The whole thing fell.
I jerked out of the way just before the stone panel brained me. Then I looked up into the darkness. I had a path out, but how was I going to get into it? I hadn't thought that far ahead.
“Fuck,” I muttered as I felt inside the shaft.
It went straight up.
I jumped off the bed and tossed the bone away. The stone panel was on the floor in pieces. I wasn't worried about the crash alerting my captors. The noise had been drowned out by dragon roars. But now those roars were growing faint. And with the evidence of my escape attempt in shards on the floor, a second chance became an impossibility. It was now or never.
In desperation, I yanked the mattress off the bed and lifted the wooden frame onto the foot, leaning it against the wall. It formed a makeshift ladder—slats becoming rungs. I climbed the ladder up into the ventilation shaft. Once inside, I had to take a moment for my eyes to adjust. But then I grinned.
The shaft only went up a foot before it turned sharply. I grabbed the ledge and hoisted myself up. Shaking my head, I crawled along the shaft. A magical city full of magical people but their buildings still had to follow the laws of nature. Rooms needed air flow. Especially underground rooms.
The shaft angled upward. I crept along it until I reached a metal grate. The ground floor. Cocking my head, I listened and peered through the grate. The room was full of shelves with crates stacked on them. Some sort of storeroom. Maybe it wasn't the ground floor. If this was the basement, then I'd been below it. No wonder Kas couldn't smell me.
I pushed on the grate. It held firm.
Shit. Something else I hadn't thought of. Furious, I reacted automatically and punched the grate. The thing went flying into one of the crates. I gaped at the metal panel, lying on its side amid a waterfall of grain that flowed from the crate it had shattered. Then I looked at my fist. The broken skin of my knuckles pulled together before my eyes.
“Fucking Dragon essence. That stuff is amazing.” I crawled out of the vent just as I heard footsteps coming down the nearby stairs.
I ran behind a freestanding shelf and hid.
Two of the Tyasmorans came into the room. One of them instantly spotted the mess I made.
“What the fuck?”
“Maybe it got knocked over when the King hit the house with his tail.”
“That's a grate.”
They moved toward the vent. Right in front of my shelf. I set my hands on the shelf and shoved with all my new Dragon might.
The shelf toppled with ease. Not just toppled, it slid forward several feet and then toppled. The men had a second to cry out, but then their cries were muffled by all the shit they had on that shelf.
A roar came. Closer this time.
I looked up. My chest tingled. Kas. I ran to the stairs.
Halfway up, the doorway at the top filled with Tyasmorans. I paused. Groaning came from behind me.
“How did you get out?” Enor gaped at me.
“It doesn't matter. We need to get him back below the ward before the King locates him!” Valen rushed me.
I jumped backward, off the steps, and landed on the overturned shelf. Groans turned into painful grunts below me. Debris stabbed and slashed at me, but I scrambled away, ignoring the pain. As soon as I got clear of the wreckage, I climbed to my feet and searched for a weapon. Not much to be had. So I took a wooden box from a shelf and tossed it at Valen.
It hit him in the face. In. The. Face.
Valen shrieked and jerked back. Holding his bloody face, he shouted, “Get him! Kill him if you have to. We can't let the King find him!”
There went his promise not to hurt me. But I guess that had been broken when they first smothered me.
I scurried around another shelf. A box of glass bottles caught my eye. I picked up the entire box and launched it at Enor. Glass broke, and Enor growled. The bottles had been full of liquid and the stuff soaked him. I grabbed another crate and tossed it at him before he could recover. It, too, was full of bottles containing liquids. Cracking, gushing, and then Enor started to smoke.
Enor looked down at himself as his friends came up behind him to help. My eyes widened. Two liquids combining and instantly releasing vapors? That wasn't a good sign. So, instead of holding back, I rushed them. I didn't want to be on the trapped side of Enor.
Just as I got even with Enor, right as his buddies reached for me, that stinky smoke turned into flames—a chemical reaction that any science teacher would have been proud of. I could hear Mr. Ellis from eighth-grade science class in my head. “Science is cool!”
