Page 70 of The Quiet
He continued to read her face, and Ella wasn’t sure what he saw.
“I remember that feeling,” he replied, but it gave little indication of what he prepared to do next.
His fingers stroked her cheek, thumb brushing under her eye before pushing along her temple.
“I know what it feels like to be out of control,” he said, “but that’s why a team is important. You need people you can trust. You lost your sight when you lost your team, Ella. I’m telling you now, with how I see things, we’re in a dangerous position. We need to report.”
He was right. Jackson had managed in moments what she’d struggled to do since the start. He’d led her back to some ounce of inner stability and shown himself to be something more valuable than an ally. He’d become her teammate in the same way that Alex, Jade, and Crow had once been. Family.
She nodded and saw light filtering in across the atrium where they now stood. It looked like an exit. She started toward it, and resisted the desire to look around too much, knowing she was but one small detail away from changing her mind. She continued to hold Jackson’s hand, fingers interlaced gently with his as they left.
“Thank you,” she whispered back to him.
She walked past broken columns and holes, dodging past a gaping sinkhole as flooring broke off beneath her and tumbled inside.
She stopped short, drawing her hand from Jackson’s on reflex before realizing that the hole wasn’t a hole at all. From the angle where she stood, she saw the tunnel inside it.
They both stared into it, air drawn into the tunnel from behind them.
“Well, whatever is here…is here,” Jackson whispered.
Ella was fixated on the dark tunnel, like any moment something would burst out of it. She listened for sounds, getting the peculiar sense they were being watched.
“It took powerful curses to create, morph and maintain the Bleeding Grin didn’t it?” Ella whispered. “Maybe this is a good sign. If Peter made it out…he’s,”
“Crippled?” Jackson continued, holding close as if he too got the sense that something lingered in that darkness.
Ella didn’t respond, but the state of the Grin’s remains spoke for themselves.
“What if something is hiding in there?” she whispered.
“Then we’re at an innate disadvantage tracking it in there alone,” Jackson responded. “Even if it is a much weaker version of Peter, it would still be incredibly dangerous.”
Ella eased forward, eyes narrowing as she spotted something under the dim light, still exposed outside the tunnel’s depths. It felt like the air was being sucked inside.
“Jackson,” she whispered, leaning forward. “Jackson,” she repeated, easing down.
“Hold on,” he said as she slipped down the edge, reaching carefully to grab a piece of fabric that was dried with blood. She felt it in between her fingers and next caught the wave of a wretched stench that even the wind’s direction couldn’t conceal.
She eased closer, Jackson slipping down behind her as he drew his cherry knife and lit it.
Ella squinted into the darkness, taking careful steps before reaching for Jackson’s knife. He handed it to her and lit another, Ella extending the fire out into the darkness as the reek of decay overwhelmed her.
“Let’s go,” she whispered suddenly, backing against him as the images caught her eyes and seared themselves into her brain. Disassembled bodies in Imperia uniforms were piled in the cave. Webs of dried blood and fragments of clothes and carnage hung like twisted ornaments from the ceiling.
“It’s Crow’s retrieval team,” she said, and turned back toward the exit. The ceiling slammed closed over the entrance, the firelight dancing off a wall of scales.
“Lambspeak!” Ella shouted as a massive claw ripped through the wall and assailed them. It locked around her body and she and Jackson reached for each other as she was dragged intodarkness and pinned low against the wall of what seemed like an expansive cavern in the dark.
Her panting breath was the only sound. “Lambspeak,” she whispered.
No response.
She heard slow and labored breathing, echoing from the wounded lungs of a giant. She listened to the air, filtering through the room like a graveyard chill.
“Ba–ker,” a broken voice said the name, a raspy, sawing voice that reverberated through the slumbering silence of her memories, and started to wake them up.
The air reeked of decay and a wide, thirsty eye opened, the full size of her body, pure blackness with a pale purple ring.
