Slade skirted past it and I followed, warm breath pluming in the air to kiss the stone.
There were more of them at various intervals down the corridor, in various poses, some male, some female.
Why line a corridor with statues like this?
Doors appeared in the tunnel to our left and right. I resisted the urge to try the handles. South was ahead, and we needed to stay on track. A sharp sound like the crack of thunder echoed behind us.
My step faltered.
“Keep moving,” Slade ordered.
Another crack was followed by another and another, and my heartbeat ramped up because my subconscious had made the connection even before it hit my conscious mind.
The patter of boots filled the tunnel behind us, and Slade and I broke into a run.
I didn’t need to look back to know what was following us. The statues had come to life. They’d fucking come to life and were after us. This was the shit of nightmares.
How many had we passed? Five, maybe six?
Fuck this.
I spun and braced myself, blade at the ready as the last statue we’d passed barreled toward me with its arms outstretched and its hands hooked into claws ready to grab. Its body was still stone, but the stone was cracked, exposing pink, fleshy fractures that pulsed with life. Its eyes were green, glowing orbs, and its mouth was a wet crimson aperture with thousands of razor teeth.
I ducked and stabbed it in the guts with perfect aim, so my blade slid into a fracture.
It screamed and pulled off my blade before throwing itself at me again.
“The eyes!” Slade cried out.
He slammed his blade into the thing’s eye, and the light died. The stone man fell, but he was replaced by another and another. Slade and I fought side by side, filling the tunnel with their screams as we cut them down. We made a good team, anticipating each other’s moves, working together like a well-oiled machine. I struck low, going for the abdomen or the thighs to disable them, and he took out their eyes. Before long, the tunnel was silent, filled only with our pants of exertion.
I wiped my sweaty brow with the back of my hand. “You think that’s what the other creatures were scared of?”
“I don’t know,” Slade said.
“But you know stuff, right?” I looked up at him. “You know what this place is.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I think I do.”
* * *
With the drones gone, there was no need for Slade to hold back on information or his emotions.
“Baile Sidhe means the Home of the Sidhe,” he said. “I’ve heard stories of this place. It was the Tuatha’s home in a time before.”
We turned away from the remnants of the stone people and continued down the tunnel. I kept one eye on the compass and my ears on Slade.
“This was where the Tuatha lived the first time they were here,” he said.
“Do you know why they left?”
“The sickness drove them away. At least, that’s what the ancient texts say.”
Palamon, the crown prince, had mentioned a sickness too. “You read the ancient texts?”
He raised one brow and looked down at me with a half-smile that tugged his tusk up. “You sound surprised. Didn’t think this big lug could read, huh?”
“No, it’s not that. I just…” What had I thought?
“You thought Winter’s Lethal Weapon would be more into crushing and smashing things than curling up with a good book?”
I winced. “Maybe.” But now I was imagining him lying in bed in his tight boxers with a book balanced on his chest.
My neck grew hot, and I ducked my head.
“Are you all right?” he asked, his tone saturated with concern. “Your face is red.”
“Exertion from the fighting.”
“But—”
“And I’m annoyed.” I forged on, grasping for another reason for my red face. Anything else but the truth.
“Annoyed?”
A reason for being annoyed surged up in my mind, and suddenly I was really annoyed. “Yeah, the Tuatha get to read whatever they want, and humans’ reading material is monitored.”
He sighed. “It’s unfair. I agree.”
Thank goodness for quick thinking. “Anyway, go on. What did you find out?”
“Baile Sidhe is mentioned in some texts, and as a youngling, I devoured those texts,” he said. “They speak of a sickness that twisted the hearts of all Tuatha, stripping them of their emotions. But in some extreme cases, it twisted their bodies and minds too. It spread too quickly for them to contain. The mutated Tuatha began rampaging and killing the unmutated. The Tuatha who hadn’t been physically altered were forced to abandon their home to save themselves.”
“Wait… Are you saying the creatures in this place are Tuatha that got sick and mutated?”
“I think that’s exactly what they are.”
Oh fuck. “And how come the Autumn Court had the key to this place? I mean, why send us in here and risk these creatures getting out?”
“I don’t know about the key, but I doubt they believe we’ll make it out alive, let alone let anything out.”
I looked up at him sharply. “And you? Do you think we’ll make it out alive?”
His brow crinkled in determination. “I’m going to ensure you do.”
That I do? “Hey. We. We make it out. Okay?”
He grinned. “Fine.”
We took a left then a right until the corridor we were in spilled out into a wide tubular space, like a massive pipe. The floor was made up of neat rectangular tiles, and the walls were smooth plaster. We’d only gone in a little way when a musty-sweet smell hit me.
Slade put out his arm to halt my progress. “Wait,” he said. “Look.”
He indicated the wall, and I noticed the strange gauzelike fabric clinging to it for the first time. Slivers of the substance hung here and there, like someone had torn it and stuck it to the plaster to create an incomprehensible pattern.
I reached out to touch it, then pulled my hand back, thinking better of it. “What is that?”
“I think it’s skin,” he said. “Snakeskin.”
Oh gross. Now that I studied the pipe properly, there was more of the gauzelike stuff on the walls and even the ceiling. Not gauze. Skin. The tunnel was coated in skin.
“Um, Slade… What kind of snake has this much skin to shed?” I scanned the width of the pipe. “And how big is it?”
He shook his head. And drew his blade. “If we continue down this tunnel, then I think we’re about to find out.”
If we continued… “Maybe we should go back, find another route?”
Slade’s jaw ticked as he studied the tunnel and peered up ahead at the dark, ominous exit we’d have to take if we carried on going forward.
I really didn’t want to go through that exit. “We’re not on a clock. We just need to make it out alive. There has to be another path that we can take that will get us to the exit.”
He nodded curtly. “Agreed. Let’s find another route.”
We turned back and I took a step. The tile beneath my foot depressed with a click. What the fuck?
“Don’t move!” Slade cried out.
The tunnel rumbled, and a metal barrier slid out of the wall and blocked us off.
Shit!
“Fuck,” Slade said.
We locked gazes. His eyes wide, his mouth pressed in a grim line. Yeah, we were both thinking the same thing. We should have made a run for it.
I stared at the tile that had caused this.
“It could have triggered something else if you’d moved,” Slade explained.
“I know. I get it.” I carefully lifted my foot, but the tile remained depressed.
“This tunnel was rigged to force us forward,” he added.
And I had a feeling we were going to discover why very soon.
18
“Stay behind me,” Slade instructed.
I’d never been one to cower and hide, but
alarms bells were going off in my head, and my body was totally ready to fight or flee, not that there was anywhere to flee to. The dark maw of the tunnel exit gaped at us, drawing us forward.
Slade’s huge frame acted like an epic shield. Damn, I was so glad he was here with me. Doing this alone would have sucked. Having him here made it bearable.
The darkness melted as we got closer, and soft amber light bloomed to life as the moss clinging to the stone was activated. It had to be a body heat thing. Shit—had our body heat woken the stone statues too?
Slade led the way into the room. The light from the moss intensified enough to cast its glow into the vast chamber and lighten the darkness to gray. Marble pillars lined the circumference of the room to brace an ornate ceiling dotted with moldings that were impossible to make out properly in the gloom.
The floor beneath my boots was marble tiles, cracked here and there, and in the center of the chamber was a huge, dark, coiled shape. It seemed to expand and contract, then it hit me that the thing was breathing.
Slade had gone very still, not breathing.
My brain finally pieced together what I was seeing.
Huge snake.
Shit.
Slade turned to me, put a finger to his lips, and pointed at a doorway on the far side of the room. A doorway we’d have to go past the snake to get to.
I nodded.
Slade’s huge hand swallowed mine, and we moved across the room, light on our feet in stealth mode, because there was no doubt in my mind that this thing was why the other creatures hadn’t followed us.
There was plenty of space between its coiled body and the wall so it wouldn’t be a squeeze to get past, but the tip of its thick, black tail lay between us and the exit.
There was something wrong with that tail, something… Oh fuck. There were people molded to it. I caught sight of a face with creamy eye whites and a mouth with bared teeth. Was that a hand? Horror clawed its way up my throat as my gaze slowly tracked up the tail to the body of the thing to confirm my awful suspicion. More faces, more mouths were visible, not under the skin of the snake, but making up the skin of the snake.
Slade relinquished my hand so he could pick me up and lift me over the tail. He set me on the other side before joining me.
The door was mere meters away and way too small for the snake to get through. We made a break for it.
“Please… Help me.” The voice was female, soft and imploring, and it was coming from the snake. “Please, help…”
My nape pricked as I followed the sound to the top of the coil. Something gold shimmered against the black body of the snake. Golden hair. A pale smudge of a face appeared.
A hand reached for us. “Help me.”
Fucking hell. There was a woman trapped in the snake’s coils.
I took a step toward her, and Slade pulled me back.
“No.”
“We can’t just leave her.”
“Danika, this feels wrong.”
My gut twisted, echoing his words.
“Please, help me out. I’m stuck.” The woman flexed her hand, her eyes desperate. “I don’t want to die. I just need a hand. It’s sleeping. It won’t wake for hours. You can climb it.”
My pulse kicked up. Slade was right, this was wrong, but the evidence of my eyes warred with the warnings my gut was giving off. There was a woman trapped there. I took a step toward her.
“Yesss, clossser?”
Whoa… I froze as movement lit up the periphery of my vision. The tail was whipping across the floor toward me. Slade’s bellow of warning galvanized me into action. I leaped over the tail and landed lightly.
“Danika!” Slade hauled me off my feet and ran toward the exit.
A sharp breeze whipped my hair forward then the snake’s tail slammed over the door, blocking our path.
Slade veered away and up the stone steps to the upper floor. A gust of air hit my back. Slade threw himself forward, rolling so that he hit the ground with his back, and I was protected by his body.
A tail whizzed over our heads.
Wait. The door, visible through the railing, was still blocked by a tail. This snake had two tails?
Another tail came at us from the right. Not tails, tentacles. The thing had tentacles.
“Run!” Slade ordered.
I scrambled off him and we ran for the back of the upper floor, but there was nowhere to go. It was a balcony and nothing more. The only way out was blocked by one of the thing’s tentacles.
Laughter rang out, echoing through the chamber, and the mass in the center of the room unfurled. The golden-haired woman rose up above the mass. She was naked from the waist up and below… Fuck… Below was inky darkness and tentacles.
It was her. She was the monster.
She reached out to us, her hands morphing into black clawed appendages. “I’m so hungry,” she said. “Always hungry.”
The tentacles writhed, and the many mouths that were part of her began to moan.
“Slade…” I pulled the blade he’d loaned me from the belt at my hip. “It’s time to fight.”
But he was already barreling toward the edge of the balcony. He launched himself off the top of the steps, blade coming up in an arc as he flew through the air. A tentacle whipped out and slapped him hard, propelling him across the room and into the wall. He slumped to the ground and didn’t get back up.
Shit. “Slade!” I took a step toward him and was cut off by a tentacle slamming into the ground in front of me.
The mouths in it opened and closed, sucking in air as if desperate for oxygen. The woman groaned, a desperate yearning sound.
“Human… Finally,” the mouths groaned. “Finally…”
I brought my blade down and stabbed the tentacle blocking my path.
The mouths screamed, and two other tentacles came rushing toward me from opposite directions. I ducked to avoid being crushed between them, then scrambled over the injured tentacle and onto the stairs.
“No escape,” the woman said. “No escape except death.”
Tentacles rushed me, left and right. I jumped, then dodged, and made it down the stairs.
In her frenzy to get to me, she’d left the door unguarded. I needed to keep it that way.
“No escape!” she screamed as I ran about the room, keeping the tentacles on me, weaving under and over them, leaping and dodging and slashing where I could get in a hit. As I ran past the center of her body, I caught sight of something red and pulsing, but then it was obscured by a tentacle.
Was Slade on his feet yet?
Shit.
“Danika!” Slade punched a tentacle aimed at my head.
Well, that answered my question. We worked together, fighting off the tentacle attacks, but whatever wounds we inflicted didn’t seem to make a difference. Nothing slowed her down.
“She has to have a weakness,” Slade said. “Every creature has a weakness.”
The red thing. “I need to get closer. Cover me.”
“I’ve got you,” he growled.
I surged forward, aiming for the epicenter of the chaos of inky appendages, and Slade stayed close, helping me to clear a path toward the red center of this beast.
The heart.
It had to be. And my gut told me I needed to stab it.
I was mere feet away when the creature shuddered and moved, so her face was hovering directly above me. Her eyes were white, no iris, but there was no doubt she was looking right at me.
“No escape…” She threw herself back, and her torso shot toward me, red heart pulsing. For a moment, confusion gripped my mind. Why was she offering me her heart?
“Stab it!” Slade ordered.
I plunged my dagger into the crimson mass. It slid in easily, and I expected a scream. Instead, I was rewarded with an aching sigh that resonated around the room. Blue blood oozed out to stain my blade. I pulled back, tripping over a tentacle in my haste to get away.
Slade snagged me around the waist and hauled me away
from the creature.
“We need to get out of here,” Slade said.
But something was happening. The monster was shrinking, tentacles shortening. The black skin began to lighten until it was pale and creamy. The monster was gone, and a woman lay naked on the marble floor, a bloody wound open between her breasts.
Oh god. Slade didn’t stop me as I approached. He shadowed me though, his dagger blade glinting and ready.
The woman opened her eyes, twin emeralds in a face that was elfin and so beautiful it made my heart ache. Wait… I’d seen that face.
The statue in the town square.
“Fuck,” Slade said. “Queen Mab?”
Queen?
“I’ve seen paintings in books and scrolls and…” He fell to his knees. “She was one of the first…”
She smiled at Slade, then focused on me and held out her hand. “Thank you for setting me free.”
”I don’t understand.”
“I know, but I don’t have time to explain it. Come closer, I have a gift for you.”
A sense of wellbeing and safety washed over me. A conviction that this woman wouldn’t hurt me, that whatever she’d been a moment ago was gone, an aberration I’d destroyed.
I crouched by Slade.
The woman reached out to me. “Take my hand, child. I don’t have much time.”
I slipped my hand into hers, and warmth tickled my fingers, followed by a prickling sensation.
“What are you doing?”
“Setting you free. You will no longer be beholden. You will have the power that should have been yours all along.” A slight frown marred her forehead. “You will need it.”
Power? “I don’t have any power. I’m human.”
“Your body is mortal, but you are one of mine, and you will have what should be yours.”
Heat bloomed inside my chest and trickled through my veins before settling like a warm blanket.
“Be strong,” she said.
Her eyes closed, and she was still.
“Slade, what just happened?”
“I don’t know,” Slade said. “But I think we need to leave. Now.”
The sound registered a moment later, screeches and wails, too close for comfort.
“I think,” he said, “whatever she was keeping at bay knows she’s gone.”
Feel My Power: The Iron Fae book 2 Page 11
