It sure didn’t hide them in the bright electric lighting, among the tapestries on the walls and dark hardwood flooring.
I turned to face him as we reached the bottom of the stairs, but he didn’t even pause to look at us, just ran right past, even as he panted and strained at the sprint.
Apparently, my grandfather’s soldiers were more like out-of-shape weekend warriors. It made sense, since who would have attacked them in the last decade or five? Unfortunately for them, the result was that they had no idea what the hell they were doing.
On the other hand, this guy knew what he was doing, in a way. Going for backup, maybe? He just wasn’t incredibly good at it.
Davin frowned after him, sighed, and then took off like a blur in his direction. He stopped the guy by grabbing the back of hisjacket just as he reached a huge, heavy wooden door at the end of the hallway.
The guy struggled and managed to yank open the door, pulling at Davin’s hold like you could actually get away from a vampire.
So Davin let go.
I would have felt bad for almost anyone in that situation, but in this case, I almost laughed when the dude splatted face forward onto the stone floor of the room he’d opened.
All laughter died when I stepped into the room he’d been rushing toward.
It was straight out of a nightmare.
The walls themselves were bare stone, and unlike any of the others inside so far, it was as cold as the outside and the storm. Inside, though...The room was cut into cubicles by thick panes of...was it glass? It was mostly clear, and slightly wavy, like the glass in really old windows. But there were bits of copper tubing running through the bottom of the maybe-glass, and it continued, laid into the stone floor of each cubicle.
Or . . . not cubicles at all.
Cells.
Because this was a prison. And all four cells that were currently in my sight line were occupied. The glass cell fronts stretched out toward the far wall that I could barely see, as well as there being other walkways leading to the left and right, so there were clearly more than just the four cells. Maybe hundreds. There was no way to know just from what we could see.
The guard Davin had stopped made a weird honking noise as he lifted his face off the floor, and there was blood pouring out of his nose. Ah, broken then. In the face of people being held in twelve-by-twelve cells, and a man who had clearly known they were there, I couldn’t muster any sympathy.
Davin was apparently of the same mind, because he didn’t even ask any questions. He just reached down and grabbed the guy’s hair, and used it to bash his head on the floor, knocking him out instantly.
The terribly thin man in the cell right next to where I stood slid slightly closer to the front glass. “Who are you?” he rasped.
“They’re danger is who they are,” the woman in the cell across from him muttered. “They’re going to get us all killed.” She turned bright gold eyes on us with an impressive glare, and hissed, “Get out of here.”
“I’m Flynn Knight,” I said, and I was proud of the fact that my voice didn’t shake at all, even though the man was wearing literal rags and the woman was wearing the remnants of a dress that might have been in style fifty years ago. They were both painfully thin, and clearly hadn’t bathed in many years. He had long, scraggly black hair that also managed to be patchy, probably because of malnutrition. The woman’s chestnut brown hair was so long it made me think of Rapunzel, and it looked to be tied into a literal knot behind her head. “And I’m here to stop Tadhg.”
The man’s eyes narrowed, and I paused at that, because seriously? They’d been here, starved and imprisoned, for who knew how long, and they weren’t jumping for joy at the very idea of being freed?
The woman snorted. “And how exactly are you going to stop the most powerful dragon in the world? You’re just some child. How old are you? You look twelve.”
“He does not,” Davin said, sounding terribly offended. Probably because of the debauched things we’d spent half the night doing, and the fact that me being twelve would have made that utterly disgusting.
I held up a hand and looked at her, meeting her eye steadily. “What difference does it make if I am twelve? If I’m here to get you out of this cell, what else matters?”
“Get us out?” the man asked from behind me. He sounded shocked by the idea, but also, for the first time, there was a shred of emotion that wasn’t annoyance or hopelessness. “You’re going to free us?”
The woman wasn’t having it. “They’re not going to free us, you old fool. They’re children. They couldn’t beat Tadhg in his sleep, and the ancient wyrm never sleeps. Run away while you still can, children.” She paused, looked Davin over, and made a disgusted face. “This one isn’t even a dragon.”
“Who cares?” the man hissed back. “I don’t give a damn if they’re humanoid rats if they’re going to let us out.” Shakily, he pressed up onto his feet. His legs were stick-thin, and I could barely look at him without shuddering. He pointed across from himself, deeper into the room and through the woman’s cell. “He always comes from there. I think there must be another door. Only the guards use that one you came through.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “You’re going to get yourself killed, helping them.”
Nearby, but far enough that I couldn’t see the speaker, a familiar voice broke the hissed argument between the two dragons. It was low, scratchy, and painful to even hear, but...it was Sexton. “Flynn?”
I whipped around toward the sound of it, but my attention was almost immediately snatched back to the two cells nearest me, when the woman stepped over to the side of her cell, the man hoarsely shouting at her that she was insane, and smacked a button there in the glass.
A red light came on in the ceiling, and an alarm blared above us.
