Chapter 16
He was back under the mountain.
Or was he?
Xavi blinked away the shroud of confusion and chaos clouding his senses and checked his surroundings to be sure.
All around him were the rough stone walls of a tunnel, lit by fungi that glimmered faintly in the gloom. The musty smell, the constant sound of dripping water… All was familiar, and yet not. As if from a distant place and time, beyond the reach of memory.
As usual, he was alone. Except in this place… that was wrong. Some instinct insisted that these particular tunnels were not to be entered without a companion. And he’d come here with…
A human? That also did not fit with what he heard and smelled, but he remembered now. They’d been swept up together in some strange enchantment. Found the ancient fae in her deceptively cozy lair. He recalled their argument, the door, the wind, the human’s cry of panic…
And yet she was not here. Had any of it been real? Or was her very existence a dream fueled by his own hopeless longing for the fated bride to appear?
Kel?
There was no answer. But Kel frequently slept for long periods, so his silence might mean nothing. Or it might mean they’d been cut off from one another. Only time would tell.
So if the human was real, where was she? In his memory, they’d gone through the doorway together. So how had he ended up here, in these strangely familiar tunnels, alone?
Unless, of course, there had been no fae, no doorway, no explanation of the curse.
A sort of sick apprehension struck him as he realized the most likely truth—that this human had simply met the same fate as the others.
At the moment she touched Kel, the enchantment had ensnared her, and she’d vanished forever.
Never to return to her world, her university, or her books.
If that were true, then this tunnel, odd as it was, would eventually lead him back to the valley. He could simply keep walking until the enchantment allowed him to leave.
Leave… and begin the cycle anew. His obligation satisfied for another hundred years.
But for perhaps the first time, that possibility did not bring him the usual sting of disappointment tempered by relief, but rather the bitter taint of something deeper. Darker. A sense that something good was gone and would never be found again.
Her face appeared in his memory like its own sort of curse. Bright gray eyes, pale freckles, upturned nose, and a brilliant smile of discovery. Aimed at him.
Why did it feel like a knife between his ribs? To think that she’d fulfilled the purpose for which he’d brought her here. That this human…
No. He had to stop calling her that, even in his own head. It was nothing more than his own cowardly way of hiding from the truth. From the guilt. If he didn’t think of the brides as individuals, then perhaps their fate would weigh less heavily on his conscience.
But this time, it was already too late. She was not just another bride—she was Ryn.
Lady Camryn Halivard. A bizarre bundle of contradictions and courage, brimming with curiosity and trailing chaos wherever she went.
And he could not bear to think of her being nothing more than a picture on a wall.
Of her life, her joy, her brilliance being snuffed out forever.
He would not allow that to happen. He had to find her.
Still feeling as if his thoughts and memories were clouded somehow, Xavi set off down the tunnel, first at a walk, then a jog.
The path curved right, then left, rising and falling underfoot, which was odd in and of itself.
In the past, the passage leading to and from the king’s chamber had always been straight.
Always level. And after he’d been running long enough to begin to feel weary, he finally knew for certain—this was not the same path.
It was not even the same mountain. The smell, the taste of the air, the twists and turns of the tunnel… This was something else entirely. Which meant that for the first time in untold centuries, something had truly changed.
Perhaps it had not been a dream after all. Perhaps he truly had been whisked away to a fae woman’s lair, fallen through a doorway, and landed here. Wherever here was. Which meant that the human… that Ryn had also fallen. That she was lost somewhere in this trackless maze of darkness and stone.
No night vision, no shapeshifting, no weapons. Nothing but her absurd little notebook, her pencil, and her curiosity.
Quiet curses fell from his lips as he paused to take stock of his surroundings.
The tunnel seemed to continue on in both directions without branching either to the right or the left.
He could keep moving forward or double back, with no guarantee that the path would even be the same if he did so.
While trapped in the weave of this curse, he could take nothing for granted—not even the evidence of his own eyes.
But there were other senses that were harder to confuse, and those were far more acute in one of his other forms. If his eyes could not be of much help, perhaps sharper hearing or a better sense of smell would serve his purposes.
He had many choices, but a gryphon would be too large for the tunnel, and the cat was a creature of the forest. The fisher and the squirrel had short legs that would cover ground more slowly, and a deer would be too fragile…
His magic rose in a rush as he selected a new shape, bending and twisting in the space of a breath until he fell to all fours and padded forward, a deep growl echoing from his broad chest. This form had once haunted the caves of his homeland, challenging even experienced hunters with its acute senses, powerful limbs, and dense hide.
If Ryn were somewhere nearby, he should be able to find her.
Pulling in a deep breath, he allowed his nose to filter the scents, looking for anything that didn’t belong in a cave, but most of all for ink, paper, soap, and the breeze off the ocean in spring…
Instead, he caught a whiff of overwhelmingly acrid musk—an oily smell overlaid by sulphur and dry desert wind that somehow was not out of place here beneath the ground.
It was an odor he had not encountered in so long that he’d nearly forgotten…
But even now, he could never forget the echoes of devastation and loss that came with it.
A cave viper.
But how? Those deadly serpents were a part of his former life—at home on an island lost to war and time. They did not live here in this new land. At least they hadn’t, but who was to say what nightmares could be spawned by a powerful fae curse?
Xavi broke into a shambling run, his massive paws crushing smaller rocks into powder beneath his feet. The smell seemed to be growing thicker and more pungent with each passing moment, which meant the creature must have made its lair somewhere in this tunnel.
But why would it be hunting so far from the surface?
Cave vipers usually lurked just beyond the reach of sunlight, making their homes in holes or cracks in a cave’s ceiling.
When darkness fell and the cave’s residents made their way back in, the largest vipers would dangle from above and snatch up their unwary prey.
That included an occasional elf, though for the most part, the Lycori knew to be wary of them and never entered caves alone or without caution.
Unless, of course, they were young and foolish and driven by an arrogant need to prove themselves…
The straight path split without warning, forcing Xavi to plow to a stop as he regarded each of the three new tunnels, swinging his huge head from side to side as he searched for scents.
There. The sulphurous reek from the left-hand tunnel burned his nose, and he swung that way with a rumbling growl. Only to catch the slightest hint of an ocean breeze wafting from the tunnel to the right
Ryn. She was here. Caught in this labyrinth with him, somewhere to the right. But if there was a cave viper to the left…
It was a viper that had stolen Kel’s future. Left him grieving and alone in the face of foreign invaders. Thanks to that day in the caves, he’d been forced to lead his troops into battle at the age of sixteen, unshielded from the horrors of an unwinnable war.
If even one of the wretched creatures could be erased from existence, it would be worth it. And there was no scent of danger from the right. He could kill the viper, eliminate the threat, then return to find Ryn.
His course decided, Xavi turned to the left. But the moment his paw entered the leftmost passage, a terrified scream echoed through the tunnels, piercing both his ears and his heart.
He’d shadows-blasted forgotten.
This was not just a cave. It was a curse, and a test for the mortal bride, which meant he might have made a terrible, potentially catastrophic error. He’d gone through the door to protect Ryn, but then he’d remembered his ancient hatred for the cave viper and chosen it over finding her.
If he failed her now, after swearing that he would not leave her to face this on her own…
Wheeling around, he barreled down the right-hand tunnel, gaining speed as he went.
They’d chosen the harder path, the enchantress had said, going together.
Because the trials were more difficult? Or because there were two of them, each with their own obstacles to face? Their own impossible choices to make?
The path split again, and he paused to determine where Ryn was waiting. But as the dank cave air met his nostrils, he caught not only ink and ocean breezes, but the same oily, sulphurous smell as before.
The cave viper, no longer behind him, but…
Xavi roared in fury and charged towards the sickening stench of a thousand bitter memories.
Towards what might yet be a repeat of the past, because he had nearly turned aside.
Was it a real viper? Could its venom cause paralysis and decay, with a long and painful decline into a helpless twilight before a tragic end?
There was no way to know, so he could not risk being wrong. Must assume that everything was real and deadly.
In this form, he was fast, but not fast enough, and as he raced down the path, he heard yet another heart-stopping scream. He might already be too late.
Pushing every muscle to the limit, he hurtled down the passageway, scraping his shoulders on a low spot, but barely noticing the pain. His feet were cut by the rocks, and one of his claws splintered when it caught in a crack, but he ran on.
Until the tunnel ended abruptly, opening into a broad, low-ceilinged cavern illuminated by colonies of luminescent green and purple fungi.
In the dead center of the cavern, a viper the width of his leg hung low from a crack overhead, striking and snapping at the human, who shrieked as she dodged, arms curled protectively over her head.
On her very next step, her boot caught on the rock, and she tumbled headlong, leaving her sprawled in a tangled pile of skirts.
“You’re a filthy cheater,” he heard her shriek, right before the snake saw its opportunity and struck.
Ryn yelped and jerked her legs back.
And Xavi went utterly feral.
With a roar that could easily have brought half the cave down on their heads, he attacked, swiping at the snake with a paw the size of a sparring shield.
The monster serpent was overextended in its attempt to reach Ryn, so the force of Xavi’s blow dislodged it from its hiding place and sent it slithering to the floor in a heap of disorderly coils.
He didn’t wait for an opening or even attempt to protect himself.
With a series of powerful blows, he swept it across the floor, somehow narrowly avoiding each darting strike from the viper’s fangs.
Bloody gashes opened along the length of the monster’s body, and when it was fully battered and drunk with the force of his assault, Xavi seized its weaving neck between jaws that could crush a wyvern’s skull.
Bit down.
Tasted the burning, oily taint of the creature’s blood.
Shook it viciously, and then hurled the entire broken body against the wall of the cavern, where it impacted with a wet thud and slid to the ground.
Lifeless.
Only then did he turn back towards where Ryn had fallen… and had yet to lift her head.