Page 9 of Brought to Light
I holstered my gun and lunged, and he squeaked as my hand wrapped around his throat and pinned him to the wall. I leaned in, our faces only inches apart. Because that was enough condescending bullshit on top of the fuckery sandwich that had been my day.
“Normalflew out the fucking window when some pointy-toothed motherfucker carrying a trick flashlight tried to gut me with a bone,” I growled at him. “And speaking of teeth and bones,normalisn’t things with teeth but no bones running around in fucking stone tunnels that we got to by going through a melting fog tree,Linden.” I squeezed harder to punctuate my point, and he let out a startled littleeeepas his hands flew up to tug on mine. I hardly felt it. “So I don’t need you trying to help me explain away reality, or accept it, or believe it, or whatever. Reality is what I see and hear and shoot. And right now I need information about reality, not you patronizing me and lying, because I’d much rather be prepared to shoot the next fucked-up thingbeforeit almost kills one of us. Are we fucking clear?”
He nodded slowly, his throat bobbing under my palm. My fingers flexed of their own volition. I was supposed to kill him. I was getting paid to kill him. Killing him before he helped me get out of this place didn’t make any sense, but I ought towantto kill him, at least. I ought to be regretting that I couldn’t just tighten my hand all the way, snap his neck, and be done with it. Job over.
The soft skin under my fingers and the perfect way my hand fit there didn’t make me want to kill him. If we’d been in the back room of a club and I’d had him pinned to the wall like this, the next move would’ve been taking hold of his cock, or maybe sliding my hand between his legs to tease the crease of his ass. Massaging that slender throat and making him squirm.
I stepped back abruptly, releasing him and getting a few feet between us. I’d made my point, and the shit going on in my head had gotten out of control. Linden rubbed at the marks my fingers had left on the whiteness of his neck.
“It’s called a kaadus, whatever that means to you,” he said with a trace of sarcasm. Okay, he’d made his point too. I really didn’t have any context for this. “It’s rumored to strip men’s flesh from their bones and wear them until they dissolve in the kaadus’s caustic innards.”
Ugh. “Let’s not be the ones to test that theory, yeah?” I considered the kaadus for a second. “Why don’t the teeth dissolve, then?”
Linden stared at me. “Is that really your first question?”
I shrugged. “Seems relevant enough. The teeth were what was going to kill you, it looked like.”
“Do I look like a dentist to you?” he snapped, his eyes narrowing with anger. “How the fuck should I know?”
It was my turn to stare at him, and despite myself, I barked out a laugh. Obscenity didn’t seem right coming out of a mouth like that…although on the other hand, it seemed perfectly right, and it sent a little spark down my spine that I really, really didn’t like.
“You definitely don’t look like a dentist. And yeah, okay. Maybe table the teeth-dissolving question for later when we’re out of here and we’ve got a bottle of Jim Beam.” I went a couple of careful steps closer to the kaadus, now a flat, gelid layer on the floor. I nudged the side of it with the tip of my boot again. It seemed to have hardened a little as it deflated. I wasn’t squeamish, but—it was probably the grossest thing I’d ever seen. “For now, let’s stick with thehow many more of them are there here, andwhere is here anywayquestions. Oh, and you can tell me if you put something in that drink you made for me, too, and if it’s going to kill me. And make it fucking snappy. I’m just about out of patience.”
Linden drew in a deep breath, harsh and labored, and his eyes went even wider. “I didn’t poison you!”
That was what he’d chosen to address first. Of course. But he sounded genuinely horrified. Christ. Looking into those eyes made it really fucking hard to imagine he’d do something like that, but I’d been hoping to hell that he had.
If he really hadn’t, that meant this was…real.
My head throbbed, but I gave grudging nod. “Fine. Answer my other questions.”
Linden nibbled his lip in a really goddamn distracting way, and then finally said, “We’re in a different realm. This isn’t the human world. And—that could be the only kaadus for miles. Or there could be dozens of them right around the corner. I don’t have any way of knowing, since I’ve never been here before. This wasn’t where I was trying to go, when I opened the portal. There are other gateways. I think the stronger magic of this one pulled us in, even though I had aimed for another. Or maybe this one had been opened more recently.”
My fifth-grade teacher had done this thing when one of the students pushed him to the limit, where he took off his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, and shook his head slowly. I’d always thought it was over the top. As I dug my fingers into the sides of my nose and sighed, I finally got it.A different realm. I flashed back to another elementary-school experience, theDungeons and Dragonscampaign Jason had run at lunchtime. He would’ve loved this shit.
Okay, so not the human world, whatever the fuck that meant. That made about as much sense as a two-day hallucination, I guessed. And Linden had brought us here. Which meant…
“So you’re not human.” I let go of my nose, allowing the pressure to come pounding back, and looked at him. He was just standing there, his plush lips pursed into something between petulance and stubbornness. A thin line of blood had started dripping down his forearm. At least his blood wasn’t green or something. “Right?”
He nodded.
“Okay. And you thought the best thing to do to escape was go through a tree without knowing exactly where you were going, ending up in a place you’d never been, that doesn’t have any food or water or an obvious way out, and that’s infested with flesh-stripping bone monsters. Does that about sum it up?”
There was a short pause. I thought about grabbing him by the neck again.
“I don’t know your name.”
“What the fuck is your obsession with names?” I took a menacing step forward, and to my surprise, he stood his ground, lifting his pointy little chin at me and glaring. It put me way too close to him, close enough that the fresh green scent I’d followed down the tunnels wafted up at me way too distractingly. He smelled like something I wanted to bury my nose in and inhale. It’d be stronger if he wasn’t wearing any clothes. “Screw my name,” I said, almost nose to nose with him. His eyes looked so big. “How do we get out of here?”
Linden swallowed hard, and he seemed to shrink a little, as if he couldn’t keep up the front any longer. “I’m not sure we do,” he whispered.
Chapter Five
Callum
I’d opted to head right instead of left at the intersection where I’d found Linden, since the tunnel the other direction went parallel to the way I’d come when I’d first set out to wander this place. I estimated I’d gone several miles, and even though we had no way to know which direction was better, I didn’t feel like backtracking. So I marked up the walls with some arrows, and we set off, with Linden following my lead.
I’d asked him about the symbols, and I’d shown him the first one we came to. He’d shaken his head. “I don’t read that script,” he said. “But now we know why we were pulled here, at least. The one who attempted to kill me must have used this route. And that flashlight isn’t for seeing in the dark. It’s for showing the marks. It would have shown him the way out.”
