Chapter 14 #2
Mikaela goes dangerously still. “Fine?”
“Fine,” I snap. The exact same intonation I’d use back in Chicago to authorize an emergency server rollback. “I’ll do it. I’ll stop fighting it. I’ll mate with Kol. Just... keep translating before someone gets their throat ripped out.”
Mikaela stares at me. A fierce, knowing spark flashes in her wide eyes.
Her hand clamps onto my arm, her fingers squeezing hard in the dark. Then she closes her eyes, forcing herself straight back into the terrifying chaos of the telepathic stream.
I did it. I agreed to mate with him. Out loud. It’s not just in my dreams anymore.
It is not a feeling I get to sit with. I don’t get a single second to watch him and wonder if I’m making a mistake.
Because the rival clan doesn’t announce themselves. They don’t roar into the dark or beat their chests. Three figures pour out of the narrow tunnel and the air goes thin.
Mikaela grips my arm. “Oh my god.”
I see them in pieces.
In the spiking bursts of gold that flare off Kol’s starfield skin, I catch them in fragments. A shoulder, a jaw, the flat, dead gleam of a raised claw.
They’re leaner than Kol’s men. Carved down to the bone. Not trained-hard lean, starved-lean. The kind of lean that happens when a body has been eating itself for months.
And they’re running dark. Not a flicker of light on any of them.
At the head of it is him.
I know before Mikaela says a word.
He is built like Kol. Enormous, sprawling, and lethal. But where Kol’s men move with focused, defensive pressure, he clears the tunnel mouth with his gaze already moving across the cavern. Searching.
Mikaela, Amelia, and I flatten ourselves even further into the darkness of the ledge.
He stops.
Just for a second, his eyes find Kol.
And Kol is blazing.
The starfield mutation is erupting across his shoulders now, charting down his forearms, while the rest of his golden skin is lit up like a bonfire. No Drakav male glows in a fight. You don’t glow when you’re being hunted. You go dark. You disappear.
Kol is on fire.
I watch Lucek’s face process that. Watch his gaze move over Kol. Watch the moment he clocks the starfield skin. See the moment his lips pull back into a terrifying snarl.
His clan-man goes first, kicking off the wall with enough force to send a spray of gravel skittering across the stone floor. He’s fast. Too fast. He’s on Kol in a heartbeat, a bone blade already extended, aiming for the soft spot where the neck meets the shoulder.
Kol stops him with one hand around the throat, mid-air, the same way you’d stop a door from slamming.
His feet don’t move. Eyes still on Lucek, he grips the warrior’s arm and twists.
The sound is wet. The warrior’s elbow bends the wrong direction and then the arm is just..
.hanging there. Useless. With a grunt, his weapon clatters to the floor.
He drops. Kol steps over him.
Around them the cavern erupts.
“Oh fuck,” Amelia whispers. “There’s shadowmaws in the tunnels behind them.”
The first one I see comes through the passage near the weapons cache at ground level, a black armored shape so low and fast it looks like spilled oil moving uphill. It hits one of Kol’s warriors from behind. He goes down hard, and the sound of it is lost in everything else.
The second one comes out of the narrow offshoot by the bathing chamber. It doesn’t pick a side. It hits the nearest warm body, which happens to be one of Lucek’s men.
He doesn’t go down the way Kol’s warrior did. He turns and fights it, bare-handed, his forearm jammed sideways into the serrated jaw. Blood. A lot of blood. He doesn’t stop moving.
He doesn’t care if he loses the arm.
This isn’t a fight. It’s bodies in the dark and the smell of copper, and the only light is coming from Kol’s flickering glow illuminating the slaughter.
A bone blade punches upward in the dim light.
Grappling bodies slam into the stone floor.
Rok drops his elbow onto the back of a skull with a sickening crack that carries all the way up to where I am standing.
A shadowmaw drags a thrashing warrior away from the edge of the fighting, sinking its teeth in and vanishing into the black.
“Sarven says their two won’t go down,” Mikaela says, her voice tight. “One just took a blade in the leg. He’s still up. Still moving.”
Because Lucek’s men fight like they don’t care if they walk out. They fight like they have nothing to lose.
While Kol’s men...
I watch Kol crack a collarbone. I feel it more than I hear it. A wet vibration that climbs right through the rock. And then, mid-parry, with a rival’s claw raking a deep, brutal path across his forearm, he turns his head.
He abandons his guard, and looks straight at me in the dark.
... Kol’s men fight like they have everything to lose.
Across the cavern, through the dark and the blood smell, he finds me on the ledge. His chest is heaving. His golden skin shifts from a yellow glow toward something almost white-hot.
The feral snarl that comes out of him is barely sound. More physical pressure than noise. I feel it vibrating in my molars. His eyes are purely possessive, making sure I am exactly where he left me.
He turns back to the fight and the next warrior in his radius goes down so hard the stone floor cracks.
Meanwhile, Lucek has gone still at the far edge of the chaos.
He’s not fighting.
He’s watching.
His amber eyes are tracking the cavern, his nostrils flaring as he inhales the cold air. I follow his gaze and realize what he’s doing. He’s counting. Counting spaces. He’s looking for the gap between where the warriors are and where they aren’t. Looking for the tunnel mouths.
He’s looking for where we went.
“The cavern of the spring mouth.” Mikaela’s voice drops to a sharp, panicked whisper beside me. “Sarven says they’re at the water access. Up where I saw the face looking down.” Her breath hitches.
The sounds shift before she finishes.
From the narrow tunnel leading down to the Hall of Knowing there’s a new noise. A body hitting stone, then another. They’re everywhere.
A single pair of feet breaks clear.
One of them got through.
He doesn’t slow down when he hits the open cavern floor. He doesn’t look at the fighting, doesn’t look at Kol, doesn’t look at anything except the passage that leads deeper into the rock.
The one that leads down.
Straight toward Alex. Toward Pam. Toward Lucy. Toward everyone else.
“No.” The word leaves my mouth but I don’t hear it.
I move.
I know what he’ll do if he gets there. They won’t be a problem he negotiates around.
They are the reason this clan crossed into our tunnels.
We are the entire reason for all of this.
The blood, the bodies, the tunnel full of killing.
Pam and Lucy and all the other women didn’t sign up for any of this.
They’re crouched in the dark in the deep chambers not because they’re fighters but because there was nowhere safer to put them.
There is no version of this where I let him make it down that tunnel.
Pure instinct floods my blood, overriding every survival rule I have ever possessed. I grip my bone knife, and I sprint.
“Erika!” Mikaela’s scream punches off the cavern walls behind me.
I throw myself recklessly down the steep incline.
The oversized pelt Kol pulled over my shoulders catches on the stone walls as I descend, but I don’t stop.
I haul it up with one hand and sprint harder, my boots skidding wildly on the jagged rock, letting gravity hurl me toward the cavern floor of the lower tunnels.
I hit the mouth of the deep passage just a fraction of a second after he does.
The warrior ahead of me is a wall of darkness. He’s incredibly fast, but he doesn’t know the layout of these lower paths. He doesn’t hear my frantic, lighter footsteps over the echoing slaughter in the main cavern behind us. I am right on his heels before he even registers I’m there.
When he finally starts to turn, I see the flat, dead gleam of his claws unsheathe.
And out on the cavern floor behind us, I feel the exact moment Kol’s control shatters.
I feel when his glowing eyes look up to the shadows of the ledge and realize I’m not there. I feel the sudden shift in his attention as he tracks the sound of my movement disappearing into the dark.
The sound Kol makes shakes the mountain.