“Iknowyou’re giant.” Two can play at this game. For distraction. “You were kneeling naked before me hours ago. Not to mention you have a habit of wearing soaking wet pants.” I leap as he laughs, not giving either of us a chance to think. Loose rock slips under the first foot that lands. The second lands true, but the damage is already done. Gravity sinks its claws into my chest, and I feel the moment of no return. Sinister darkness threatens below, concealing the death that waits in the form of concealed stone. My lungs seize, heart leaping into overdrive, sprung free from my rigid focus.
There’s a moment of weightlessness.
Then an impact to my chest slams me against the wall. Pain flares through my head, sharp. Bloody iron floods my mouth. Rune’s citrus scent is close, but my vision is blurred. Then the ground is moving, crumbling. Rocks fall, echoing as if it were a rain of cannon fire.
“Odi—” His grip is on me, launching me around him, pushing me downthe other side. “Run!”
I blink, shuffling sideways even as my eyes struggle to focus. Blood pounds in my head in waves of pain. But the word lives in me, and my feet move like they’ve waited a lifetime for me to let them.
Run.
More rocks fall, but I don’t stop. I feel him behind me, imagine the soaked stone giving way beneath him.
“Jump!” he shouts. But I don’t see the end, not with a guttering torch and the weak vision of my human form. He should have gone first. Shouldn’t have pushed me ahead where my reluctance to trust could kill us both.
The rock wavers beneath my feet and I leap, every hope and dream of freedom I’ve ever had suddenly small against the desperate will to live that floods through me as I’m airborne for a half second. The opposite side isn’t kind when I land, full body into solid rock, catching me by my ribs and hip and sending a razor sharp pain through my injured leg.
I open my eyes to darkness.
And silence.
“Rune!”
The scream rips my throat, echoing in the inky black, fading into ripples, then into quiet again. The torch is gone. There’s stone everywhere my hands can reach, but I can’t see. I can’tsee.
“Here.” The word is a grunt. Relief drowns common sense as I turn and scramble towards him on all fours, one hand slipping into nothingness. I gasp and pull back, then gingerly feel along the uneven edge.
“Where?”
“Just back up. Don’t come this way.” His voice is strained, and the pain in it ricochets through my insides, swirling the darkness into vivid nightmares.
“Fuck you, Rune.” I crawl along the edge until my hands find his, the worry having turned to anger in a breath. He’s hanging off the ledge, holding on with the strength of his fingers. I’m tired of his constant masochistic need to martyr himself. I’m tired of him throwing himself into danger at every turn. For saving me when I don’t deserve it.
He grunts, and I hear his arm slap down on the ground. “Fuck me yourself.”
I laugh, and sit back, then a pair of useless, quiet tears streaks down my face, the relief bubbling over. “I won’t be able to pull you up.”
“You don’t have to.” He pants, but another strained breath later his head is nearly in my lap. I raise on my knees and wrap my arms into his, tugging with all my might. Then his leg is up and he propels himself forwards, falling over me as we go. He catches himself with an arm, his chest brushing mine as it heaves between us. His shirt is gone, and I wonder if he can tell how my nipples harden under his weight. I can see nothing, but I don’t flinch when something gentle and sharp traces the drying streaks my tears left behind.
“You shifted.” It’s not a question. It’s instinct. The change is subtle, the difference between a kitchen knife and blood-soaked blade but impossible to miss, even in the dark.
“Half-shifted.” The words spirit over my cheek, down my neck, slinking low to the heat that already grows between my legs. “It isn’t easy to hold onto out of water, butit can help with strength and speed, for a time.” He pauses as I strain my eyes, trying hard to see his face, then rolls off of me, to his back, sprawling on the ground. “You should give it a try.”
The thought pinches something in my chest. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“We’ve got time.”
It’s strange to know my eyes are open, staring sightlessly ahead. I scan from side to side, but there isn’t even a hint of light. “You mean because our way back just disintegrated?”
“I bet you got top marks in pirate school.”
I kick his leg and he throws his knee back at me, but doesn’t pull away, letting it rest on my thigh.
“You can still full shift. Your other form might have better sight in the dark.”
Oh. Shit. It does. The moment he says it I know it’s true. She’d see even better than regular animals, thanks to a brush of magic. But I can’t let her out here, not when she’s so prone to fear. “She won’t like it,” I murmur.
“She?”
