And nowshehad to endure it too. My Devora.
“Wait.” I threw an arm out to stop Kieran. “Do you smell that?”
His nostrils flared, surely smelling the same thing I did. Something…decaying. Riddled with sickly sweet herbs. But it didn’t smellhuman…
A scuttling came from further down the tunnel. Distant and quiet at first, and then louder, like several limbs skittering on a hard surface.
Red eyes appeared from the darkness. Tiny, beady little eyes, growing larger and larger by the second. The legs came next, followed by pincers, and?—
Kieran cursed right as the first wave of spiders lunged at us.
They were twenty times faster, stronger, andlargerthan any spider I’d ever seen. One of them latched onto my neck. Before itsenormous pincer could pierce my skin, I shifted my hand to a claw and shredded through it with a single swipe. Black blood and organs dripped from my talons. More crawled toward my legs, and I kicked them with enough force to send them flying down the hall.
One grabbed on to Kieran’s back while another landed at his forearm. As I clawed through the one on his arm, something dark and furry came flying at us from behind. I nearly spun to knock it to the side when I realized it was Tessa. Her teeth sank into the spider at Kieran’s back. It immediately let go, its legs flailing as she flung it into the sidewall.
She shifted and gagged, spitting out a thick, black liquid. “That’s disgusting,” she said with a grimace.
“Well, I don’t think you’re supposed to eat them,” I drawled as I whipped a dagger from my belt and plunged it into another oncoming creature. “Did you get the prisoners out?”
“There weren’t many, but I did what I could,” Tessa said. I tossed her my dagger, and she sliced through two others before throwing it back to me. “Told them to get aboveground and to the village.”
A dozen more spiders came scurrying from the end of the hall, some of them even larger than the last. Behind us, Kieran let out a hurried, “Move!” followed by the sound of pounding hooves.
I flattened my back against the wall right as he charged forward in his white stag form, his long, thick antlers pointing straight ahead. He shook his head back and forth, impaling at least seven of the spiders at the ends of them.
“You know what they say about big antlers,” Tessa grunted as she speared one with her smallsword.
“That he’s overcompensating for something?” I offered.
Tessa flashed me a feline grin. Faster than I could blink, her arm shot out and grabbed a spider midair as it flew straight toward my chest.
I winked before glancing at Kieran down the hall, where the remaining two were crawling up his hindquarters. My smile faded as one reared its headback, pincers aimed at his flank.
“No!” I shouted. I didn’t think. I grabbed my dagger from its sheath and launched it.
It spun through the air, silver gleaming as it found its mark in the spider’s head. The creature fell from Kieran’s back with a crash.
“Nice throw, brother,” a voice called out. The hair on the back of my neck rose.
It wasn’t Kieran.
Chains rattled along stone, echoing around me as a torch ignited down the hall. A silhouette came into view. As Scarven stepped out of the shadows, he carried another with him.
“Devora,” I choked out, staggering forward. She was on her knees with black cuffs binding her wrists and one around her neck. The skin on her throat and hands was raw. One side of her shirt was shredded, with a thin line of blood trickling from an open wound.
Scarven jerked the chain in his hand, and her body lurched forward. “Looking for this?” he purred.
He was dragging her along on aleash.
My control snapped. Blood boiling, my dragon fire rumbled through my chest with blinding rage. But when Devora’s eyes caught mine, she frantically shook her head.
Scarventsked. “Temper, Nox,” he chided. “It must run in the family.”
He stared straight behind me, a wicked smile curving on his features.
My stomach dropped as a scent wafted toward me. One I hadn’t smelled inyears. Smoky amber and rose, so achingly familiar, it nearly stopped my heart. But there was something else woven into it now. Something rotten. Poisoned.
I slowly turned. A figure emerged from the shadows at the end of the hall. For a moment, I was a teenage boy again, listening to the sweet laughter of a baby girl as she smiled up at me.
