The Pit
My eyes flew open.
I was instantly seeing red.
As such, I was already tensed, the demon in me fully active, so before I moved a muscle in our bed, I knew it was the dead of night. I also knew Tanyn was not in bed with me. Hurley was still in the room. And so was something else.
I heard Hurley whine, felt him jump up on the bed, but he’d barely landed before he landed again.
In the sense he was down.
Unmoving.
My heart thumped painfully.
Holy hellfire.
I reached out with both arms to snatch his alarmingly immobile body into them before I twisted the other way and jumped out of bed.
I did this with demon speed, which meant in less than a second.
I landed against something solid.
I was about to fight my way around it when the moonlight streaming in through the windows illuminated who was in the room with me.
“Put him down, honey, and we have to go.”
I stared at Monique, uncomprehending.
I mean…
What was she doing there?
Was I dreaming?
“Now, Cat,” she said urgently.
She then didn’t wait for me to put Hurley down.
She took him from me.
My heart thumped again, more painfully, and my skin got chill.
“No!” I snapped.
“Quiet,” she snapped back. “He’s fine. Asleep. Let’s go.”
Go?
Go?
It was the middle of the night, Tanyn was gone, but somehow, Monique was here.
“Go where?” I demanded. “Why are you here? Where’s Tanyn? What the fuck is happening?”
“I’ll explain. Later. Now,”—she snatched up my hand and started pulling me with unexpected strength, for a human—“you’re in danger. We must go.”
I didn’t know why she was there.
I was terrified that Tanyn wasn’t.
What was seeping in was her mood.
She was not lying.
She was tweaked.
No, not tweaked.
What I sensed from her was controlled panic.
But it was a lot of panic.
And we were moving.
Fast.
“I need a robe. Clothes,” I said to her back as she dragged me down the hall, and in the back of my head thanked the gods I did something I only occasionally did. Put my nightgown back on after Tanyn and I had sex.
“No time,” she replied, continuing to drag me down the hall.
She stopped at the corner. Listened.
I opened my mouth, and she jerked up a hand to indicate I needed to stay silent.
This struck me, because I had no idea how she knew I was going to speak. Her back was to me.
I had no idea about a lot of things.
And it was safe to say, I really didn’t like that.
She then kept us moving.
I could go far faster than her with my demon speed, but I didn’t know where we were going.
I just knew with the way we were moving, we needed to get there.
We raced down the stairs.
“Where are we going?” I whispered as we ran down a hall, the silk of my nightgown flashing around my legs.
“Shh,” she shushed me.
We entered the stairwell that led down to the admin floor.
We raced down those too.
And along another hall.
My heart was hammering.
My skin was prickling.
My senses were reeling.
My mind was filled with whatever this was…
And Tanyn.
We hit another doorway to another stairwell, and she went down them, taking me with her, but she did not call for the lights.
I could see with my demon vision.
She could not.
And since we were underground, it was pitch dark.
But she had no problem navigating the stairs, dragging me with her.
We hit the next level down, one I’d never been to, and I vaguely noticed that the walls were not entirely snow packed here. You could see the original black stone up to about shoulder height.
In normal circumstances, I would find that interesting and ask Tanyn about it.
However, at the moment, I was too terrified to…
Wait.
I yanked on Monique’s hand and stopped us both.
“Catla,” she stressed, “we don’t have time.”
“It’s melting,” I whispered.
“What?” she asked.
“The snow walls. They’re melting.”
And they were.
As we stood there, I watched the pack slowly receding, and the stone underneath being unveiled.
There was no dripping. No water. So it wasn’t melting.
The snow was just…vanishing.
I turned my attention to the floor.
It didn’t look like a sheet of ice.
It was stone.
“Ca—” she began but stopped herself as both of our heads whipped to look behind us.
I felt it too.
Someone…
Or something…
Was coming.
There was no sound.
But I could sense them.
And so could Monique.
Seriously, what the fuck?
She was human.
Again, I didn’t have time to ask.
Now I knew the threat was real.
It was then, I ran, dragging Monique with me.
I would have picked her up (even half-demon, I had the strength), but she needed to guide us to wherever the hells we were going.
With jerks on our connection as we ran, she did.
To another stairwell.
As we descended, I noted this was all stone. No snow. No ice marble floors.
But contradictorily, it was cold as all fuck.
At the end of a short hall down there, a hall that didn’t smell all that great, and the vibe of it was far worse, we ran into a door.
A dead end.
I was about to let her go so I could attempt to use my strength to break it down, something I hoped I could do because it was made of wood and iron, it was obviously old, but it was not rickety.
But Mon ordered, “Stand back.”
Alert to her no-nonsense tone, I did.
She positioned in front of the door, put her hands at her chest, palms facing out, and with a push on the air, the door buckled back, exploding, the planks of wood flying into the dark beyond.
Okay.
Seriously.
“What the hells?” I snapped.
I knew my human gal had some witch in her blood.
But that?
Princess Anna was a farging royal, and she probably couldn’t do that.
Monique took my hand again and we raced into the room.
I knew what it was immediately.
The dungeon.
Albeit undoubtedly interesting, I did not take a look around.
We sprinted through some rooms and down yet another hall—this one contained nothing but cell doors (a goodly number of them)—to another dead end.
It was made of stone.
And there was nowhere else for us to go.
Though, strangely, even if that was the case, it looked like someone along the way wanted to go through it, quite badly, because there were an abundance of blast and scorch marks all over the surface.
“Gods dammit,” I bit off and whirled on her. “Why did you bring me here?”
“Face the wall, Cat,” she demanded.
“What?”
“Honey,” she whispered. “Trust me. Just face the fucking wall.”
She was no less tweaked.
No.
She was more tweaked.
Therefore, I did as told.
Feeling like an idiot, feeling more crucially that we were wasting time when we were trapped, even though I had no idea what was happening, I did know someone was after us, and I would not, in that moment, allow my mind to go to where Tanyn was and what it meant he was not with me, I turned and stared at the wall.
I barely aimed my eyes at it before the lights in the room illuminated.
I was seeing through red, but I still knew those lights were also red.
Holy Lilith.
And then I jumped when the stones in front of me started shifting.
“What in the realms?” I whispered as I watched them go.
An arch formed.
A door.
And beyond it, a pitch-black void.
“Do you have a light?” I whispered.
“Go,” Monique said.
I twisted my neck to look at her in shock. “Go where?”
“Just go.” She whipped to look behind us, I felt it too, she turned to me and shouted, “Go go go!”
With nowhere else to head, I stepped into the void.
And instantly, tiny pinpricks of red lights illuminated on the walls, dimly showing there was another staircase here, again going down.
Those lights formed ancient symbols. And runes. The characters that made up the long-gone demon language that only the most fastidious scholars now knew how to read.
And they didn’t light the way.
No.
They lit where we were and a few feet in front of us.
After we passed, they faded to black.
I noticed this like I’d been noticing everything else.
Vaguely and on the run.
It felt like we were dashing down those stairs forever. Like they never ended. Like the lore behind Berg Castle being built on the steps that led to the hells was true.
And maybe it was true, because I eventually saw something at the bottom.
Small, and still far away, but I could make it out.
It got bigger with each step we rushed down.
Another doorway beyond which there were red and orange lights that couldn’t be misconstrued.
Fire.
Not a cheery little blaze.
It looked like the space beyond was filled with fire.
We were running straight toward fire.
“Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuckfuckfuck,” I bitched as I kept moving.
“Faster,” Monique urged.
We went faster.
So much faster, when the stairwell let out into the…I had no idea what the fuck it was, a chamber, a temple…neither of us had it in us to stop.
Therefore, we dashed across the narrow bridge single file to the plateau in the middle before we were able to halt our progress.
Around this plateau, the rest of the circular space—outside that bridge—was what appeared to be a bottomless pit of fire.
And this was it.
There was nowhere else to go.
We were trapped.
Did Monique lead me into a trap?
Impossible.
Impossible!
“Stand ready,” Monique warned.
“Ready?” I demanded. “For what?”
She didn’t answer.
I had many questions (so many!), primary at that moment to all of them was how we were being followed, by what was clearly a threat, and why it seemed she led me into a trap.
However, this question went unspoken due to the fact I was standing still as a statue, stupefied as she lifted one clenched fist, shook it once in the air, like one would shake a cocktail shaker, and a staff sprung from her fingers made of bright white light.
It was very long.
She held it in the middle.
And each end was not blunt. They were both wicked-sharp blades, facing in opposite directions. Each had a lethally curved tip.
Agog with this, I wasn’t ready for when she swung her other arm in front of her, and at the end of her arc, a deadly blade of white light curled around her knuckles.
What.
In.
The.
Fuck?!
“They’re here,” she whispered.
But I knew they were.
Shit!
And it began.
I learned what that spot was on the photo of Tanyn and me from the party.
Our attackers were invisible.