Page 182 of Quicksilver

“Please. Help me!”

“A bargain, then,”the whisper purred.

“No! No bargains. No tricks. No deals.”

“Then why would we help?”

I stopped running. Overcome with exhaustion and pain, all I wanted to do was curl into a ball and pretend that none of this was happening. Instead, I said, “Because this is wrong. What they've done here. It's evil, and you can end it.”

“Evil and good are two sides of the same coin.”The whisper snickered.

“If that was supposed to be funny, then... then...” I threw my hands in the air, my eyes pricking with tears.

“There is always evil. There is always good,”the whisper said.

“Yes! But look how much evil exists here. So much pain, and death, and suffering. Isn't it time for some good? For balance? I...” I trailed off, not knowing how to win this argument. “I love him,” I said. “I can't bear him to die.”

“The Kingfisherrrrr,”the whisper buzzed.

“Yes.”

“Your mate.”

I stared into the dark, feeling hopeless. “Yes,” I said. “My mate.”

The silence rang in my ears, deafeningly loud.

The whisper was gone. The thread guiding me to it was gone.

It was over. I was stuck in this awful labyrinth, alone. I would die here. I wouldn't even be able to make it back to him, so that we could die together.

“A small favor, then,”the whisper said. “We will do it for a favor. And for a restoration of balance. And for love.”

I burst into tears. “What kind of favor?” I choked out.

“As we said. A small one.”

A small favor. That was vague enough to ring all kinds of alarm bells, but it was the best I was going to get. I would deal with the consequences of whatever foolishness this was later. “All right, then. Yes. I’ll owe you a small favor.”

“This way, then. This way.”

The thread flared back to life, pulling me forward. I followed it. I ran. I sprinted as fast as my legs could carry me—

—and I screamed when I rounded a corner and came face to face with Morthil.

The demon was still dead, but that wasn't much of a comfort. According to Fisher, it would 'respawn,' whatever that meant, and I had no desire to be around it when it did.

“Where are you?” I hissed.

The whisper answered delightedly, “Inside! We are in. Inside.”

“What do you mean?” I was verging on hysteria now. This was too much. Because I already knew what it meant by inside, I could feel it, so close, humming, and I didn’t want to admit to myself what I was going to have to do.

“Inside,”the whisper insisted.

I crept forward, approaching the spider demon's steaming corpse. It lay in a heap, its abdomen ripped wide open where I'd stabbed it with my dagger. One of its legs lay on the ground three feet away. The huge mouth in the center of its face was mangled from the blow Lorreth had death it with Avisiéth, which only made it more hideous. I held my breath as I leaned over and peered into the demon's yawning maw.

Fuck. Any hopes that I might have been wrong went up in smoke when I saw the gleaming flash of silver at the back of the beast's gullet.