Everything around me descended into chaos of crashing glass and churning water.
“Up to the west tower, Maren!” Kye yelled to me, running to the spot where the male guard had disappeared into the pool.
Tower? What tower? What direction was west?
I pivoted around, trying to orient myself in the darkness streaked by moonlight and green glow from the monsters.
The female guard drove her sword upward. The blade sank into the pale flesh of the creature attacking her, and it shrieked. It was an ear-splitting sound, like metal tearing under metal. Fluorescent green ichor sprayed across her chest and arms. It sizzled where it touched, leaving long, steaming streaks across the hard scales of her breast armor and the exposed skin on her arms. She screamed in agony, splashing some water on the burns.
A long, hard claw snapped, reaching for her from the dark depths of the nearest pool.
“Watch out!” Kye lunged for the claw.
He grabbed its tentacle, immediately turning it to glass, then broke it into pieces by crashing it over his knee.
“Fucking scum,” he cursed.
“Enric...” the woman panted, visibly shaken.
She thrust her hand out, pointing at the sloshing water that had closed over the other guard’s head moments ago.
Kye nodded, then tipped his head at me. “Get her up the west tower. Now.”
The floor cracked under my left foot.
“Move!” the woman yelled, running toward me across the hall.
The glass beneath my feet gave way, and I threw myself toward the stable ground in the hallway beyond the bedroom. I hit the glass hard. The breath left me in a visible cloud as the air suddenly chilled around me.
The woman sprinted, leaping over the cracks and fissures in the floor.
There were too many monsters this time. Kye’s turning one to glass didn’t appear to make a dent in the swarm of undulating tentacles under the glass. The water seemed to boil with their movements. The whole palace now looked like a giant nest of glowing, slithering water snakes. Only instead of snake heads, almost every tentacle was tipped with a hook-like claw, strong enough to break the glass.
One thick, black appendage rose above me. Its tip curled like a question mark above my head, and I stilled, afraid to move.
Unlike the rest of them, the bulging veins along this tentacle glowed blue. But that wasn’t the thing that made me freeze in place, staring at it in horror.
The entire length of the tentacle was peppered with eyes. White eyeballs with pitch-black irises blinked and squinted, focusing on me with the disturbing attention of gun barrels aimed to shoot.
“There you are.” The familiar voice rushed through my mind like a flood of icy water. “I’ve been searching for you.”
I gasped, unsure where the voice had come from. The black-blue tentacle curving over me had no mouth, yet the words came out clearly in my mind. This monster had been searching for me.
And now, it had found its target.
Chill emanated from the creature. I pressed my back to the glass wall behind me, shaking from cold and terror.
“Maren!” Kye dashed toward me.
Leaping over a wide crack in the floor, he landed in a slide that took him almost directly to my side. His foot aimed at thegrotesque blue tentacle with eyeballs. But it twitched, shrinking away before Kye’s foot could touch it.
The bizarre, terrifying creature spasmed. Water exploded into a gigantic splash around it. At least a dozen snake-like appendages shot out of the depths, shielding the seeing tentacle from Kye’s touch.
Kye swept his arm across them all, like a musician playing a giant harp. With a ripple of shimmer, the wall of wet, undulating tentacles turned into a rigid fence of glass. It crashed down into the pool, breaking into chunks that sank into the restless water.
“Take her up to the tower, Seraphine,” Kye ordered the woman again. “Keep her safe.”
A tentacle slapped around his ankle. It turned to glass immediately, but another one was right behind it, trying to wrap itself over the glass cuff formed around his leg. Kye kicked his leg, breaking out of the glass manacle and incapacitating the second tentacle.
