Page 12 of Brought to Light
I shook my head, snapping myself back to my priorities.
Survival, evasion, resistance, escape. We didn’t have much to evade or resist at the moment, but survival and escape were a lot more important than worrying about whether Linden wanted to touch me.
He seemed to take that head shake as aimed at him. “You would. You’d be respected in a way I never was.” His smile faltered. “What do we do now?”
“I’m not the expert here,” I said. “I think we’ve gone about six miles from where we started, not counting the little distance between the two parallel tunnels. Maybe six and a half miles total. You said this place is ‘between worlds.’ That means you can get in and out of the normal world through here, right? And in and out of whatever the other world is you were trying to get to.” He nodded. “And obviously whatever you did to get us here isn’t going to work in reverse, or you’d have done it already.” Another nod. I’d started to get a little frustrated. “Do you actually have any better ideas than wandering around until we find the edge of wherever we are?”
“No. I’d hoped you did, since you seemed to know where you were going.”
The top of my head nearly popped off at that. “Seemed to know where—Linden,how the fuckwould I know where I’m going? Do you seriously thinkIcan read those fucking squiggles? And you think maybe I would’ve said so? I picked a direction and kept going that way, so at least we wouldn’t be wandering around in circles!”
Linden lifted his chin and glared at me. He didn’t seem intimidated at all, even though I’d unconsciously leaned into his space and kind of yelled right at him. Apparently he was taking my promise seriously. “Then I guess we keep doing that.”
And maybe we would have, if the second he finished speaking the whole place hadn’t started to shake, dust falling from the ceiling and the floor rolling and jolting under our feet, an echoing rumble rising up from everywhere at once.
Chapter Six
Callum
Linden tripped backward, his arms pinwheeling, and smacked into the wall with his mouth wide open. I flailed after him, but I couldn’t catch him before he went down. He slid to the floor and I fell into a crouch, bracing myself on the rippling stone floor with my fists.
And it was rippling, buckling visibly like it’d come to life beneath us. The roar was like being right in front of a freight train, so loud it whited out my other senses. “What the fuck is this?” I shouted, though I doubted Linden could even hear me.
His mouth moved, but all I caught were snatches of sound, like he’d been badly edited.
I managed to prop myself on one hand and shine the flashlight around, for all the good it would do. All I saw was stone, shaking and waving, lit like a strobe as the beam bounced with my own motion.
Linden lurched toward me, beckoning frantically, and I launched myself in his direction, landing hard half on top of him. He wrapped his arms around my neck and yanked my head down. “Someone else is trying to get in!” he shouted right into my ear. “Someone whose magic isn’t compatible with this place!”
The word “place” rang endlessly in my battered ear as the earthquake, and the noise, stopped as abruptly as it started. Then both of my ears were just ringing. I shook my head. He still had his arms locked around my neck, and our chests were pressed together. His heart thumped so hard I could feel it.
I leaned in even further, close to his ear, until his hair feathered against my cheek, and murmured, “Did they get in, or not?”
He swallowed hard. “I don’t know. My magic’s not strong enough to tell.”
Well, that sucked, because my magic sure as fuck wasn’t going to be up to the task. I opened my mouth, but whatever question I might’ve thought of next died on my lips.
Footsteps. That was without a doubt the sound of footsteps, and whoever or whatever was making them had shoes. Not a kaadus. I pulled back, and our eyes met, Linden’s gone wide with the same realization. We had company.
I clicked off the flashlight. The last thing we needed was our company spotting us before I could get a bead on them. Leaning in again, the very minimal space between us feeling even more intimate in the pitch-blackness, I put my mouth nearly against his ear and whispered so softly I almost wasn’t vocalizing.
“We’re not going to move. Sound carries here and there’s no cover, we’re too far from a corner. Stay perfectly still.”
He didn’t answer me or even nod, and I smiled into the darkness. Whatever else he might be, Linden was a quick study. We held ourselves rigid, straining to hear what was coming. The heat of his body and the rise and fall of his quick breaths were distracting as hell, but I forced myself to focus. The footsteps echoed oddly. I turned my head back and forth a couple of times until I was certain they were coming from the direction we’d already been. Did that mean we were going the wrong way? Was whatever passed for an exit behind us, or did the fucked-up rules of this place have one area to land in, and one that would let you out? Hopefully I wouldn’t have to kill whoever they were before we could ask them.
Nicely, if that worked. Not so nicely if it didn’t. I wasn’t picky at this point.
The sounds grew closer, and a murmur of voices joined the tap-tap of…two pairs of feet. All right. Two targets. I turned slowly and carefully, putting myself up against the wall between Linden and whoever was coming. My gun stayed trained straight down the tunnel.
And then my eyes picked up the faintest glow. At first I thought I was imagining it, the way you’d sometimes see lighter spots against the darkness when you closed your eyes, but it grew suddenly brighter.
That might mean they’d taken the same turn we had, at the junction where the kaadus had attacked, and now were in our stretch of tunnel.
Probably following the arrows I’d scratched on the wall, although I had no idea whether they’d arrived in the labyrinth in the same place we had. I had to chalk the arrows up to good strategy, bad tactics, and let it go. They were going to be on us in a couple of minutes whether I blamed myself or not.
I waited, my limbs loose and my mind quiet. This was more or less par for the course for me. Linden, on the other hand, was practically vibrating behind me. Not so much for him, then. I wished he could control his breathing a little better; it was loud enough that they’d be able to hear it, if they’d shut up for a second. Luckily they kept talking, their voices not quite resolving into anything I could interpret.
Linden suddenly stiffened against my back. “I know them!” he said, and God fucking damn it, loud enough for them to hear. Their voices and footsteps stopped dead.
