Page 55

We’re Not Alone Down Here

“Vos?” Reven says.

“On it.” His yellow light joins the turquoise glow of the jedite as he goes to work on the icy top layer of the lake. It starts with a crackling sound that echoes through the cavern softly, then louder with each passing second. A burst of water, and he’s through. Not the entire surface but a decent-size hole.

Through that opening, the water bubbles up, spilling out over the top of the ice and turning it more clear than white.

“This would have been easier with Cain,” Vos says through clenched teeth as he works.

We shouldn’t have split up, even just a little bit. None of us say that out loud. Instead, we watch in silence as water, and then chunks of ice so pure they’re a brilliant white even in the multicolored lights, pour out of the hole, the gush of water straight up, growing higher and higher. Omma once described to me the geysers that spewed steam and boiling water from the ground in the harsh flats leading to Mt. Tyrh, the active volcano in Mariana. I pictured something like this in my head. Only not so much ice.

Like Vos dislodged the right chunk or something, the glow of turquoise below, obscured by the roiling waters, intensifies so much that it lights up a large swath of the lake from underneath.

“That’s it,” I whisper.

“You’ve got it,” Reven says to Vos.

Vos is clenching and unclenching his jaw and abruptly the light dims, like the heart sank lower under the lake. “Damn it.” The geyser of ice water drops down to a gentle burble. “I can’t see what I’m doing.”

“Keep going,” I urge.

With a grunt, the geyser rises again, and after a few tense minutes that stretch on and on, the light below the surface starts to move again, coming closer until something not ice or water bursts through the hole, to float precariously on the top of the fountain of water still spewing up.

All of us except Vos turn our backs to it abruptly, and I’m blinking away the sting of my eyes.

The heart.

“I guess I didn’t really need my eyes,” Pella grumbles off to my left.

“Someone grab it,” Vos calls out in a voice strained with effort.

Flickering has me looking again to see a stream of shadow pass before the heart, dimming it on and off in flashes. Shading my eyes, I watch as the shadow tries to lift the heart from the water. Because it keeps moving, though, Reven keeps missing. Until suddenly the darkness he wields changes to a net that scoops it up.

“We got it,” I breathe the words, hardly daring to let myself believe that for once things are going our way.

He drops the heart on the ground and buoyant optimism sneaks past my emotional barriers in a bright burst of relief. We really got it. Allusian will help us now, with all the powers of a goddess. We can put an end to everything. It’s over. It’s finally all over.

I turn to Reven with a grin. “Thank the—”

And that’s when the sheet of ice covering the rest of the lake explodes, sending massive, solid chunks shooting at us like cannon fodder.

Reven blasts up a screen of shadow. The ice hits that and bounces back at the massive creature that breaks through the water, roaring a challenge.

“Run!” Vos yells.

We all scatter.

It’s that or get crushed as a monster—one the size of Bene when he’s himself—plows up onto the shore so hard and fast, rocks and ice fling upward in its wake. The thing is fat and long, with a flattened fluke of a tail at the back and four beefy legs allowing it to crawl on land. It starts swinging its heavy body violently around, slashing the razor-sharp horn that sprouts from the center of its forehead like a rapier sword.

“The Gorecutter!” Pella shouts from somewhere on its other side.

Wildernyss’s Devourer.

An urgent shout sounds from my right and Tziah gets jerked into the air by a whiplike appendage that has nothing to do with the Gorecutter. It’s coming out of the ice-chunk-filled waters of the lake.

Ripping fear lances through my gut and shreds apart any of the numb barriers I just built up.

The Revoker. Tyndra’s Devourer.

Everyone’s heard tales of what the various monsters in our oceans look like. The Revoker is supposed to be the smallest of the monsters, human-looking on the top, the bottom end a long, snake-like tail that splits into three. It’s rumored to pull people who get too close to the water in and eat only their eyes, tongues, and feet, leaving them alive but floundering in the ocean. Very few have ever made it back to shore.

Holy blasted hells. We’re facing two Devourers.

“You are in big trouble,” the Shadows crow.

Tziah opens her mouth to take them both out, but, as if the creature knows what she can do, it smacks her against the rock wall of the cavern, and she goes limp in its grip.

“Tzi!” I can’t see Vos, but I can hear him.

I scramble to make sense of the situation. That water can’t just be an underground lake. It has to connect to the ocean. They must have swum under the dominion somehow. Even with the lands sinking.

Most importantly, there’s no way we can go up against two when Bene isn’t full-sized.

“Don’t kill them!” I yell as another realization slams into me. If Allusian helps us free her sisters, they’re going to take immediate retribution on the humans who killed their consorts. Monsters or not.

“Are you kidding me?” Pella shouts back.

No time to answer. I throw myself on the ground to avoid being sliced in half by the Gorecutter’s swinging horn. Vos spews ice from his hands, hitting the Revoker’s tail that is flinging Tziah, still unconscious, around in the air like a ragdoll.

But that Devourer is smart. It tosses Tziah away only to swoop Vos up with a different tail. Vos doesn’t hesitate, freezing it fast, starting where it has him and working his way down. A ghastly sound screeches from under the water, making the already stirred-up lake ripple like sand in an earthquake.

A third tail whips around Vos’s wrist and snaps his arm before ripping it clean off at the shoulder, like tearing a chicken wing off a cooked carcass. I feel that crack and Vos’s shout all the way to my bones and bile surges up my throat.

Shadow whips out too late. Formed like an axe, it comes down on the appendage that has Vos. The Revoker drops him and the shadow transforms to a net, catching Vos, to drop him onto solid land.

Which is when I see it. What Tziah meant. Blood is pouring from his wound, soaking his clothes and the red rock of the mountain. And I can’t tell the difference.

Fear spikes, and the Shadows surge. “One down!”

“Vos!” I yell.

He rolls out from under the Gorecutter’s flat tail that the thing brings down on top of him, obviously trying to crush him. The second the tail strikes the ground with a dull whomp , pitch blackness descends over the entire cavern.

Not from me.

Reven.

“Get out of the way!” he shouts from somewhere behind me.

Essentially blind, crunches of rock and ice tell me where the Gorecutter is thrashing about wildly to my left. Staying as low to the ground as I can, I crawl away from both Devourers toward where I saw Vos last, feeling my way as I go.

But it’s too dark, and I’m moving too slow.

Almost as fast as Reven doused all light, a turquoise glow penetrates the absolute darkness, like the tiny pinprick of a star at first, then growing larger.

The heart.

It won’t be hidden by shadow. Even Reven’s.

It doesn’t take long before I can make out details of the cavern, now bathed in blue light that turns the red of the rock a purplish black, and the Shadows pound at me, trying to get out.

A quick check shows me Vos on the ground with a chunk of ice capping off where his arms was, stemming the bleeding. One-handed, he’s crawling away from the Gorecutter toward where Tziah landed, leaving behind a pool of glistening blood where he’d been lying.

I can’t see Hakan, who I think is on the other side of the monster, and Reven is nowhere in sight, but Pella is to my left. In that short blackout, she climbed almost entirely up the fall of rocks under the shaft we came down.

The Gorecutter swings away from me and Pella toward some threat to its right, stabbing and slashing, thrashing its head around.

“Hey!” Pella shouts, waving her arms.

But the thing doesn’t so much as acknowledge her.

In a sharp, fluid move, Pella has her bow out, getting off three arrows in rapid succession, two of which bounce off the animal’s hide, but the third strikes the corner of its eye.

The monster screams in fury and whips around on her faster than an animal that thick and large should be able to move. Pella jumps to avoid its horn, coming down on the rocks in a way that sends her toppling over with a yelp.

The Gorecutter rears back to bring its horn down on her like a Wildernyssian soldier cleaves with a broadsword.

“Kill her!”

Only, Bene shoots in front of the Gorecutter’s face. The other Devourer pulls up short, freezing almost like it’s surprised, and the two stare each other down as Bene flaps in the air.

Is Bene talking to it?

The Gorecutter gives a great squealing warning that’s somewhere between a song and a growl and Bene darts forward like he’s charging the thing despite being only raven-sized. Kind of like a gnat confronting a crocodile.

And damned if the Gorecutter doesn’t back the hells off, even if only a smidge.

I have just enough time to think, Bene’s got this, when the Revoker launches the rest of the way out of the water like a demon violently escaping the hells, one tail propelling him as it whips around underneath, while the other two tails shoot to either side.

One coming straight for me.

“Bene!” Pella yells.

I swing back just in time to see the Gorecutter lunge for a distracted Bene, swallowing him whole.