Chapter 14
WE'RE UPGRADING FROM 'CAMP' TO 'HEAVILY FORTIFIED MURDER-CAVE'
ERIKA
Mikaela is crouched six inches to my right. I can’t see her face in the pitch black, but her breathing is too fast.
“I can’t see anything,” Mikaela whispers, her voice thin. “I should be out there with him.”
“You don’t need to see,” I tell her, keeping my voice perfectly flat.
If I let a single tremor of fear slip into my tone, we are going to have a panic cascade on our hands, and I do not have time to manage everyone’s emotional breakdown while we are being hunted.
“You just need to listen to Sarven. That is your only job.”
She lets out a shaky breath and bites her lip.
A suffocating silence settles over the sprawling cavern.
And then, it happens.
Click... Click-click.
“The fuck is that?” I whisper.
The sound echoes from the main cavern entrance, bouncing off the walls inside the cavern. They are already inside.
“Shadowmaws,” Mikaela whispers.
My blood runs cold. “What the fuck are shadowmaws doing here?”
They’re pack hunters. Low-slung, black-plated beasts with serrated teeth and jaws that unhinge like a snake’s to swallow prey whole. They are creatures of the open dust. They do not hunt in the deep rock.
Mikaela swallows hard. “Lucek’s clan lured them here.”
Every drop of blood evacuates my extremities. My heart slams against my ribs and I stop breathing.
I force a breath into my lungs. The air is so cold it burns on the way down, scraping against my windpipe. I swallow the pain.
“Pam,” I whisper. My voice cuts through the absolute silence of the tunnel. It’s so sharp, and devoid of the fear that’s turning my guts to ice. I don’t know where I found that voice, but I don’t stop to question it. “Mira. Go. Now.”
“I don’t know the way in the dark,” Pam whimpers from the shadows behind me. “I’m going to fall.”
“You are going to put your left hand on the rock wall,” I steady my tone. “And you are going to follow it down the incline until you hit the flat chamber where Alex is waiting. Give Mira your right hand. Do not let go.”
They don’t argue with my tone. Two dark shapes detach from the shadows, their hands blindly gripping each other. They scramble frantically away, their shoes slipping on the uneven stone, heading down the steep, twisting shaft toward the deep chambers.
I turn back toward the cavern floor.
“Amelia,” I hiss, trying to find her in the dark. “Fall back. They’re here.”
“No.” The word is flat.
I squint through the suffocating gloom. There is just enough illumination for me to make out her silhouette.
She is standing, back pressed against the cave wall, a heavy bone spear gripped so tightly in both hands that I can actually hear the subtle, straining creak of the hide against bone.
“Trecia is still hiding in the offshoot to the bathing chamber,” she whispers. “We should get her and head deeper.”
“What? Why didn’t she head to the lower tunnels with the others earlier?”
“All of us hiding in the same spot isn’t a smart plan,” she says.
“Fuck.” She’s right. But one or two of us alone is worse odds.
“Here.” Amelia shoves something hard and bound in rough leather against my chest. A bone knife. She shifts her grip on her own spear, her posture rigid and radiating a stark, aggressive readiness. She has zero intention of dying quietly in the dark. “Go get her.”
I wrap my fist around the hilt, push off the rock wall and sprint down the incline. Ten yards down, tucked into a narrow tunnel leading to the bathing chamber, Trecia is frozen, staring blankly toward the main cavern entrance.
“Trecia.” I snap my fingers. A sharp, stinging sound in the cold air. “Move. Deep chambers—”
She jumps, the paralysis breaking. “I-”
Another sharp click-click echoes distantly from the cavern floor directly below us. I freeze.
My heart drops into my stomach. They are breaching right now.
The incline leading back up to the safety of the high tunnel is exposed.
If I try to drag a panicked, uncoordinated Trecia back up the steep rock in the open, we are too slow.
We will be spotted the second the warriors step into the cavern.
“Change of plan,” I hiss, grabbing her arm and shoving her toward the narrow, twisting side tunnel that loops behind the bathing chamber. “Take the back passage. Go down to the deep chambers the very first chance you get.”
She stumbles, lip trembling, before she bolts into the dark offshoot, scrambling out of sight.
I don’t wait. The second she is gone, I turn and scramble frantically back up the steep incline, my boots slipping on the stone, my heart hammering in my throat with the sheer terror that a towering shadow is going to step out into the cavern below and catch me entirely exposed.
I retreat to my spot near Mikaela, my lungs screaming from the freezing air. Amelia is a rigid shadow to my left, her spear braced against the stone. I look toward the cavern floor.
Below me, directly in the center of the main tunnel entrance, Kol is a towering, terrifying silhouette.
His broad chest and dense, roped arms are burning with a blinding, erratic gold.
The starfield is pulsing just beneath the surface of his skin in chaotic bursts, like lightning caught in a bottle.
“Okay,” I say to the empty air. I tighten my grip on the rough, leather-wrapped hilt of the bone knife Amelia gave me. It feels exactly like what it is. A piece of a dead animal, unbalanced in my small hand. “Mikaela.”
“Here.” Her voice is hard, steady. She leans in to my right.
“What are they saying?”
The silence drags out.
The click-click has stopped.
That’s worse. The rhythmic noise was a warning.
“Nothing,” Mikaela whispers, her hands tight on her own knife. “It’s completely... wait.”
Her breath hitches sharply.
“The east tunnel,” Mikaela relays, solely speaking aloud for my benefit. Her words come in a rush. “The passage leading toward the meat drying racks. Hunters. At least three.”
I press my back harder into the stone. That tunnel is narrow, and it connects close to where we are. My fingers clench around the hilt of the bone knife, a lump rising in my throat.
“They’re moving fast,” Mikaela says, her voice dropping. “They’re dropping straight down the vents.”
Dropping.
The drop down those vents is at least forty feet of jagged, unforgiving rock.
The sound hits us a fraction of a second later.
It echoes down the narrow stone shafts. The sickening thud of bodies colliding, followed by the scrape of claws tearing into flesh and stone.
They aren’t just dropping. They’ve already engaged the warriors Kol stationed up there. The fighting is right above us.
“They’re splitting up,” Mikaela says, her eyes flying open.
Splitting up. Of course they would split up.
My stomach drops. My human brain is frantically trying to catch up while blind.
“They must have found another entrance,” I say. “Tell him.”
“They already know,” Mikaela says. “Sarven is moving to intercept.”
Her hands press together as if she’s silently praying.
I stare down into the cavern. The erratic gold light on Kol’s broad back flares suddenly, a blinding spike of pure heat. He is waiting.
I trust him. The shape of him anchoring the cavern is the only thing keeping the terror from swallowing me. I know he will not let them through.
But I let out a shaky breath anyway, as the sheer, helpless frustration begins to crawl up my spine.
I am deaf. I cannot hear what they are saying. I cannot hear Kol’s commands. I cannot hear where the enemy is bleeding through the lines until Mikaela has the breath, and the presence of mind, to whisper the translation aloud.
It is exactly like trying to play high-speed, competitive chess by telephone. During a home invasion.
Another few seconds of silence pass. In the darkness below, Kol shifts his stance.
He looks like three hundred and fifty pounds of pure, patient violence.
Beside him, the three other warriors are completely, terrifyingly still.
They wait in the absolute dark, their long claws resting lightly against the stone, eyes fixed on the black tunnel opening ahead.
“Mikaela,” I whisper sharply. “What did he just do?”
“I don’t know,” she hisses, her face going shuttered.
“Sarven is trying to block me but... oh god, it’s still bleeding through.
There’s blood. Someone’s chest just got torn into.
Oh my god, they’re using the shadowmaws and—” Right before my eyes, she recoils, pressing the heels of her hands hard against her temples.
“It’s just red. Everything is red in his head. ”
I grab her shoulder. “Who is down?” I push the panic out of my voice. “Whose chest?”
“Not Sarven,” she breathes out, fighting to keep her grounding as the violence bleeds into her brain. “I think it’s Sorn. He threw himself on top of one of the shadowmaws to save Haroth.”
My vision actually edges with white, helpless rage.
“When this is over,” I grind out, my teeth chattering as the freezing draft hits my face. “I am getting access to the mindspace. I cannot be blind like this.”
Beside me, Mikaela’s eyes snap open. She looks at me in the dark.
“You have to mate with a Drakav for that,” she says quietly.
“I’m aware.”
“You...” Mikaela watches me despite the terror making her brows turn upside down. “You’ve spent months explicitly avoiding exactly that.”
“I am aware,” I repeat, my jaw tight. The leather wrapping on the bone knife is cutting painfully into my palm.
I stare down at the sprawling, golden-glowing shape of Kol holding the line below us. I remember the weight of him dropping to his knees between my thighs hours ago. The vibrating purr literally rattling the blood in my veins. His total devotion, overriding everything else.
I remember the look in his eyes when he picked up my discarded clothes and handed them back to me. Feral. Starving. Possessive in a way that defied every single parameter of human logic.
“Fine,” I say.