Page 97 of Hunted in the Shadows
I could picture the next few days as if they were already happening. She’d pass out from magic exhaustion. Her light would go out. Our penlight batteries couldn’t last forever. Eventually, we’d be in perfect darkness. Until someone else came along and found a kaleidoscope of mushrooms climbing out of our corpses.
A chill washed over my skin, carried by a breeze. It was fucking cold. Maybe we’d die of that first.
But then, I realized—a breeze.
“You feel that?” I uttered, turning my head and blinking hard.
Halfway along the wall across from us, there was an opening that hadn’t been there before. A stony threshold crowded with vines, leaves, mushrooms, and light. I swore I could hear a trickle of water. I might have thought I was hallucinating, but Cliff and Sylvia had locked onto it, too.
Stone began to grind together.
The exit was sealing, vegetation pulling itself back into the other side.
We bolted, desperate to reach it in time. Sylvia darted overhead, clearing the threshold just before Cliff and I barely managed to emerge on the other side, stone scraping my shoulder on the way out.
We stumbled forward, and my breath caught in my throat. A vast cavern stretched out before us—far larger than it appearedoutside. Craggy ceilings glittered with bioluminescence, towering like a cathedral.
Cliff and I stood on a long strip of earth that jutted above crystal-clear water that churned around us, the surface glowing with the same teal bioluminescence with every ripple. Golden fae lights hovered at fixed points, illuminating small structures built deep along the cave walls like crawling ivy.
The hum of wingbeats flying between these formations filled the air.Fairies. Too many to count—not including the two dozen armored fairies that encircled us with spells glowing menacingly at their fingertips.
I exchanged a wide-eyed glance with Cliff, both of us rendered speechless. Hovering between us, Sylvia’s cerulean glow faded, casting her in shadow as she clapped a hand over her mouth. Rainbows of color danced over her conflicted expression, refracted by the water.
With a heavy, resonant thud, the stone door sealed shut behind us. The sound hit me like a death toll. I whipped around, cold dread seizing me as I watched the last sliver of the other passage disappear from sight. I could see no other exit—certainly not for humans.
My attention snapped back to the front, where a small battalion of fairies were in formation. Their eyes were sharp, postures coiled and tense.
Cliff and I instinctively pulled our weapons, though I wasn’t sure how much good our battered iron hunting knives would do if these fairies coordinated their attack. At the very least, they recognized the metal’s poisonous aura; most of them flinched, their flights stammering. Sylvia cringed too, her gaze still fixed forward, never looking back at us.
“Only a precaution,” she explained, voice wispy with fatigue.
One fairy in particular glided toward us, drawing my focus. He wore the same armor as the others—a deep, lustrous teal, intricatelypatterned with scales that seemed to glimmer in the light with every movement. Practical trousers were paired with ankle-high boots caked with mud. His bare arms were deeply tanned and inked with runes, with more favoring the left shoulder.
His presence commanded the attention of the other fairies, who seemed to wait on him for a signal. His gaze rested on Sylvia a moment longer than it did Cliff or me, his expression unreadable.
“On your knees,” he commanded, his voice steady and authoritative.
Sylvia balled her fists, summoning a burst of icy air between us—but that was as far as the spellwork blossomed. The threads of frost flickered out, her shoulders sagging. The three of us exchanged resigned looks. We were in no shape to fight, dizzy from blood loss and magic exhaustion.
Muscling down my instincts, I slowly lowered onto my knees beside Cliff. We set our blades down, hands held up in a reluctant sign of surrender. The moment our knees hit, black vines burst through the stone floor like snakes, curling around our ankles with an unyielding grip. A testing pull confirmed it—we were rooted in place.
The commanding fairy met my enraged stare with a toothy smile.
“Welcome to Veloria, hunters.”
19
Jon
Soft,musical laughter echoed off the walls, making the hair on the back of my neck rise. I squinted in search of the source, new dread unspooling. From the shadows, sirens flitted intermittently through the water—and even more were entering the cavern through a sunken opening in the wall across the way. They didn’t pursue us from the depths, but their eyes glinted at us as they surfaced and dove, giggling with a seductive curiosity as their faint, eerie melodies overlapped.
“If you’d kindly discardallweapons, please,” the commanding fairy went on, jutting his chin toward the iron blades. “We prefer our negotiations to be free of bloodshed, when it can be helped.”
Cliff scoffed, his voice a low, bitter murmur. “Sure, that seems like a fair fight, considering you’ve got two dozen trigger-happy fairies raring to go.”
“Would you prefer we carve them out of your hands?”
I hesitated, looking between Sylvia and Cliff. This wasn’tentirelyhostile yet. They could have killed us the second we crossed over that threshold. If we had any chance of proving our goodwill and getting our hands on a gemstone, it was in our best interest to comply.
