by Lucia Ashta
“There’s a space … beneath the dungeons. She put me there at first when I wouldn’t obey. I used to be like you.”
“Like me? A … sirangel?” I asked. That shouldn’t have been possible...
“No, a mermaid. I used to be like you. I used to feel the water always a part of me.” From the heavy lament in her voice, it was clear she no longer did. Whatever Lizbeth had done to her, the woman was no longer a mermaid.
Mulunu’s angry footfalls shook the floor. Though she wasn’t a large woman, her rage was sufficient to dwarf the cramped space. “Lizbeth took the ocean from you?” she seethed.
The former mermaid met Mulunu’s eyes for a flash before casting her gaze downward again in submission.
Mulunu growled, and I discovered myself unconsciously retreating from her anger. With a roar, she flung her staff to the side, aimed it at what had been Lizbeth, and shot a beam of light from the staff’s crowning opal.
The gore beside the former mermaid ignited immediately, the white glow of Mulunu’s fire illuminating the space more fully, revealing just how disgusting the conditions were that Lizbeth had subjected so many magical creatures to.
The fire flickered and rose while Mulunu snarled, appearing to be wrestling for control of her anger.
Liana edged carefully behind her, pulling open the already unlocked doors as she went. No prisoners leapt to their escape. Apparently, they’d require coaxing as the former mermaid had. Lizbeth had set out to break her captives, and in most cases she’d succeeded.
Which meant the remaining prisoners would have to wait for Irving and I to return for them.
“We’ll be back for you all! Just as soon as we can, we’ll return to help you out of here,” I cried out, hoping the captives weren’t too far gone to understand and latch on to hope. They’d need it to survive.
My heart heavy, yet determined, I bent in front of the mermaid, forcing her to meet my waiting gaze. “Will you please show us the way to this space beneath the dungeon? I’d be most grateful.”
She nodded quickly, obediently, then turned, rose to a crouch and half scampered, half ran toward the exit of this damnable hall.
Mulunu drew the flames back into her staff to protect the rest of the prisoners, and then we all set off after our guide. She led us toward a trapdoor concealed in a dark, dusty corner off an equally dark, dank hallway that appeared long forgotten. Pointing with her head of matted hair, she whimpered at the door barely visible within the floor.
With a fresh wave of bile churning in my gut, threatening to come up with my fear at what I might find at the bottom of the trapdoor, Brogan helped me to heave it open. We recoiled as a wave of foulness escaped before looking down into the black pit.
“Mulunu, aim your light here,” I said, before realizing I shouldn’t be ordering the leader of the Kunu Clan around. I grimaced by way of apology, but she wasn’t paying attention. She was distracted, her gaze sweeping the hall constantly. She lowered the crown of her staff toward the hole in the floor, then looked away, keeping watch.
Her light revealed a vertical dirt tunnel that was too deep to make out its bottom. A rickety, wooden ladder clung from one of the walls, its bolts old and rusty. I sucked in some courage and pressed the sole of one foot against the first rung.
“Be careful,” Liana said, her forehead creased as she looked between me and the gaping hole beneath me.
I nodded, but had no reassurance to offer her. Panic welled within me, but I didn’t mention it.
I couldn’t tell if Quinn was down here. I wasn’t sure I felt him at all anymore. The space within my chest where I’d grown used to sensing our connectedness was suddenly terribly empty.
Before that emptiness could take hold, I raced down the ladder, Brogan immediately behind me.
7
A third of the way down the ladder, the rung beneath my foot cracked under my weight and I screamed, scrambling to hold the entirety of my weight with my arms. My shoulders jerked, pain shooting up the length of my arms, before I remembered I had wings.
“Are you okay?” Brogan asked urgently, as Liana called the same from up above. I couldn’t answer yet.
Certain I wasn’t going to fall any further, I pressed my forehead against the dirty rung in front of my face, catching my breath. I was trying hard not to feel stupid for forgetting my wings. The moment I’d re-entered the water to fetch help for Quinn, I’d instantly grown used to the body I’d had for most of my life. Despite the two-plus months I’d spent on land, my wings felt foreign to me once more after the familiarity of a tail. In the crone’s and Liana’s company, it was easy to forget that I wasn’t still one of them, part of the Kunu Clan, part of the ocean.
“I’m fine,” I finally eked out. Liana’s sigh of relief was loud enough to reach me down the tunnel.
Mulunu, never one to waste time on coddling, barked down the hole, “Hurry!”
“I’m going, I’m going,” I grumbled, forcing myself to continue downward. The strength of Mulunu’s beam faded the further down we went, increasing my trepidation with every step.
Halfway there, I shouted down the tunnel. “Quinn? Are you down here?”
“Selene?” he croaked. “Selene!”
“By Neptune ... Quinn!” I scrambled to move down the ladder faster while continuing to take care with each foothold. I’d realized there wasn’t really enough space to unfurl my wings. If the tunnel was wide enough, it was only just barely, and I had no desire to test the limits of my wings just then.
“Selene!” he called again, and though his voice was raspy, my heart soared. I’d found Quinn, and he was alive!
I wouldn’t allow myself to dwell on what Lizbeth might have done to him down here. I focused solely on my immediate goal. One foot after the other, it took me less than a minute to reach a packed-dirt bottom.
Flinging my arms out in front of me as a guide in the nearly pitch-black space, I started along a narrow, horizontal tunnel that was barely tall enough for me to fully stand upright. Brogan, who descended moments after me, had to crouch.
“Well this is a lovely place,” he muttered, following me. The further we went, the more we lost the final remains of Mulunu’s diffuse light, and the more we relayed on our touch to guide us.
“Quinn?” I called again, trying to dispel the willies of being down here in this torture dungeon beneath another torture dungeon.
“I’m here, Selene. At the very end of the tunnel.”
“Keep talking so I can follow your voice,” I said.
“I will, but be careful. The witch was very precise with her steps whenever she came down here. She might’ve booby-trapped it. Actually, she probably did.” He groaned. “You’d better not come any closer. You could get hurt.”
If he thought there was any chance I’d turn tail when I was this close to him, he’d lost his mind. “Just keep talking.”
“How’d you find me?” he asked.
“Mulunu,” I answered, as if the one-word reply would explain everything. To a Kunu, it would. But Quinn wasn’t from that world. “When you...” Suddenly self-conscious of the stranger on my heels, I had to force myself to continue: “When my, uh, magic … hurt you”—there was no way I was discussing our love making in front of Brogan—“I didn’t know what to do, so I went to get Mulunu.”
“Let me guess. And when you came back to find me, I was gone.” His voice was getting louder—closer.
I tripped on an uneven patch in the dirt floor and held my breath while I waited for a kill spell to slice toward me or something. When nothing happened and Brogan’s hand settled on my back, encouraging me forward, I sucked in a ragged breath and continued. Even after she was dead, Lizbeth was doing a number on my nerves.
“I had no idea who’d taken you, but Mulunu brought us here.” I shuffled my bare feet along the floor, reaching with my hands until I touched metal. “I’ve arrived at a cell,” I said in a rush of excited breath.
“Oh, you’re here!”
I screeched and jumped about a league when Quinn spoke directly next to my ear. I brought a hand to my heart, feeling as skittish as a crab being chased by seagulls.
“Are you okay?” Concern laced Quinn’s voice even though he was the one in the rank prison deep beneath the ground.
Exhaling slowly, I nodded, though he wouldn’t be able to see me down here. “I’m just jumpy. Too many jerks attacking us lately.” My twisted grimace was for me alone.
“We have to hurry,” Brogan reminded me.
“Who’s that?” Quinn asked, suspicion clipping each syllable, while I began dragging my fingers along the bars, searching for a keyhole.
“Hey man, I’m Brogan,” he said before I could explain. “They just released me from one of the prisons upstairs. I promised Irving I’d help find you.”
“Is Irving okay?”
“He’s fine,” I answered. “Or, well, he’ll be fine. He still has his shifter powers, which is a huge blessing, but he’s lost a lot of weight and muscle.” And a lot of his inner fire, but I wasn’t about to say that. “Just like you when Dimorelli took you. But he’ll recover. Now, we need to get you out of here, and fast.”
“How do we get you out of here? Is there a key somewhere?” I rotated in place, bumping into Brogan, but couldn’t make out anything from the darkness.
“No key,” Quinn said, as if the fact had already sealed his doom. “You’ll need to get the witch down here to open the door.”
“No can do,” Brogan said, and I could hear the smile in his voice. “Your girl here killed the bitch.”
“You killed her?” I couldn’t see Quinn, but I could picture his wide, abalone-colored eyes.
“She sure did,” Brogan continued. “She leveled her. She mashed nasty witch all over the floor above us.”
“Then she deserved what she got,” Quinn spat.
“I only wish I could’ve killed her myself,” Brogan said, and Quinn growled a similar sentiment.
“You’re out of time!” Mulunu’s voice arrived like a crack moments before an ominous loud thud far above us.
“Please tell me that wasn’t what I think it was?” Quinn asked.
I was afraid that’s exactly what it was.
Brogan was already moving quickly back the way we’d come, but I knew what the verdict would be before he confirmed it.
The metallic sliding trapdoor was closed—and locked.
Having grown up in the vast ocean where there were no walls, as a rule I didn’t like cramped spaces. When the space was dark as a starless night, and heavy as if air were scarce, the dirt walls on all sides of us felt like they were closing in on me, one terrifying inch at a time.
“Just focus on breathing,” Quinn told me in soothing tones, reaching through the bars of his prison to rub at my bare back. It wasn’t lost on me that Quinn had been the one my magic attacked and sent into spasms, the one Lizbeth had apparently tortured, who’d survived two months of Dimorelli’s torture, and yet he was helping me. I didn’t want it to be that way, but I couldn’t help it. My body had wrested control from my brain.
“I am breathing,” I said, “but we’ll run out of air. There’s no air coming from anywhere. We’ll drown.”
“We won’t drown, we aren’t underwater. And besides, I’ve been here for days and I’m still alive.”
“Which means you’ve already used up lots of the air.” I wanted desperately to clamp my mouth shut, but my fears just kept tumbling out as if I had no control over what I said.
“Do you still have your shifter abilities?” Brogan, who was enviably calm, asked Quinn.
“Yeah, the witch didn’t manage to break me.”
“Me too, man. That’s good. Glad to hear it. What do you shift into?”
“What does that matter?” I snapped, suddenly defensive of Quinn and his secrets. Irving seemed to know this Brogan, but I hadn’t observed enough of their interactions to decide whether he was trustworthy.
“Uh,” Brogan started, “in case you missed it, we’re trapped at the bottom of a nasty place with no way out. We need to try that trapdoor, see if one of us can bust it open.”
Some sort of explosion rocked the floor above us, sending dirt showering down. The three of us coughed and wheezed as we inhaled the heavy dust.
Once I stopped coughing, I was breathing too fast and I knew it. Still, I couldn’t seem to stop it. We were going to be buried alive, and this was about the last place I’d choose to die. I clutched desperately at the hand rubbing my back, until he brought it around for me to hold. I squeezed his hand hard enough to override the thoughts possessing my will—and it still wasn’t enough.
“I shift into some kind of mer-dragon-bear,” Quinn said, and I could feel him wincing at the admission across our link. “Beyond using brute strength, I don’t think my animal form will be of much help in opening the door. I still would have to get out of this first.” The fingers of his free hand tapped against the bars.
“I’m a polar bear, like Irving,” Brogan said, and I turned to gape at him though I couldn’t see him. “I’m in his dad’s pack.”
My jaw dropped open. Irving’s dad was the alpha of a pack of polar bears? Say what?
“Then brute strength is all we’ve got,” Quinn said.
I couldn’t believe Quinn was moving right along after that revelation. Maybe he’d already known about Irving. Or maybe he’s more focused on our survival, the logical part of my mind suggested, struggling to regain control over my panic.
“Except for Selene,” Quinn continued, and I sensed his attention on me like a warm caress.
A second explosion rocked the walls of our tomb; the ceiling crumbled overhead, sending clumps of dirt and fine dust raining down on us. I coughed so hard that my throat hurt.
“Selene,” Quinn said urgently, “you need to get out of here. Forget about me, just magick yourself out of here. You can do it. You can get out of here before the ceiling comes down on us. Take Brogan with you. You can get both of you out.”
“There—” I coughed until I struggled to breathe, wheezing, but only pulling in more fine particles of dust. “There’s no way I’m leaving you behind.”
“You have to. There isn’t time. You can’t risk it.”
“If there’s time to get Brogan and me out, there’s time to get you out.”
“I’m … I’m not sure, Selene. You’d have to get me out of this cell too, and wouldn’t that use up your magic?”
“I have no idea, I just know I’m not leaving you, so don’t waste your breath.” Or our increasingly limited air…
Quinn sucked in a deep gulp, and rushed to get through his admission. “I don’t know if I can survive your magic again. I barely did last time.”
“Then you have nothing to lose.” I blatantly ignored the screaming warnings pulsing through me. We were out of time, and death by my magic was no longer the worst alternative for Quinn. There was absolutely no chance I’d leave him to die alone in a cave-in.
The walls and ceiling rattled, showering us with more debris, and Brogan wheezed, “Whatever you’re going to do, you need to do it now.”
I nodded into the darkness, forcing myself to push out the air that didn’t quite manage to fill my seizing lungs. Though I wanted to, I refused to consider all I might lose if I messed this up.
My magic was about as unstable as it could be at this point, and I’d already hurt Quinn once. Still, I barreled forward.
“Give me your hand,” I commanded Brogan.
Without hesitation, I felt it trailing across my back, then my shoulder and arm, until our hands met. I squeezed Quinn’s hand through the bars; he squeezed it back.
Pretending Quinn and I weren’t in the company of a near-stranger, I whispered, “I love you, Q. In case, you know…”
“I love you too, Selene. Always. Now get us the hell out of here.”
A thunderous explosion rocked the tunnels so violently that the shuddering earth knocked me over. I squeaked in fear, then powered
on until my protests transformed into a warped battle cry. Pulling on Quinn’s and Brogan’s hands hard enough to keep them with me no matter how much the earth tried to separate us, I snapped my thoughts to the only place that would make a difference.
Struggling to ignore my surroundings, especially when the ground beneath us split into a crevice that tried to swallow one of my feet, I gritted my teeth in fierce determination.
I would not let us down. If we died, it wouldn’t be because I hadn’t given it my all, it would be because Quinn and I apparently had the worst luck in history.
Picturing Quinn free of his cell, and joining Brogan and me at the top of the cliff above the crashing ocean shore, I willed us there.
When nothing happened, I screamed, venting all my frustration and fear, and I really willed us the hell there this time. I shook from the mental effort.
The floor caved out from under our feet as the ceiling crumbled above us. Quinn slid downward as his prison vanished beneath him.
I tightened my grip and pushed every speck of my magic into my vision. There was no place for doubt, only the most primal of instincts: survival.
Screaming until my throat strained, I finally felt the now-familiar tug of my magic.
I clenched my eyes shut against the vertigo that confirmed we were jumping across space, and focused only on two things: the cliff above the ocean, beneath Lizbeth’s fortress, and holding on to the two men who were relying entirely on me to survive.
8
We crashed into the rocks near the cliff’s edge and tumbled. I flopped awkwardly onto my back and sprawled across several hard, rounded stones. Brogan teetered at the edge, swirling his massive arms to regain his balance. The moment he tipped over the edge, Quinn reached for him, and Brogan managed to catch Quinn’s outstretched hand.
Struggling to gain my feet to help, I watched with trepidation while Quinn proved to be every bit as strong and formidable as the white-haired polar-bear shifter.
He managed to heave Brogan back up, where the two of them retreated from the cliff’s edge and bent over, hands on their thighs, trying to catch their breaths. With both of them safe, I allowed my head to fall back against the rock behind me and sighed with exhaustion.