A pale green light glittered through Kye’s diamonds on the floor, broken by their facets into a myriad dancing sparkles. The light intensified, growing brighter from below.
An orb of a pale green light rose from the ocean, right under the glass floor of our bedroom.
“Kye?” I asked with an unnerving trickle of dread down my spine. “What is this?”
Chapter 11
Maren
The bizarre green light grew bigger and brighter as it approached from the depth below the glass floor.
Tap, tap.
Tap, tap.
The sound against the glass grew stronger.
“Get out of the room, Maren,” Kye said in a frighteningly quiet voice that made the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand on alert.
“Your Majesty!” the guards from the great hall screamed.
That was the warning Kye had brought them here for. But their presence proved unnecessary as high blasts of water shot from every pool in the palace. All at once, the place filled with so much noise, it’d raise the dead from their slumber.
The glass beneath my feet groaned like a beast. A tremor traveled up my shins, growing so strong, it rattled my teeth.
“Run, Maren!” Kye shouted.
Too late.
A giant claw emerged from the green light below. It smashed against the glass. The floor exploded upward in a spray of crystalline shrapnel. It threw me sideways, my shoulder painfully slamming against a wall.
“Maren!” Kye’s voice thundered under the glass ceiling.
As powerful as his roar was, however, another explosion of glass drowned it.
“Kye!” I couldn’t hear my own voice in the crashing chaos of glass and roaring water.
I climbed to my hands and knees, crouching on what little was left of the floor in the room. In the middle of our bedroom was now a gaping hole with large chunks of glass sinking through it.
Tentacles reached out from the black water below. Tipped with hard claws, they cut through the glass like icebreakers.
“Shit,” I cursed under my breath.
Strong language often made me feel braver, tougher than I really was. I preferred being angry over scared. But it wasn’t working right now. Showered with water and glass shards, I crawled on all fours along the wall toward the exit.
“Your Majesty!” a guard screamed from the hall.
There wasn’t just a warning in his voice this time but pure, undiluted panic.
Through the glass between us, I saw creatures surfacing in the pools in the great hall. Some were dark, the color of mud, like the tentacles of the monster that attacked me a few days ago. Others had the skin of translucent white, veined with pulsing bioluminescent blood that illuminated the space around them with that eerie, green glow.
A tentacle whipped around the guard’s ankle, then yanked, flinging him hard against the floor. His dropped sword clung to the glass, sliding away.
“Uhrg!” the guard gurgled, rotating to face the monster that had trapped him, dragging him into the dark water.
The female guard ran to his aid, her sword raised over her head, but another tentacle lashed across her legs, knocking her off her feet.
A tentacle thicker than my thigh lashed toward my face. The displaced air raked across my cheek, and I screeched, my stomach roiling with terror and disgust. I scurried out of the bedroom, scrambled to my feet, then froze, unsure where to run.
