It didn’t help that the creatures swirling at knee height behind her new kidnapper were snap-snarling, smokeglass teeth champing and splashes of yellow foam from their misshapen muzzles wriggling briefly against the floor.Theoneiroswas torn from her throat with bruising force and Liv heard Dakshi yelling her name before a monster-squeal trilling up into falsetto was cut short with a wet, distant crunch.
The man carrying her rounded a corner, her head bouncing like a doll’s.He was lean, tall, and apparently made of iron, his fingers biting cruelly.Her pajamas fluttered as she forced herself to go limp, turning into deadweight.With any luck he’d think she’d passed out, but she was thinking furiously, trying to count the turns and straightaways of these strange, tangled tunnels.
What the hell just happened?
Erik had shut the big metal door and Robert had dropped a bar into big welded-on brackets, effectively blocking the way.The older man had led the way downstairs before stopping dead, his greying head held high like a prairie dog sensing danger, and Liv had only the confused idea that the jagged yawning hole in the side of what Dakshi calledthe Flame-vaultwasn’t usual—the other one hadn’t had it, but then again she hadn’t been taking notes—before thethingsboiled out and surrounded him.
She hadn’t even had time to cry out, which was a mixed blessing because when she could get a breath, her midsection cruelly thumped at every step by her kidnapper’s muscle-stiff shoulder, it reeked something awful.
The rocky, rough-edged passageways were roughly oval, walls gleaming with slick phosphorescence and the bottoms swimming with strange opalescent stuff looking for all the world like slug-slime.It made her suspect the tunnel hadn’t been dug but somehowchewed, and the resultant flood of mental images was sickening enough to empty her stomach if it hadn’t been empty.
And if she wasn’t already been nauseated from the smell.
She timed her movement between steps, waiting for that critical moment when weight shifted from one foot to another before surging aside, trying to roll out of his grasp.
It would plop her down among the tentacle-backed creatures, doglike except for the nest of rubbery arms sticking stiffly up from their spines, but she’d cross that bridge when she burned it, as Mika was always saying.
Pain roared through her.There was a snap like a lightbulb smashed inside a balloon; furious, buzzing blared through her skull, a feedback whine fit to purée her brains.
It felt like he’d just taken her off the temple grounds.Without Erik or another Son around to help keep the voices out, a wave of unfiltered thought crashed through her shivering, unprotected psyche.Liv cried out, miserably, and the creatures running at her carrier’s knees, somehow not tripping him, answered with a cacophony of howls, squeaks, barks, and rubbery noises.
His fingers bit afresh, and she stopped trying to struggle.Her eyes flooded with hot water, she was breathless from being folded in half, and to top it off, she was still in a tank top and loose silky pants.
She didn’t even have hersockson.Dakshi had been carrying her; maybe this asshole had killed him.
God, I hope not.It was a good thought, a sane thought,herthought instead of the howling traffic-noise roaring past her inner ears.Maybe he’d just knocked the Younger over.
Another thought, hard on the heels of the first.Erik will come get me.
But Erik was heading upstairs.He had some idea what was going on, and it didn’t look like a pleasant one.And in any case, she couldn’t hope for anything even close to rescue.
No, Liv was, as usual, on her own to deal with this bullshit.
The man carrying her wore a harness like the Sons, oiled leather straps lying flat against a thermal shirt, but no jacket.Her hands realized this before she did and hanging upside down bouncing in the dark wasn’t the best of conditions—but if she stretched, her fingertips could just brush the butt of a nasty-looking, matte-black firearm.
Screw the whole “no physical weapons” shit.She began wriggling with more purpose as the tunnels sloped down, crossings and turns taken with what felt like nightmarish randomness.If she could just get her hand on the gun, things might turn out all right.
At least I can save one bullet for last,she thought, quite naturally, and writhed with fresh strength as the feedback noise mounted inside her skull.It wasn’t so different than ignoring a hangover while working a pole to pay for college tuition, the lights strobing and the music a throbbing migraine attack.She was doing pretty good, she actually had a chance of grabbing the weapon?—
Until, that was, one of the tentacle-infested hounds leapt for her, jaws snapping shut with the heavy sound of a good clean break on a pool table, catching a hank of her hair instead of her dangling arm it was probably aiming for in the first place.
Liv screamed, her lungs burning, and the man carrying her snapped something definitely not in English, a short curt word that burned her ears worse than the massive cicada-scream of the city overhead.
Was the accumulated rock and dirt above keeping the rest of that hideous mental noise from swallowing her?Liv devoutly hoped so, and choked back another scream when the dog-thing thumped back to earth, slavering over a mouthful of her hair.A few others trotted alongside, snaking their muzzles in as if to get a nip or two; the snarling turned into a brawl among the pack.They fell behind as her kidnapper put on a burst of speed.The indistinct silvery slug-slime glow had intensified, and the carrier’s boots splorch-splashed in a good two inches of muck.
Oh, gross.Another sane thought, very nearly comforting.She twisted again, swaying for the gun so temptingly near.There was a small leather strap holding it in the holster, but if she yanked hard enough?—
Too late.The walls and ceiling leapt away as Liv’s kidnapper veered into echoing emptiness.Vast susurration filled a giant cavern, stalactites festooning its vault, stalagmites its floor.The stone spears looked wrong, twisted and tortured, and the temperature shot up—which would have been welcome if the heat wasn’t so sick, moist, and clinging, like the inside of an diseased mouth.Noise doubled, lapped at the walls, broke into fragments, and splintered among what sounded like a crowd.
Liv, hanging half upside-down, didn’t think it was a concert or even a rally.Tiny impressions in her peripheral vision made her even more glad her stomach was empty, because the shapes pressing forward weren’t anything close to human.
Or even earthly.
The monsters had her, and her kidnapper trotted up slick, uneven stairs coated with a fly-buzzing crust.Clouds of lethargic insects rose and swirled at knee height, their dark bluish carapaces glowing with diseased fungal dots.Her nerveless fingers brushed the gun again; she made one last gasping, strenuous effort.
It failed, and he tossed her with a heave onto a rectangle of black, glossy, glassy stone, its edges vanishing under the same rancid crust as the stairs.The smell—rank copper, decay, vegetable rot—filled her nose, and she was lightheaded from the sudden stop as well as being turned right-side up, however temporarily.There were pale bipedal creatures at each corner of the altar stone, and they leered as they grabbed her wrists and ankles with sweating, tepid hands.It was like almost-cold pasta wrapping around her limbs, but the strength in each flabby appendage was apparent and every hand had six fingers instead of the usual, normal four-and-a-thumb.
Oh, God,Liv thought, pointlessly.There was no god here, unless it was the cackling, leering thing in her nightmares, cavorting behind a merciful, smudging screen of unreality in heavy golden robes, grey skin sagging and cherry-red tongue flickering as it screeched, each footstep grinding through the dust of centuries.
