“No.” The word leaves my mouth but I don’t hear it.
I move.
I know what he’ll do if he gets there. They won’t be a problem he negotiates around. They are thereasonthis clan crossed into our tunnels. We are the entire reason for all of this. The blood, the bodies, the tunnel full of killing. Pam and Lucy and all the other women didn’t sign up for any of this. They’re crouched in the dark in the deep chambers not because they’re fighters but because there was nowhere safer to put them.
There is no version of this where I let him make it down that tunnel.
Pure instinct floods my blood, overriding every survival rule I have ever possessed. I grip my bone knife, and I sprint.
“Erika!” Mikaela’s scream punches off the cavern walls behind me.
I throw myself recklessly down the steep incline. The oversized pelt Kol pulled over my shoulders catches on the stone walls as I descend, but I don’t stop. I haul it up with one hand and sprint harder, my boots skidding wildly on the jagged rock, letting gravity hurl me toward the cavern floor of the lower tunnels.
I hit the mouth of the deep passage just a fraction of a second after he does.
The warrior ahead of me is a wall of darkness. He’s incredibly fast, but he doesn’t know the layout of these lower paths. He doesn’t hear my frantic, lighter footsteps over the echoingslaughter in the main cavern behind us. I am right on his heels before he even registers I’m there.
When he finally starts to turn, I see the flat, dead gleam of his claws unsheathe.
And out on the cavern floor behind us, I feel the exact moment Kol’s control shatters.
I feel when his glowing eyes look up to the shadows of the ledge and realize I’m not there. I feel the sudden shift in his attention as he tracks the sound of my movement disappearing into the dark.
The sound Kol makes shakes the mountain.
Chapter 15
AN INCONVENIENT TIME FOR A GROWTH SPURT
KOL
When the first of Lucek’s warriors slams into my chest, the dead-weight force of the impact travels straight through my legs and cracks the stone beneath my feet.
It is a sickening, wet crunch of colliding bone and muscle. The vibration travels up my arm, through the pain already serrating my shoulders, and settles deep in my spine. I do not step back. I do not yield a single fraction of an inch of the tunnel. I simply twist my shoulders, and snap the warrior’s arm at the joint.
He drops. I am already moving to meet the next two.
My body is a contradiction of agony and power.
The transformation is tearing me apart from the inside out. A flood of raw energy that makes every strike hit harder and every nerve scream louder. The starfield is blazing across my ribs, the points of light burning so bright they cast erratic shadowsacross the blood-soaked stone of the cavern. It feels as though fires have been lit beneath my skin. My bones are thickening, reforming, settling into something broader, denser, deadlier.
The pain is splintering. The power is staggering.
And yet, in the center of the slaughter, surrounded by a handful of Lucek’s warriors and the swarm of shadowmaws they drove into my home, mydra-kiris distracted.
Eh-ree-kah.
Her terrified presence above me is a screaming weight at my back. She is flattened into the shadows of the high tunnel. She still has not moved.
I force my attention back to the slaughter. I must hold this floor until the mountain is safe for her.
I tear one of Lucek’s males off Rith, throwing his sprawling body into the cavern wall with a wet thud.
The air reeks of spilled lifeblood. A dead shadowmaw lies to my right. A broken and limping rival to the left.
Another warrior lunges for my throat. I raise my arm to parry the strike, my muscles coiled and ready to deliver a devastating counter-blow.
And then, a shadowmaw breaks through the front line to my left, its serrated jaws snapping at the air.
