Chapter 53
EVER
Idon’t have to ask if Atom heard it, not when his pace quickens, his breathing too. I match his speed, but the distant sound gets louder, closer, more menacing every second. Claws scrape the roots. Snorts and grunts chase us.
“We’re almost there,” Atom assures me, layers of panic in the forced calm of his voice.
“Zandrite’s chamber?”
“No, to Wiley the whistler.”
“Shit. Atom, what is it? The things with the gray skin, the tunnel runners?” My hands and knees are a blur, shuffling and scuffing over the roots.
“I don’t know what they’re called! They’re Zandrite’s pets. They drink the blood from the bodies.”
“What?!” I screech.
“They drink—”
“I heard you!” I scrabble faster than I ever thought I could move, my hands tender, gripping roots and pulling myself forward. “Go go go.”
“I’m trying!” His little arms and legs speed forward, setting our pace.
A huff of warm air hits the back of my legs, blasting through my pants fabric.
I look over my shoulder, only for a split second, but it’s enough to ignite terror.
Beady, black eyes stare into mine. Broad shoulders, shiny gray skin.
Teeth like miniature daggers. The tips of curved horns point at me.
And the snarl that it releases—it could make my skin fall off.
My scream doesn’t surface, stuck halfway down my throat. I crawl even faster, fear stripping me of all thought. My body moves as if not my own, tearing through the tunnel after Atom. Maybe I’m fast enough. Maybe I can get away. Make it out alive.
I cry out despite all efforts to keep quiet, even before the pain strikes. The entrance of a horn into the back of my thigh is one thing, but the twisting pull out nearly empties my stomach. A vision edges toward my mind.
Of that same bloody horn ripped from Atom’s chest, of his heart impaled on the tip, still beating.
“Kick it in the throat,” Atom urges, pulling me from the vision. “Or the balls!”
“Does it even have any?” It’s an absurd focus when under attack, when bleeding and trying not to die, but it keeps the panic from spiraling into shock from the surge of heightened sensations that hit me.
“Don’t we all? It used to be a Half Link.”
I want to laugh at that, a pleasant rejection of reality rather than full-body abhorrence manifesting in nausea and crawling skin, but no such luck.
The reminder is bleak. I can’t ignore the faded impression on the mottled skin of its chest. The round ears on the side of its head.
The fingers. The way it crawls on its knees like me.
I kick out with my uninjured leg, aiming for its throat, but teeth sink into my foot. Into my skin. My muscles and tendons. My bone. I groan in agony. Blood drips from its mouth.
“Let her go!” Atom tucks his arms under mine and attempts to drag me away.
I try to pull my foot free and only manage to shred more of my skin. A strangled cry erupts from the bottom of my lungs. I fall back against Atom, dizzy and weak. And that’s when I see it swallow. Again and again, sucking the blood from my foot in giant gulps.
And pity narrows my vision, inflates my heart.
This poor creature lost its link and fell for Zandrite’s offer to take away its Half Link symptoms?
And turned into this? Is there still a Vaile in there?
With regrets and fears? With memories and moments they’d die to live again? “Let go! I don’t want to hurt you.”
It growls and bites down harder, suctions stronger.
Pain pumps up and up my leg as it’s emptied.
Eli would kill the creature with a single glare for taking so much of my blood.
I wrap my hands around its horns and wrench downward, pouring all the magic I can muster into my touch.
It squeals in pain, then whimpers and retreats, gray hands pawing at its face as it scurries away.
I turn around and look at Atom. His face is solemn, only allowing rapid, scattered breaths to slip past his lips.
“Go.” That’s all I can manage between my own short breaths.
Atom tries to lift me again.
“I said go.” I can’t put the demand into it that I want, not with my head about to float off my shoulders from the blood loss.
His words stumble out. “You’re hurt. Bleeding. It’s everywhere.”
I punch out my response in painful bursts. “I’m not. Going. To sit here. And die. I’ll follow you.”
The way his face crumples drains the life from me.
He fights it, sealing his lips and widening his eyes.
But the longer he stares at me, the more hopeless the battle.
Tears well and shove over the brink, winding past freckles on their way down his cheeks.
He sniffles and stuffs his worry out of sight.
Darkness seeps into his eyes. “No. We go now. Together.”
My leg throbs. All I want to do is curl up on the lumpy roots and sleep.
But I fold the pain away into the recesses of my mind and turn over.
My hands grip the roots. The tunnel spins and swirls with the amount of blood I’ve lost. Light splashes over the twisted floor, racing along the roots and through my fingers, up my arms. Magic crashes into my veins, charges through cell walls.
“Now what’s it doing?” I slam my fists down, my strength renewed despite the steady stream of blood still flowing from my foot.
“Turn that off. They’ll find us.” Atom tries to peel my hands from the tunnel floor.
“Why can’t I figure this out?”
“Because you’re letting it control you instead of the other way around.”
“I don’t want it at all!”
“Well, maybe it knows that!” he snaps, then turns away, crawling again as though nothing happened. Once again, I wonder what kind of life he’s lived, what kind of child keeps his head through all this with no more than a few tears.
But I can’t keep up with him. The creature’s teeth must have clipped a nerve. My leg hardly responds. I drag it behind me, driven onward by a sort of determination only born from pain, from devastation. The fuck-you-world-I’ll-show-you kind.
The tunnel is infinite. The stench of meat strengthens. Putrid flesh and old blood. It furls in my lungs, choking the air from me.
“I don’t have light stones this far into the tunnels,” Atom says.
Even though my body wants to run in the opposite direction and tear up the newly constructed map in my head, my mind is drawn closer, like the gentle tug of a lullaby pulling me into sleep. Note after note. Around corner after corner.
Into pitch darkness.
“This is it,” he says when I’m sure my palms have worn down to the bones.
With pure adrenaline driving me forward, it takes a moment to tell my body to stop crawling. Too long of a moment. I plow straight into Atom.
He shoves back hard against me, scolding me in a whisper. “Careful. It’s a drop. It leads to Zandrite’s chamber.”
“Why does it smell like death-scented dirty laundry?”
“That’s just death.” He’s painfully serious.
And I realize it’s time. No more smiley face stones or distractions. No excuses about Kelter wanting nothing to do with me. If I can kill my mother and scare off a village, I can face Zandrite. I have to. “Swap with me. I’m going down there.”
Atom presses himself against the tunnel wall to let me crawl past. I grope around for his shoulder and give it a squeeze. I don’t have to see his face to know it’s somber. “It will be different this time,” he whispers. “It has to be.”
I don’t question what he means by ‘this time.’ I’m too busy wondering how far down a drop it is… and what’s at the bottom. Will I break my legs? Land on spikes? Become a ravenous creature’s dinner?
I sit on the edge, my feet dangling in the darkness, and scoot forward. Little by little until my bottom slips off the edge. I try to hold myself up by my elbows on the ledge, but my weight overpowers my arm strength. And I fall.