serious mold problem, or it’s worse. I vote mold.”
The dark veins stretched several feet farther across the chamber floor, branching outward through the glowing mineral lines like rot moving through living tissue. And it wasn’t merely black.
Movement existed inside it. Slow. Thick. Wrong. Like shadows swimming beneath ice.
Kara shook her head. “Guessing it’s not mold. That’s truly disappointing and that’s a statement I never thought I’d say.”
Nick’s entire body went rigid against her side. She felt the shift before she saw it, the subtle tightening of his arm, the way his weight redistributed onto the balls of his feet.
Aphid stopped at the edge of one of the stone bridges and stared openly downward, his usual restless energy draining out of him in a single slow exhale.
“I really don’t think this is what Fane had in mind when he told us to come here and recruit the trolls,” he said quietly.
“I feel like we’ve been signed up for something where we should have been given the fine print. ”
Honestly, fair.
The Troll King stood at the far edge of the fractured stone, his back to them, one enormous hand resting on the pommel of a sword strapped around his waist. Several older looking trolls had gathered around him now, half a dozen of them, their heavy robes stitched with silver symbols Kara couldn’t read but didn’t particularly want to.
He turned as they approached. His deep amber gaze fixed first on Kara. Then on her stomach.
And something old and exhausted moved briefly through his expression before it vanished again beneath stone-faced control.
“Kara.”
She resisted the urge to point out that hearing an ancient troll king say her name like he was announcing the end of civilization was not helping her anxiety levels.
Instead she folded her arms beneath the cloak and tipped her chin up.
“I’m beginning to feel like every conversation in this realm starts with people saying my name like I’m an errant child who has once again done something to cause the downfall of their entire civilization and must now climb some mountain to get a flower that blooms once a year on the coldest day in winter in order to save everyone. ”
“That was oddly specific,” Wadim muttered.
One of the elder trolls, a woman with silver-threaded braids hanging past her waist, made a choking sound suspiciously close to laughter.
Nick looked offended on her behalf. “That wasn’t funny.”
“It was a little funny,” Kara admitted.
The Troll King motioned toward the spreading darkness behind him without looking away from her. “You have asked several times why you have remained here.”
Her humor evaporated. “Yes,” she said flatly. “I have.”
Around them, the chamber quieted.
Even the warriors farther along the bridges had gone still, axes lowered, shoulders angled toward the king. That kind of silence didn’t happen by accident. That kind of silence meant whatever was coming next was meant to be heard.
Nick stepped half a pace closer to Kara, his shoulder brushing hers. Protective. Always protective.
The Troll King’s gaze slid toward the corruption, then back. “At first, we believed the rot followed you.”
Kara blinked once. “Well,” she said. “Very judgy. I didn’t walk into your realm and assume that you’d caused the stupid craze of pencils being shoved up troll butts so that their hair waved wildly while people wrote. Seems like you could have given me the same courtesy.”
“There are trolls with something shoved up their butts in the human realm?” A huge troll with no hair and a bulbous nose asked, his dark eyes wide with shock.
“Not real trolls,” Kara said, hoping her tone was at least a little placating. “They’re little plastic toys,” she paused, “but remarkably accurate in some ways. Wait, do any of you fart glitter?”
Nick’s arm tightened around her waist. “Babe, probably not the time to ask that.”
“That’s totally going in the archives,” Wadim spoke up.
“And if we manage to save the world from whatever the hell this is,” he motioned to the black veins, “I’d like to talk to more of you about the similarities that Kara is speaking of.
Strictly for the sake of keeping records correct, of course. ”
“Right,” Zara muttered. “Not for your amusement at all.”
The king continued as if none of them had spoken. “The darkness beneath the mountain began changing shortly before your arrival. Stone weakened. Pathways we have used for centuries shifted. Creatures from the lower caverns turned on their own kin.” His jaw tightened. “Then the heartbeat began.”
The chamber floor pulsed faintly beneath Kara’s boots, as though answering him.
Nope. Still hated that.
“We believed your child called to it,” the silver-braided elder said quietly.
Nick growled. Low. Dangerously low. The sound rolled out of his chest hard enough that every troll warrior on the surrounding bridges visibly stiffened, hands flexing against weapon grips.
Rachel was at Kara’s other shoulder before Kara had even registered the movement. “Absolutely not,” she snapped, her voice carrying with the kind of sharp precision of a dominant female wolf. “You do not get to blame an innocent child for this.”
Gavril’s hand settled instantly against the small of his mate’s back, grounding her even as his own wolf pressed visibly closer to the surface, his eyes glowing with his beast.
Kara pressed a hand flat against Nick’s chest, sending calm through their bond before this turned into an international incident. The thunder of his heart slammed against her palm. “Easy, Cujo.”
His eyes flashed gold, then settled.
The silver-braided elder inclined her head, the gesture deep and unmistakably respectful, first toward Nick, then toward Rachel.