by Kelly Mendig
“For what?”
“This.” He swept his arms out. “Us, locked in here instead of on morgue slabs. He planted the idea that we had a happy future. It’s the seed that’s sown this entire debacle. I believed him, Evy, so when you died I sought him out, and I never thought about how easy he was to find.”
A tremor clawed down my spine. “Whose idea was the resurrection, Wyatt?”
He looked ill. “His. Tovin suggested the spell with that line about something still left for you to do. It’s what convinced me to accept the deal. I didn’t even consider the price. I just wanted him to be right.”
I was finally tracking his thought process. Each missing puzzle piece, save one, was clicking into place. Tales of a happy ending when one couldn’t possibly exist. Halfies killing Jesse and Ash, and forcing me and Wyatt together. Kelsa admitting someone else had a purpose for me and that Wyatt was intended to find me dying.
The plan for the resurrection was to put me into the body of a dead Hunter—a Hunter who’d already been dead two days. If the clock had started then, as planned, the whole ordeal would have been over yesterday. Except something had drawn me to Chalice—a fortuitous turn of events I still couldn’t explain. The final piece of the puzzle.
“That son of a goblin whore,” I said. Another more terrifying thought occurred to me about the powerful elven mage. “Christ, Wyatt, does that mean he’s part of this alliance? And what about Amalie and the other Fey?”
“I don’t know.” His fists clenched and released, clenched and released. He seemed to vibrate like a live wire. “We can’t trust anyone, can we?”
“What about the Triads? They’re still human, run by humans. Surely someone can help us.”
“Maybe, if we had any way to get to them.”
Good point. “So what the hell does Tovin want so badly with your free will?”
“I have no idea.”
Wyatt was Gifted, sure, but his abilities were no match for Tovin’s. And there were easier ways of getting access to the Triads. Handlers had no high-level influence. If Tovin had truly gone through the trouble of setting this up from the onset, the payoff didn’t seem to match the effort. Not even close.
“Then I guess we’ll have to ask the bastard when we see him,” I said, relatively calm, considering.
“Thinking positive again?”
“I’m thinking I don’t like being manipulated. I’m thinking I don’t want the clock to run out in this cell without ever knowing the truth about my death. I’m thinking we’ll get out of here, because I don’t want to die. I believe we have a future, Wyatt, and I want it.”
Wyatt went absolutely still—an amazing feat that seemed to go on endlessly. Intense black eyes stared at me, through me. Sought the truth of that final statement. Giving him no reason to doubt—and suddenly very aware that I was still standing there in my panties—I stepped toward the bars. He mirrored my movements.
“I do love you,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s romantic love, or just because of our history, or if it even matters now if it’s mine or Chalice’s or gratitude for everything you’ve done for me—”
He silenced me with a finger across my lips—a simple touch that unleashed a swarm of butterflies in my stomach. His finger traced a line down my cheek and hooked beneath my chin. The subtle hint drew me forward the few inches he needed to kiss me.
It was tender and awkward and painful. The bars bit into my cheekbones and left little maneuvering room. The spicy taste of him, familiar and foreign, invaded my senses. His tongue probed forward. I parted my lips to allow entry, meeting his with mine. My hands tangled in his short hair.
As our mouths danced in what little space we had, a subtle warmth built low in my stomach. It spread lower. I clenched my thighs. The movement elicited a pleased growl from Wyatt.
Cold metal continued to press into my face. Cold, like a goblin’s skin.
Irrational fear drove me back, out of the safety of Wyatt’s embrace. His hurt surprise quickly turned to understanding.
“Evy?”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, I am. I shouldn’t have—”
“I’m glad you did.” And I was. Glad and terrified and turned on and a conflicting mess of other things. “A little awkward through the bars, though.”
“Maybe if we ask nicely, they’ll put us in the same cell.”
“Sort of a final request?”
Darkness flickered across his face. “I thought we were thinking positive here.”
I shivered at the chill in his voice, yet another reminder of my lack of clothes. My jeans were still on the other side of the cell. I padded across the cold cement to fetch them, then put them and my sneakers back on.
Fully clothed once again, I sat back down against the bars. Wyatt hadn’t moved and he didn’t reach for me. He was still waiting for an answer, and I had none to give. Positive or negative, I was tired of thinking. I wanted to lock myself into a room and let Wyatt hold me until this nightmare was over. I wanted to eat pizza and beer and donuts, and do tequila shots until I threw up. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life staring at him through iron bars, waiting for Kelsa to show up and the clock to run out, wondering if I’d escape or wither away.
“I’m thinking,” I said, turning to face him. “I’m thinking I’d like to get out of here.”
“Ditto, but unless we can shatter that crystal, or discover a hidden escape route, we seem to be stuck.”
“What happened to thinking positive?”
“I—”
The ground trembled, distant and soft, like a train passing too close. It couldn’t be an actual train—we’d have heard one passing sooner. The mini quake silenced itself after only a few seconds. Maybe a truck, or an airplane flying too low.
“That was odd,” Wyatt said.
Odd repeated itself a moment later. The second tremor was closer, stronger. The floor vibrated like an electric wire. Whatever it was, it seemed to be moving toward us. Sideways, upward, backward, I couldn’t tell. Through the cement floor.
The unfinished cement floor.
I whooped, pumping one fist into the air. Wyatt stared. “What, Evy?”
“The cavalry is here.”
The cell floor hummed and shimmied. The tightly packed particles began to thrum with kinetic energy. They pulled apart and shifted, like quicksand. I backed to the corner, careful to not get sucked into the maelstrom. A hand formed, the size of my leg. It braced on the unmoving section of the floor and pulled a second hand out of the liquid cement. A familiar face coalesced. Basketball-sized eyes blinked at me, but did not see. Only sensed.
“Smedge,” I said.
“Stony. ”
“How did you find us?”
“Know scent. Spells … cannot block.”
“But why?” Wyatt asked. “What are you doing here?”
Smedge grumbled, a familiar sound of dislike. “Save. Sent.”
“By whom?”
The bridge troll grumbled again, but did not reply.
“Who sent you to save us, Smedge?” I asked. I didn’t dare hope it was true, that we were on the verge of getting out of there. Hope was a dangerous thing. Like gargoyles, the trolls had always presented themselves as a neutral race. Stories about trolls hiding under bridges and eating children are highly exaggerated.
Smedge curled his stony lips in some attempt at a smile. “Amalie. Friend.”
“Amalie?” I repeated. The sprite Queen was sending trolls to find us? I recalled yesterday’s conversation with Smedge about Amalie. He said she was consolidating her power in preparation for choosing sides. Had she seen this coming, or was she working with Tovin? Sprites and elves were distant cousins after all.
“Friend.”
“Smedge, do you trust her?” I asked.
“Yes. Trust. Friend. Save Stony. Save Truman. Save world.”
Save world? Gee, no pressure.
“Can you get us out of here?” Wyatt asked.
“Trust me. Must.”
“We trust you,” I said.
Smedge’s head lowered back toward the floor, flattening out until it appeared to be little more than an anthill. His eyes disappeared as his mouth opened and expanded. Wider until it was a three-foot hole in the floor, outlined by cement hands. I peered over the edge. It descended into complete darkness. Into the heart of the earth and the world that trolls inhabited.
I looked at Wyatt. He seemed dubious, but shrugged, leaving the choice up to me.
“I’ve always wanted to see how the other side lived,” I quipped.
“Just don’t forget to come over here for me.”
“Never. See you down there.”
I inhaled and held it, summoning up the courage it took to leap off a cliff with no sign of the bottom. I closed my eyes, stepped off the edge of Smedge’s lip, and plummeted into his belly.
Chapter 20
25:12
Free-falling into utter darkness turned into a sensation of floating. At some point, I stopped moving. Pitch surrounded me. I tried to move, but couldn’t. I opened my mouth to scream, only to realize that I couldn’t breathe. Something filled my mouth, thick like gel, but with no taste or actual consistency. It was in my ears and nose.
Great plan, Evy. You’re going to suffocate in the gullet of a troll.
I tried to spit out the offending substance. It was like forcing air out of my mouth without actually exhaling. My lungs ached. I tried to move, claw, fight, anything but hover there. Alone.
Wyatt! I screamed in my mind. Was he down here with me, slowly choking to death on some viscous fluid with no real properties? Had it all been another of Tovin’s tricks?
My chest spasmed. Lungs burning, I prepared to open up and suck in that fluid and just end it all. Then floating turned to actual movement. Free-falling again, this time headfirst, toward light. I held on, fighting against the need to inhale.
I hit something hard. My left shoulder burned and I cried out, which forced an intake. I coughed on the fluid and something else—air. I inhaled greedily, alternately spitting out the mucus, which was foul-smelling and gluelike now that I was … somewhere else.
Rubbing the mess out of my eyes with equally messy hands, I tried to get a look at my surroundings. I felt dirt beneath my knees and caked on my skin. Mixed in with the stink of the goop was the heavy odor of earth. Dark shapes coalesced in the gloom.
Something slammed into my back. I fell over again, this time with Wyatt tangled up in my arms. Dirt scraped my elbows and face. I grunted. He wasn’t coughing. I rolled him onto his back. He was slathered in the same clear goo from head to foot, but his eyes were shut. He was perfectly still, and not breathing.
“Shit!”
I wiped off his face as best I could and tilted back his chin. With muddy fingers, I scooped some of the gel out of his mouth. CPR training was years ago, lost along with most of those first few, intense weeks of training at Boot Camp. I did what I remembered, hoping it was accurate. I pinched his nose and blew twice. One hand over the other, five compressions. Two more breaths. Five compressions. Each motion performed with careful precision. No panic, no haste, just absolute faith that he would—
Wyatt coughed. I rolled him onto his left side, so he could vomit onto the floor. His entire body shook as he expelled the offending goo. He coughed for a long time, and I held his head, content just to have him breathing again.
We were in a tunnel of some sort, probably an abandoned construction shaft, part of last year’s attempt at creating a city subway system. There were dirt floors and walls, with a hand light strung every ten feet or so. It was cold and quiet. I listened for the sounds of traffic or running water, anything to identify our location.
Wyatt rolled onto his back, still coughing. His grimace melted into a smile when he saw me. I cupped my hands on either side of his cheeks. “Do not scare me like that,” I said.
“Sorry.” He cleared his throat and spat to the side. “I tried, but I guess I didn’t take a deep enough breath.”
“Well, Smedge could have warned us.”
“Did not ask.”
His voice, less than a foot to my right, scared the shit out of me. He had emerged in the wall, features more pronounced in the softer earth. I considered arguing with him, but failed to see the point. Trolls were very literal, and he was right. We didn’t ask what to expect before leaping into his mouth.
“Halfway.”
“We aren’t there yet?” I asked.
“No. Halfway. More air.”
“No kidding.”
“We have to go back into that?” Wyatt asked.
“He said halfway. So we just need to take deeper breaths.” And a shower, once we got where we were going. In the open air, that fluid smelled like rotten eggs.
I helped Wyatt sit up. He threw his arms around my shoulders. Though slick and smelly, and uncomfortably chilly, I still hugged him tight. Together again and away from the blocking crystal, the sense of power returned. It tingled through me like a static shock, energizing and comfortingly familiar. I started laughing for no good reason. He did, too. Smedge probably thought us a pair of loons.
“Must go.”
We both stood. I held Wyatt’s gaze as I inhaled, matching my breaths to his, prepping like a deep-sea diver. I nodded when I was ready. He winked. Mucus trickled down his cheeks like tears.
Smedge had shifted, creating another mouth-shaped hole in the dirt floor. I took a deep breath, held it, and jumped.
* * *
Halfway my ass. The second trip felt interminable, and even with the prep, I was screaming for air by the time I was finally ejected. I coughed and spit and gulped in oxygen. This time, I had the good sense to roll a few feet and avoid Wyatt’s crash landing. He hit the sand a few seconds after I did, alert and gasping.
No, the stuff on the ground was finer than sand. Like confectioners’ sugar, without the white residue and dust. It didn’t scrape my skin like regular dirt, but it still stuck to the goo and made a gross, pale brown paste on my arms and hands.
“Evy, are you okay?” Wyatt asked. He tried to wipe his face and succeeded in smearing muck across his forehead.
“Yeah. You?”
“Yeah. Where the hell are we?”
Awareness of my surroundings set in with the nearby thunder of falling water. We were in a cavern. Its roof towered over us at least twelve stories high, the very top lost in dimness. The water flowed from a break in the upper rock, straight down in a stream as thin as my arm, and splashed into a pool the size of a small car. The water in the pool was black as pitch and glossy as a mirror, despite the constant ripples. The sound should have echoed louder, given the enormity of the cavern. Instead, it created a rhythmic white noise.
Dotted here and there on the craggy walls around us, flowers grew. Nothing I’d ever seen before—blue and purple and red, trumpet-shaped like lilies, but with dozens of petals like a daisy. I couldn’t imagine how such a stunning flower grew underground without sunlight. The sandy ground around the pool was peppered with small pockmarks, like thousands of tiny feet had once run across it. Glowing orange orbs stood on rock poles, acting like street lamps and casting a glow on the underground world we’d been vomited into.
“Holy …”
Awe crept into Wyatt’s voice. I twisted around, away from the falls. My mouth fell open.
A city rose up behind us. Carved directly into the rock, hewn stairs connected level after level of doors and windows and walkways. Their sizes varied, but few were larger than five feet tall. Curtains of shimmering material covered them all, cutting off their interiors from prying eyes. It reminded me of photos I’d seen of Mediterranean villas, but built up instead of out. Other varieties of flowers grew among the stones and doors and steps.
More impressively, abstract murals covered every inch of rock on that side of the cave. Scrolls and filigrees surrounded doorways and repeated on the windows—splashes of red, green, orange, blue, purple, and yellow,
twisted into a thing of beauty. Dotted among it were silver and gold and bronze, and I had no doubt that it wasn’t paint creating those rich, shimmering colors, but the metals themselves. Spheres the size of basketballs dotted the walls between windows, along the stairs, and in the stone face of the cave itself. They glowed with the same burnt orange color. But more than the visual aesthetic, I felt the power of the place. Stronger than I’d ever felt in the city; keener than just those vague wisps of energy.
I stood up on trembling legs. There was no sign of Smedge, or of the cave’s inhabitants. No, “village” was more appropriate than “cave.” Cave did not do the space’s majesty any sort of justice. The air was rife with the scents of flowers—lavender and roses and honeysuckle—none of the stale, humid air I expected.
Wyatt’s fingers slipped around mine, and slimy as they were, I held tight. My heart sped up a few beats, but not from fear. Nothing about this place scared me. It was exhilarating, like coming home after a long absence—a feeling I didn’t quite understand. Wyatt’s wide-eyed, slack-jawed gaze indicated similar feelings.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. He whispered, as though afraid speaking too loudly would destroy the peace around us and bring a horde of angry locals down on our heads.
“It’s amazing. Empty, but amazing.”
The burnt orange spheres glowed brighter, becoming first yellow, and then shimmering ivory. The colors of the wall murals sparked and lit, creating rainbow washes that almost hurt my eyes with their beauty. It bounced off the cavern walls all around us, making it seem somehow larger than before. Like a football stadium, minus the fake grass.
A curtain in one of the ground-level doors pulled to the side. A petite figure emerged, walking slowly, but with purpose and intent. Barely four feet tall, her sky blue skin radiated light and life. Her flaming red hair was done up in fancy spirals and held in place with crystals. More crystals dotted her face and cheeks, creating lazy paths down her shoulders and arms and across her stomach to her legs. Her breasts were faint mounds on her chest, with no discernible nipples. The sharp V between her legs was smooth and sexless. She was the perfect re-creation of the female figure, on a slightly smaller scale.
