“A trap,” Ashton says quietly.
“A trap?” I ask, confused.
He doesn’t look happy. “I think all of tonight was some kind of sick ceremony. A sacrifice. And we were the ones they were sacrificing to the ground, for reasons that are still unclear.”
I’m so shocked I almost laugh. The wedding, the cottage, the show of hospitality—it was just the appetizer. We were always the main course.
A sound rolls down the tunnel, a noise so deep I feel it in my molars. Then a scrape, like a million bones being raked through mud.
Something is coming.
“Whatever that is, it's expecting to find us in the cabin. We need to get the hell away from here,” Ashton whispers, eyes darting around the shadows.
We stumble away from the cottage, into the tunnel, following the faintest slope downhill away from the approaching noise. Ashton takes my hand. His palm is slick but steady.
Behind us, the sound gets closer. It’s a slithering, a pounding, a rhythm older than language.
I glance back… and my heart sputters to a stop as the light from my sword spills down the tunnel behind us. The glow stretches far, farther than it should, racing through the darkness like a living thing, chasing the shadows deeper into the cavern. What had been swallowed by blackness moments before is suddenly laid bare in stark silver light.
And what the light reveals makes my blood run cold.
The worm is the size of a mountain. Its skin is ringed with armored scales, wet and glistening, covered in scars. It moves in fits and starts, slamming its body forward, then coiling back,then lunging again. Its face is a mess of teeth and barbed feelers, all of it slick with spit and dirt.
When it reaches the cottage, it slows, then rears back, then crushes the whole building in its jaws. The building comes apart like cake. The worm grinds it down, shakes its head, then snorts dust and bits of bone across the tunnel.
I taste bile. My legs turn to water.
The creature pauses, its massive body going still. Then the barbed feelers around its mouth begin to sweep through the wreckage. They slide through the broken boards and crushed stone, pushing, prodding, digging. The worm’s head tilts slightly as if listening, though it has no eyes.
Searching.
One feeler hooks into the rubble and drags it aside. Another pushes into the splintered remains of the cabin, curling through the wreckage like a probing finger. It moves slowly, methodically, tearing apart what little remains of the cottage as it keeps checking… and checking… and checking.
Then it stops.
For a heartbeat, the cavern is silent.
The worm suddenly convulses, its enormous body thrashing violently against the stone. A sound rips from it—an awful, shrieking roar that makes the tunnel tremble around us. Its feelers lash wildly through the air, smashing what little rubble remains, tearing at the walls like it’s trying to rip the mountain itself apart.
Because it didn’t find us.
And it knows we’re still here.
10
Alette
Ashton is pressedagainst my back, breath loud in my ear, arms so tight around my waist I feel like he’s trying to protect me with his body alone. His heart pounds against my ribs, a wild animal beating itself bloody against the bars. I want to tell him it’s okay, that we’ll make it out, but the words don’t come. Besides, they’d be lies.
I clutch my sword handle, but I can barely keep it from shaking. The blade is too bright, throwing shadows up the tunnel wall that look like monsters, or maybe just like the memory of monsters.
Ashton whispers, “Can you dim it?”
I don’t know, but I stare at it, willing it to dim, and somehow I force the light down until it’s just a ghost of itself.
There’s a flash of pale, wet flesh. It glides nearer, body pulsing in and out, each ring of muscle lined with spines and hair like a centipede scaled up by a god with a sick sense of humor. The head is all mouth, a ring of teeth like chipped glass, and the feelers whip the tunnel, smashing stone and snapping backwhen they hit something soft. I try to breathe so shallow my chest doesn’t move, but my lungs betray me with a tremble. The nearest feeler quivers, then jabs at a piece of wood it’d thrown from the cabin. I bite down on my own tongue to keep from screaming.
It’s so close I can see the eggshell texture on its skin. Ashton’s arm tightens across my gut, and I realize he’s shaking, too.
