Page 61 of The Inheritance
So fucking close.
I looked below again, surveying the bodies, the floor, the walls…
I had to let it go. There was no way down. We couldn’t afford to sit here wasting time and energy obsessing over it.
I felt the weight of someone’s stare. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose.
I concentrated. The hidden watcher was across the cavern, perpendicular to the bridge.
Slowly I reached into my backpack, pulled out my hard hat, slid the selector on the light to maximum beam, and jerked the helmet up.
Across from us a face with two shining eyes peered at me through the gap in the far wall. My talent grasped an outline of a long humanoid head. A blink and it jerked out of sight, behind the stone.
The light on the helmet sputtered and died.
“And now we know we haven’t lost it, Bear.”
Something was following us. Not just something. Someone. And they glowed bright red.
Red meant value. Our hunter offered something useful, something that, judging by the intensity of the color, we desperately needed.
I got up and stuffed the helmet back into my sack. It was useless as a light source, but it still worked as Bear’s water bowl. The anchor was still pulsing on the edge of my awareness.
“If we find the anchor, maybe we can find a way down.”
Bear wagged her tail.
“Come on, Bearkins.”
I started forward and Bear chased after me.
Bear and I trudged across another stone bridge, a vast drop below us. This part of the breach seemed to consist of massive caverns and deep shafts connected by short tunnels. Natural stone bridges crisscrossed the sheer drops. Water was scarce. I’d filled our canteens when we killed the latest lake dragon, and half of our water supply was gone. It made me nervous. I kept hoping for streams and not finding any.
We could probably get some moisture from the blood of the monsters we killed, but they had grown scarce too. Nobody barred our path. Maybe the inhabitants of the breach simultaneously decided that we were too much of a threat, but I doubted it. A few times I glimpsed creature corpses below, broken as if they had fallen from a great height. The fall wasn’t the only thing that killed them. The bodies were torn, shredded by something with terrible claws. And worse, nothing had touched them since their death. This place was full of scavengers, yet all of that meat was going to waste. There was only one answer: whatever slaughtered the creatures was so frightening, that nothing else dared to touch their kill.
The anchor was ahead and slightly to the right. We had been drawing closer, but our route didn’t run in a straight line. We were making circles around it, getting nearer in a spiral that became tighter and tighter.
Behind me, Bear halted. I turned. She was looking to our right, across the cavern. That side of the chamber lay shrouded in gloom.
Bear let out a quiet, deliberate woof.
Something was definitely there, in the darkness.
I flexed. My talent rolled outward, trying to measure the distance to the gloom, and falling short.
Woof.
Another stone bridge ran below us, leading to the right. It was a twenty-foot drop. If we got down there, I could use my rope to climb back up.
Woof.
“Okay. We’ll go check it out. Up!”
Bear leaped into my arms. I held her the same way I carried Mellow, my cream cat, and jumped down. We landed on the lower stone bridge. The impact punched through the soles of my feet into my legs. I stuck the landing like an Olympic gymnast. Maybe once I got out of here, I would go for a career change. Not many forty-year-old acrobats debuting out there. I’d be a sensation.
I let Bear down, and we headed toward the shadows.
What the hell would I do once I got out? First, I’d need to make sure Cold Chaos didn’t have a chance to unalive me, as Tia would put it. I was living proof of their fuckup. A huge liability. A week ago, or however long it had been since we entered, I would have said that a major guild, especially Cold Chaos, wouldn’t stoop that low. The risks were too great. But now I didn’t just expect the worst, I counted on it.
