Chapter 22
Felicia
One moment, Auby’s sonic burst seemed to halt the ice-covered Naga in their tracks; the next, they shook it off and lunged for us.
Levant’s response was one of fury and lethal grace.
It turned my stomach as blood spurted and coated the pristine white snow red.
He bought us the time we needed to use the winch to go down, but he wouldn’t take it.
Like he was possessed, he gave chase, attacking with a fury I would never have guessed he possessed.
He’d been so careful not to harm any of them last time, but today, a switch had been flipped, and he seemed to be hellbent on killing them all.
“Levant! We need to go, now!” I tried to reason with him, but he appeared not to hear me.
He wasn’t attached to the descent harness yet, but we had to go.
I could see how the light was changing, growing intense enough that it burned my eyes and forced me to squint.
It was also beginning to shift through various colors, red, purple, blue.
Then the earth rumbled beneath my feet, and I stumbled, my foot sliding on the edge of the gaping hole. “Levant!” I screamed, and I went over.
In the blinding light, I saw shapes hurling after me, accompanied by a roar of fury so powerful it overshadowed the rumbling of the quake that shook the ice.
The harness I’d secured around me abruptly halted my descent, and pain bloomed bright and hot all along my hips and waist. The thick layers of fur probably saved me from serious harm, but the pain was intense.
I blinked through it, fought to see, but heard the crash below me before I recovered.
“No!” I shouted. Peering down into the brightly lit hole, I saw how much snow had drifted in and piled high.
I also saw where a shape had plummeted into it, but there was no sign of life.
Raising my head, I hoped fervently that Levant was at the edge, looking down at me.
Only Auby stuck his pale lavender and pink snout over the lip of the hole, his eyes bright, visible even from a good fifty feet away.
“Auby, please tell me Levant is up there with you,” I begged.
He shook his snout and let out a mournful whimper.
When he disappeared, I feared for his life.
The winch hummed, and I began sinking down at a steady pace, my feet dangling and my body spinning in slow circles as I dropped lower and lower toward the floor of the tunnel.
The ice groaned and creaked around me, and it felt like it wanted to squeeze in and crush me to death.
A rumble morphed into a growl so visceral and mean that it made the blood in my veins turn to ice.
That was not the earthquake—it came from below me.
The fear that sound had evoked morphed into hope.
Levant! He’d survived the fall. It was nearly impossible to see him because the light was so bright down here.
It was going to scorch my retinas and make me go blind if this lasted much longer.
I needed sunglasses on steroids, but all I had was the thick, furry edge of my fur hood to pull lower over my head to shield my eyes.
I saw movement then, the snow pile sliding and roiling.
A hand burst through the surface, and my belly clenched with renewed fear.
That hand wasn’t black, but nearly white and dusted with ice crystals.
One of the savages… I instinctively clutched the rope I hung from and tried to slow my descent.
“Auby! Auby!” I shouted, but he did not respond, and I kept lowering deeper into the hole.
The Naga burst from the snow with a howl of rage, his eyes locking onto me.
I dangled helplessly above his head, and though a couple dozen feet still separated us, I knew that might not be enough if he was truly determined; and he was.
He rose on his tail, lunged, and would have snatched me out of the air, but I managed to lift my legs just enough that he missed.
As he crashed back to the cave’s icy floor, Levant rose from the snowdrift.
Yes! He’d survived. The snow had broken their fall, and their big bodies and tough scales must have done the rest.
The pair clashed with fury, slashing and clawing at one another.
If I kept lowering, I’d end up caught in the middle, and I wasn’t sure Levant would realize that in time.
I could be squashed like a pancake, flattened like a bug before he knew I was there.
“Auby!” I shouted again, but when he still didn’t respond, I feared the others on the surface had somehow gotten to him.
Then the earth shook again, and abruptly, that blinding light vanished.
Darkness descended over the cave, and my ears rang as if a loud noise had exploded across my senses, but I hadn’t heard it.
My breathing sounded loud in the silence that followed, raspy and frantic.
My heart pounded in my chest. The darkness was so absolute, my eyes struggling to adjust. What was happening? Where was Levant? And Auby?
My hand found the knife sheathed on my belt, and I clenched my fingers tightly around the grip.
The winch had stopped lowering me at last, right when it might not be necessary any longer.
Should I cut the rope and hope that the short fall and the pile of fluffy snow below would protect me from harm?
I had to find Levant, and I had to stop the ship from imploding and taking the planet with it.
Then the ice rumbled and shook again, harder, louder; this quake was worse than the last. Ice groaned, creaked, and then it gave out with a horrendous crack.
A rain of ice and snow came down on me from above.
I swayed dangerously on the rope, and felt the ice cut through fur and leather in more than one place.
The sting of those wounds was nothing in comparison to the terror I felt—worse, the fear of losing Levant and Auby.
I couldn’t see enough to know the extent of the damage to the ice shaft, and it was still shaking, still splintering and breaking.
When everything halted after what seemed like way too many endless minutes, I was certain everyone was dead and I was somehow the sole survivor.
My mind already flashed with plans of what I’d have to do next: get down to the ground, to my ship, and engage the self-destruct so it would stop harming the planet.
There wouldn’t be anyway for me to escape, but that was a detail I couldn’t care about when Levant lay broken at the bottom of this shaft and Auby had become a bad afternoon snack for some beast again.
The voice cutting through the dark was so unexpected that tears sprang into my eyes.
“Felicia, are you all right?” Auby asked, his sweet, childlike voice echoing down the shaft like a ray of sunshine.
He was alive! I didn’t know how he’d managed to avoid those wild Naga up there and then survive that massive quake, but he had.
“Alive!” I shouted at him. I didn’t know how to put into words my fear that Levant wasn’t.
I didn’t hear him, still couldn’t see a thing in the utter blackness after the light.
There should have been daylight coming from above, at the very least, but there was nothing, just dark.
Levant should have made a sound. Was he buried under ice, suffocating, crushed?
My throat closed up, and pain so intense it took my breath away crashed through me.
I loved him like I’d never loved another.
This was the man I had decided to give up everything for, because he was worth it. I couldn’t lose him, not now.
A light flared above me, and through my tears, I saw Auby’s eyes beam down at me like a pair of headlights.
“Stay where you are,” he announced, and I choked on a watery laugh.
Like I could go anywhere, dangling from a rope somewhere above broken ice and layers of snow.
If I cut the rope now, I’d risk impaling myself on something I couldn’t see below me.
Levant was there, lying in that mess, maybe bleeding to death from a wound.
Frantic with terror, I searched around me in the meager light coming from my Revenant companion.
I needed options, and fast, find the core of my training and figure this out.
A swish and then a whirring noise reached my ears.
I looked back up and discovered that Auby and his lights were descending.
He was right above me, somehow sliding down the rope I was hanging from.
I didn’t know how he did it, but he was coming down fast. In the moment I’d looked up and spotted him, he’d traveled nearly all the way down.
I blinked, and suddenly I had my arms full of baby Vakarsa.
He squealed. “You are unharmed. Thank the stars, Felicia.” His snout pressed once against my cheek, where my tears had frozen on my skin.
He exhaled warmth, and my body trembled, as if that point of heat reminded my flesh how cold it was.
There was still light beaming from his eyes, a bright blue very different from the cold white that had emitted from my ship all night.
I could see that he’d hooked his paws around the rope—all six of them—and the metal hooves had locked together.
“Magnetically,” he said smugly. “Now, let me see if I can’t get you down. Where is Levant?”