“Taking the Grel passages are we? Sneaky, sneaky.” He hadn’t even known it was here, but then he’d never questioned how the Grel got around much.
He couldn’t fit into the tunnel, so there was no following her that way, but he could figure out where she was headed and cut her off. He spun and jogged out of the room and sped down the hallway towards the upper portion of the palace where thesecurity hub was. They’d have all the Grel routes marked down somewhere.
He passed a few of the maids and other workers on the wide staircase, some of them calling out cheerful encouragement as he swept by and by the time he pushed open the metal door into the palace security room, all of his fatigue had evaporated in the adrenaline flush from the hunt and he all but bounded around the room until he found his head of security, a small female with mottled gray fur and curling leathery wings that went by the name of Tedo. Her round face held wide set eyes that blinked at him with dual silver pupils. “Lord Rathal, what do you need?”
He bounced on his toes and cracked his neck. “I need to know where the Grel tunnel into my prize’s room lets out. She’s crawled into it and I mean to catch her before she makes it out of the palace.”
Tedo’s pupils split as she brought her arm up to tap at the holoscreen projecting from her Link. “It goes down, my Lord, to the old palace. These plans indicate the tunnel she’s using will split. One leads to the old library, and the other to the ballroom.”
He felt his grin develop a devious edge. A hunt through the abandoned lower levels? With no one to interfere or witness whatever conclusion Callie and he came to? Oh, it was almost too good. His ears curled along with his tail and Tedo took a step away from him when he started tapping his claws together and laughing.
twenty
Callie
Justwhatinthegoddamned hell had I been thinking crawling into this fucking nightmare inducing bug tunnel? I swear I could hear them scurrying around though I’d yet to see one of the creepy Grels. It smelled fucking weird in here too, like musk and decay, and it was damned dark. If I hadn’t thought to use the light of my Link, even my new and improved night vision would have been worthless. Not that it really mattered, since there wasn’t anything to see anyways but dusty stucco and a dark void past the soft yellow glow of my Link.
The Grel had bored through the thick stone of the palace leaving a tunnel narrow enough that my shoulders were scraping on both sides and I was having to do a kind of army shuffle crawl to move. It was slow going and that only added to the ever growing anxiety that was heating me up, causing sweat to form on my brow. I felt like I couldn’t take a full breath, each scrape and pull of my movement followed by a sucking gasp as I tried to take in as much air as I could.
Who’d have thought I’d be claustrophobic?
I was discovering all kinds of new things about myself on this little side journey. Like that Rathal was right. I liked being chased. After the fight in the Assembly, when Rathal had thrown me over his shoulder, I’d been high on adrenaline and weirdly drunk from the rush. When he’d squeezed his hand over my thigh to keep me in place while I’d shouted obscenities at the dude I’d been beating the shit out of, it had gone straight to my head… and my pussy.
I swear that fight had knocked all my sense out of my head, because I’d been about to ask him to stay the night with me right before he’d closed the door in my face. It truly felt as if I’d drunk a whole bottle of vodka and all my inhibitions had drained out of my ears, because after Rathal had beat his hasty retreat, I’d been pissy as hell, frustrated that he hadn’t acted like his usual self and come onto me. If he’d flirted and teased me as he’d done every day in the past, I’d have taken him up on his offer.
I’d stomped around my room, throwing pillows and pulling things off the shelves in a hissy fit that gave me twinges of embarrassment now thinking back on it, but that’s how I’d found the tunnel. I’d pulled the towels off the bottom shelf and the damn shelf had come with them, revealing the tunnel behind it. It was probably there so the Grel could get the trash, and I wish I could say I’d thought long and hard about stuffing my stupid punch drunk ass into the creepy crawlies' domain, but nope.
I’d raced around my room righting things so that it wouldn’t look like I’d lost my mind and give me away too soon, and then I’d gleefully dived into the tunnel, giggling the whole time… That is until about thirty minutes into my slow crawling journey when the reality of my situation set in. I couldn’t go backwards, I’d probably get stuck for sure, so the only way out was forwards and it was starting to feel like a horror movie scenario in here.Every sound had my heart in my throat and my breath coming in pants.
I crawled as fast as I could, inching forward until I realized far too late that I was going downward and the rough stone dust covered floor was growing slick. I’m sure to a Grel, with their many claw tipped feet that the downward slope was easy to navigate. For me it was a too fast slide into probable death, but luckily, after a few terrifying seconds of free fall in which I screamed my fool head off, I discovered that unlike the trash chutes with their slick walls, the walls of the Grel tunnel were rough and if I flexed my shoulders and pressed my legs to the sides, I slowed down into a more controlled slide.
I was just starting to laugh at myself for panicking when the tunnel spit into a fork. I’d come too far down though, and now I didn’t have room to maneuver to pick either direction. I had to shore up my resolve against the growing claustrophobic meltdown that usually killed people in the movies… which felt a little like trying to hold back a tidal wave with a beach towel but it somehow worked. I kept myself together enough to shimmy back a few inches, just enough to slide left. The downward angle of the tunnel started to level out and I wasn’t ashamed of the whimper of relief that escaped me when I saw the opening a few dozen feet ahead, a dim light glowing into the tunnel, almost like moonlight, and I knew that wasn’t possible, but damn did it give me all the motivation I needed to get the fuck out of there.
I slid out onto a smooth marble floor and rolled to my back to breathe in huge gulps of fresh air. Oh sweet baby Jesus, I was never doing that shit again. I laid there until the trembles subsided and the sweat cooled on my skin. I’d been in the tunnel for over an hour, at least. How long until Rathal caught up to me?
The thought sent a shot of pure adrenaline through me and that weird drunk feeling creeped back in, and I grinned lazily upat the only source of light in the room, a single flickering white crystal in what was once a grand chandelier.
Rolling to my knees, I saw that I was in an old ballroom, or something similar to that. Tables were stacked against one wall, covered in long drop cloths with chairs piled up haphazardly next to them. A thick layer of dust covered everything, including myself. I brushed what I could off my clothes and stood, coughing as it rose up in a choking cloud.
The floor was slick under my slippers, the dust so thick I couldn’t tell what color the floor was, or what the paintings were that hung on the faded pink walls. Or at least I thought they might be pink. Between the dust floating in the air now that I’d disturbed it and the dim light, there was no way to be certain. The single crystal only lit a fraction of the space, the sense of emptiness clueing me in that it was much larger than it seemed, and luckily for me, the chandelier was right in front of a pair of double doors that stood ajar, one side barely hanging onto its last remaining hinge.
Why the hell was there an abandoned ballroom in the palace? You know what, I didn’t want to know. Every time I got answers out here in space, it just made things weirder. I padded across to the doors and stuck my head out. The doors opened onto the wide first landing of a grand staircase, the steps below widening into what might have been a type of foyer—there was a white statue of a winged female in the center of the foyer twisting into a move I’d only ever seen performed in ballet—with the two branching staircases on either side of the doors sweeping up into more darkness above.
Up or down? Up probably led to the lived in portions of the palace, which would probably run me right into Rathal and that would ruin the whole thing, so down was probably my only option. I moved away from the doors and down the stairs, past the statue and through another set of double doors that openedinto a wide hall, like the kind in a castle where those larger than life paintings of ancestors would be, or maybe rows of suits of armor, but here the hall was empty and dark.
I held my arm up and willed my Link light back on. If I stopped thinking about it, the light blinked off, disappearing completely like there wasn’t something embedded under my skin.
Walking the long empty hall was kind of creeping me out, which was killing whatever kind of buzz I was getting from running away and with the buzz draining, my common sense was seeping back in, calling me all sorts of names for being stupid and irrational. That inner voice was just starting to win out against the new, wilder part of myself when I heard a soft thump from somewhere in the dark behind me.
I turned, holding up my forearm to try and see through the gloom. Nothing. I held my breath, listening intently, but whatever it was was gone now. I was sort of thankful for the interruption, because my heart rate was climbing, and the rational, judgy voice of my subconscious was suppressed again with that weird buzz zinging back through my blood.
I kept going, my steps quicker now. After ten minutes the spot between my shoulder blades was so tense I could barely move my arms, and the feeling of eyes on me was now strong enough to make me jittery. It was like a thousand ants crawling under my skin. I broke into a run, unable to stand it any longer. I felt like a racehorse let out of the gate, pure adrenaline pumping by the bucket loads through me. Sweat pricked my scalp and dripped between my breasts while I poured on the speed, my arms pumping hard at my sides, the light of my Link jumping in the dark as I moved. My thighs burned with the exertion and I’d lost my slippers at some point, my bare feet slapping hard against the stone flooring.
It was a good thing I hadn’t panicked or anything…
I could see a darker portion of the wall ahead, and as I got closer I saw that it was a dark set of doors. I veered, shouldering through them hard enough to slam one of the doors into the wall, and skidded, trying to stop before I ran into a massive bookshelf and fell, sliding on my ass on the smooth carpet. My shoulder cracked into one of the wood shelves and I hissed, bringing my hand up to rub it while I scrambled back to my feet and ducked around the shelf to press my back against it, my heart bucking against my ribs like an enraged rodeo bull. It smelled like old musty paper in here. The books on these shelves were all long past rotted, some of them little more than crumbling dust between two covers. I sneezed twice before I got myself under control.
I waited, listening, for several long tense moments in the dark before I heard anything. A soft, barely perceptible clicking. I frowned, trying to figure out what it was as the noise moved slowly closer, almost leisurely, like whatever it was wasn’t in a hurry.
