“Well, that’s… useful.”
Lorien’s hands gripped his daggers tight, but he nodded to the stone dragon as we passed.
This way.
Slate pushed past me, striding off into the shadows, but yet more stone dragons lit up.
“Apparently it’s this way,” I said with a shake of my head. “Shall we?”
Part of me wanted one of the others to put an end to this madness, but I had no such luck.
“Into the very scary tomb, past all the mysterious stone statues we did not see last time,” Lorien muttered as we walked further in. “Sure, that sounds like a very good plan.”
It wasn’t. He knew it and so did I, but it was the one we were running with now. The three of us were used to this sort of thing. When we were still street rats, we were forced to think on our feet, be able to pivot as soon as a situation turned bad. Those instincts got us out of plenty of scrapes before, so they’d serve us well now.
Will they?That damned voice was back in my head.Then come further, little human. Will you find clarity or…A low chuckle reverberated around in my head.Or will you die like the dogs you are?
“Murdoch, Murdoch, clever knave.” Lorien sang the rhymethe girls always used when playing skip rope. “Went to Drathnor’s shadowed cave. Learned too much, lost his head. Now he studies with the dead.”
“Well, that’s not terrifying at all,” Fern said in a voice that wavered just a little. “Exactly who was this Murdoch?”
“The last man to spend any real time in the Tomb of Terror,” I replied, eyeing the walls. More bas relief sculptures were carved into the tunnel, but I strode past them. “Academic from Wyrmpeak who made it his life’s work to study the tomb.”
“Went mad and ended up in an asylum as a reward for all his hard work,” Lorien added.
“Hope the roof doesn’t collapse in on us, that we don’t go mad or get lost in this gods awful place,” Lance muttered, his sword back in his hand. “All in a day’s work then.”
Whatever anyone else had to say, it was cut off by the sound of a far off roar.
“Auren!”
Fern surged forward, running deeper into the tunnel.
Chapter 48
Auren
This way.
I didn’t need that feminine voice luring me forward, because the direction I needed to take was clear. Dragon statues had been knocked over, the pieces scattered across our path. I picked my way past them, then paused. Great furrows had been dug into the living rock of the cave, left there by the former queen. My claws flexed. I could see that Drathnor had been forced to drag herself through the cave complex, some instinct driving her deeper.
I set my claw down in one of those ragged marks, and that’s when I saw the difference. Even if I stretched each talon to its limits, I would never match the span of Drathnor’s claw. A crunch had my head whipping around in time to see the silver dragons were following behind. Slate’s claw found the marks his mother had left without thought and I saw then the similarity in their size. Not as large?—
Not yet.I heard another voice and there stood that obnoxious orange dragon that had plagued me back in Wyrmpeak. He looked me up and down with insulting slowness.You rejected me,using your father as a shield, but how do you think great Hadrian will fare against those silver beasts?
He wasn’t here. He couldn’t be here. The walls of the caves themselves would reject this and collapse in on him in seconds, somehow I knew. That feeling had me forging on, walking right through the illusion.
Only to be confronted by another.
Daughter.My father emerged from the shadows. That tone, it was one he’d used with me so often. He came to stand before me, his tail curling around his feet.You cannot fight your own nature. Females rise and males pursue. This is the way of things, even now.
I followed his gaze, looking over my shoulder to see Viridian and the three silvers.
And more.
Shadowy figures approached swiftly, the dark shapes reconciling into the shape of yet more dragons. The sounds of their claws slapping down on the stone, the hoarse rasp of their breath, it was what had me turning, spearing through the apparition of my father. Move, that’s what the feminine voice, my own heart, told me I needed to do. My wings flapped out, wanting to work them to get me moving faster, but that wasn’t possible here. The tunnel was capacious, able to allow a dragon twice my size to pass, but it was still not big enough for me to fly. Instead, my haunches worked hard, driving me deeper, deeper into the cave system.
Until my claws raked across the stone as I was forced to come to a stop.
