by Chloe Adler
“There’s room to stand now but I need to come,” I told him, trying not to sound whiny and failing.
“You can beg me to come later, when we’re done here. Maybe keeping you on the edge is exactly what we need right now.”
“Bastard,” I hissed and felt a sharp swat on my rear, which only elicited more shivers.
“Stand up, Sadie. My legs are cramping.”
I obliged, pulling my body forward by my arms and stretching out my legs first. I didn’t realize that my legs were cramped too until I tried to stand.
Ryder was behind me in a flash, catching me when my legs faltered.
“Probably misuse combined with lust,” he teased.
We stood, blinking for a moment. I leaned into Ryder, my head bent back to touch his shoulder. His warm arms circled me, one hand clutching a breast through the thin top of my black sundress.
Jared’s eyes shone in the near darkness, glinting from the small amount of light I still emitted.
It took me a moment to realize Ryder was trying to light the room. The dullness of the cavern walls sparked to life as he kneaded my nipple. Jared sat a few feet away, watching us.
“Gives a new meaning to the term ‘headlights,’ “ he joked in my ear, bending to bite and caress the lobe with his tongue and teeth.
What this man could do to me. I could even overlook his inane jokes when he treated me like the most desired woman in his world. My knees threatened to give out again and he held his arm tightly around my waist, moving forward with me.
The room was large, a cave really, with several passages presenting themselves. Ryder moved to one of the walls. It was meticulously spray-painted with words of warning. Beware. Turn back all ye who enter.
I looked at Ryder with more confusion than concern.
“I think we’re in the right place,” he remarked. Then we heard the scream.
I took off at a run, but like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, Ryder grabbed the back of my dress and my legs pinwheeled uselessly. Jared ran over to me, placing his front paws on my legs.
“Stop,” Ryder commanded and when this man commanded me, I obeyed. When had that happened?
I pulled up as my dress threatened to come off backwards.
“That scream sounded like Iphi.” My breath came out in a pant.
“If we run into the fray, they’ll know we’re coming and retaliate. We need a plan,” Ryder said, which made more sense than my nonexistent one.
“Let’s sneak in.” I inched forward but Ryder once again held me back, this time by my hair. Jared was shaking his furry head.
“I go first, Sadie.”
“But I’m stronger,” I protested.
“Not really. You have some powers, yes, but you’re impetuous. And if something takes you out, we’ll lose any chance of magic.”
Jared emitted a low growl.
“Sorry, Jared, but in your current form, you won’t be able to help as much as I know you’d like to.”
Jared ran around in a circle.
I looked at my watch. “Another thirty,” I said to him.
Jared and Ryder advanced toward the tunnel where the scream had come from. I followed directly behind.
My own witch light had gone out in my fright. The light from the tunnel was a dark gray, and once our eyes adjusted, we could just barely see. Rekindling my own light would just alert them to our presence, so we all moved forward slowly in the dimness.
Ryder had one hand on the wall next to him and one arm held out in front. I was gripping the back of his jeans. At least we could stand here.
It seemed like we walked for at least a mile as the passageway twisted and turned, yet we still saw nothing. Jared ran ahead.
I pulled hard on Ryder’s jeans to get him to stop and leaned toward his ear.
“What if we chose the wrong tunnel?” I whispered.
Jared appeared, having scouted ahead, and emitted a low growl.
“We’re going the right way,” Ryder whispered to the air between us, warming the stale cold with his breath.
He reached out and grabbed my hand, then continued forward. We tried to follow Jared but after several more turns we lost him.
That’s when we heard it. A muted scraping sound bounced off the cavern walls followed by a low-pitched screech like something . . . or someone was being dragged across the cold granite.
Chapter Seventeen
There was no way to enter the cavern unnoticed. There were no corners to peek around, no stalagmites to hide behind. The area was vast and open.
The human zombie army stood watch.
Kind of. Their eyes were fixed on the tunnel’s mouth as we emerged from it. At first glance, there was no other entrance into the cave. One of them walked in circles, dragging its broken leg.
Ryder waved his hand at me behind his back in a swooshing motion, indicating I should sneak behind him and the men. The rest of them stood still with trance-like expressions on their faces. Slack jaws and unseeing eyes. The Scrim’s army of commandeered humans.
What the what? Was that—Ms. Bretscher?
I actually recognized some of them. Not just our old neighbor, but others who had disappeared during the past year. There were so many more than I had heard about. Many of them looked like they had come from our homeless population, down at the gates. I knew the police hadn’t done anything because they were humans, but the sheer number of them still shocked me. It had been so easy for these people’s disappearances to go unnoticed, especially now that our new Signum chief, Sheldon had changed the focus of the council’s interest.
Everyone looked malnourished. Not the best idea for strong-arming your enemies. Quantity must be what the Scrim was going for, not quality. I couldn’t count, there were too many of them, facing us in formation.
Before either of us could stop him, Jared ran in front of us, emitting his fox screams. Like a switch, they all came to life. As a fox, he was a fast runner.
He zigzagged in a crooked line and they took off after him, following at a slower pace. Under the Scrim’s command they weren’t the brightest or the quickest. Zombies indeed. It took them several beats to change direction, only to need several more to change back. Brilliant.
Ryder and I proceeded forward hugging the cave wall. After several steps he tripped over something and almost fell. It was the duffel bag with our supplies. Ryder hoisted the bag over his shoulder and sprinted forward. I chanced a look back.
Jared and the army were at the far end of the cave; I could just make out two areas that looked as though they’d been carved into the main cavern to form rooms or passageways. There was still no sign of the Scrim. This worried me almost as much as seeing him would.
I followed my man as he veered into the first room which was darker than the passageway and I couldn’t see anything. I stood still for a moment, trying to adjust. From the darkness came a hissing sound that rivaled the intense beating of my heart. Ryder fumbled around in the duffel bag—for a light, I assumed. Too late. Something cold and wet grabbed my thigh, just below my skirt hem.
Still shrouded mostly in darkness, I shook my leg but the wet thing was tightly attached. Ryder shined the light on the utterly disgusting thing. The giant leech-like creature was covering almost the entire surface of my thigh and shin. Ryder dropped the light. It rolled a few feet away, still shining but now in the wrong direction.
The wetness on my leg was briefly replaced by hands. A dull wet tearing sound momentarily filled the air a second before globs of something soggy and disgusting pummeled my body. My instinct was to shrink back but instead I bent over, feeling for the flashlight until my hands wrapped around it.
With the flashlight trained toward the ground, I could clearly see that it was littered with heaps of bulbous flesh. Ryder’s hands were shaking and bloody. My stomach somersaulted and I had to repeatedly swallow to keep from losing it.
The same gray pulp was splattered across my arms and legs. The spot on my thigh where I’d been grabbed was blooming
with blood, which trickled down my leg to my ankle.
I was trying to wipe away the gray blobs when something else wet sloshed to my left. The flashlight almost catapulted out of my hand as I spun to face it.
It was another giant leech. As large as a human and completely revolting. Inching forward slowly, steadily. I backed away, shaking in fear. That thing could probably eat me.
“Flares,” Burgundy’s voice rang out but I wasn’t sure from where.
“Tarda,” Chrys called out in Latin. I couldn’t see her either. Both voices sounded like they were coming from above me.
I swept the flashlight out and then up, toward their voices. A strangled gasp escaped me. In the center of the room was a huge moat filled with giant spikes rising upwards instead of water. In the center of the moat, large cages were stacked haphazardly on top of each other, to the point of wobbling. Each cage contained one of my loved ones, as well as two people I didn’t recognize. I assumed they were Ryder’s family.
“Move,” yelled my father from his cage.
I jumped out of the way instinctively. The leech was moving slower but still heading toward me. I spun around to look for Ryder. He had a knife in his hand, slicing up another giant leech that, from the looks of it, had almost been upon my back.
Quickly dumping the rest of the contents of the duffel, I grabbed a flare and pulled off the plastic cap, wasting precious seconds trying to strike the end of it with the igniter on the lid.
It finally lit. I threw it down on the ground in front of me and worked on igniting the others. In a few moments I had formed a circle around myself, keeping the approaching leech at bay.
I stuffed the contents back inside the bag and trained my flashlight upwards. Burgundy was grasping the bars, watching intently. But in doing so, her cage had begun to move, almost dislodging and falling into the moat, along with the one piled on top of hers. Ingenious. Sick.
Burgundy’s mouth opened and then closed, her eyes turning into saucers as she stared behind me.
“Sadie, behind you!” my father yelled from the cage above Burgundy’s.
I swiveled around to see several zombies moving toward me. Crap. Where was Jared? Ryder was occupied, tearing apart the leech I had held at bay with the flare. Gobs of gray meat flew, covering the walking souls. They kept advancing, not bothering to react to the sheer repulsiveness of their situation.
The one closest to me, a gaunt woman with vacant eyes and a tattered dress, reached for me. I didn’t want to kill these people or even maim them; they were all citizens of the Edge, controlled against their will. Innocent victims.
As I reached for the duffel, one of the creatures kicked it into the spiked moat. It snagged atop a metal skewer. Dropping to my stomach, I inched forward. The dirt coated my leech-wet and bloodstained flesh. I wanted to tear my skin off. Not willing to see my family die, I gritted my teeth and kept inching forward. At the edge of the moat, I reached a shaking hand toward the duffel just as a zombie grabbed my legs and pulled me back toward the fray.
“Sadie, use your magic,” Iphi called from above.
Why hadn’t I thought of that? “What do I say?” I called out.
“Duratis to freeze them,” Chrys’s voice reached my ears.
I repeated her word, throwing my hands up and toward the creatures to freeze them in place. I felt a little spark from my fingertips and then a sizzle, like someone blowing out a match. It didn’t work, they kept advancing.
“Try again,” yelled Dad.
I tried several more times with no effect. Maybe my stress was getting in the way. I didn’t have time to think. I kicked at the man-thing holding my legs and scrambled toward the edge of the moat again.
“I’ll hold them off,” Ryder yelled and then I heard a muffled yell.
Ryder was being carried away by two humanoids while he beat against their backs.
A growl emerged. Jared in his cougar form leapt between me and the other human robots. His teeth were bared and snapping, the beings still ambling forward.
Confident that he could help me, I reached as far as I could into the moat and barely snagged a strap of the bag with my hand.
A loud moan sounded behind me. I almost let go, but didn’t. Pulling the bag toward me, I twisted my filthy body in the dirt to crawl back toward Jared. He was slapping the humans down one by one with his head and paws, claws retracted.
“Jared, careful!” I yelled at him. “They’re innocents.”
Yellow cougar eyes glinted in the light of the flares. He understood.
“We gotta tie ‘em up,” I barked.
Jared kept them at bay. He stood in front of me and, whenever one lurched too close, he nudged them back or swiped at them without extending his claws. The spiked moat was to my back and I used it to my advantage. I opened the duffel and grabbed one thick coil of rope.
After unwrapping the fifty-foot skein of twisted hemp, I threw one end to Jared, who caught it in his jaws.
“Run around the humans,” I commanded. He turned and ran in a circle, winding the rope around the lot of them, about twenty-five. When he finally finished, they were all writhing together like flies caught in the web of a giant spider.
It took me a few minutes to join the ends of the rope so they couldn’t escape.
“Nice work,” screamed a thousand children.
Chapter Eighteen
I swiveled around to the bald head and leering gory smile of the Scrim.
“Sadie,” his yellow snake eyes narrowed, “welcome.”
“Let them go.” What a stupid thing to say, but it was all I could think of in the moment.
“But I did this for you.” He held his arms out wide, sweeping them toward the cages.
“Why?” But the bigger question was why wasn’t I terrified?
He took a step toward me and I had nowhere to go with the spiked moat at my back.
Jared was crouched, ready to strike. I held my hand up to him, palm out. Turning back to the Scrim, I caught his evil devil smile.
“I did this to show you.” His yellow, pointed teeth were even more gruesome than I remembered.
“Show me what? That you can trap my family like animals?”
“To show you how weak they are,” he hissed like a rattlesnake.
His hand reached toward me, the sharp yellowish nails catching the light. I ducked right before the moment of contact.
“You will come back with me to my realm and be my queen.”
I laughed, which was definitely the wrong response. “Is that your version of a marriage proposal?”
“Sadie!” Iphi shrieked from above me.
“Not the time for jokes,” Burgundy threw down.
“Silence, insignificant things!” he bellowed, their cages creaking in the darkness.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.” I tried to distract him from killing my loved ones.
“Oh, I think you will.” A forked tongue appeared. He licked his crimson lips. “To save them, you will do anything. You’re weak, like they are. Like all beings in this world.”
“Why would you want me then?” From the corner of my eye, the tawny yellow of Jared’s fur inched forward slowly.
“You are the most powerful witch in this world. You will bear me a child to rule this realm in my stead, while I run my empire from my own.”
“Gross. And I’m not the most powerful witch, my mother is.”
“Your mother is nothing compared to you,” the monster taunted.
“What have you done with Ryder?”
“What have I done with him? That one had free will. He chose his path and led you right to me. He’ll get what I promised him.”
Flashes of the past few days replayed in my mind. Unwanted, the memory of his quick exit from Promise. The V Club. My bedroom, to feed a cat I’d never seen evidence of at his houseboat. The longing, guilty way he’d eyed me the first time I’d seen him in Burgundy’s living room.
“You’re lying.” I ran my fingers through my h
air, trying to clear my head.
“He wears my brand, woman. You think he belongs to you? Your world, this”—he raised his arms, gesturing around the dank, sodden walls—“is all illusion. My world, where you will reign with me in darkness, renders all of this false, useless. There is no need for your loved ones there.”
“I’m not going with you. I want you to return Ryder to me.”
“The traitor? Why? He will only betray you again.”
“Enough,” I cried out, less confused about my lack of fear. He needed me, or thought he did.
A gruesome smile spread wide across his devilish face, and though I wanted to run, I held my ground.
“Want to cut a deal?”
Beady eyes narrowed. Head cocked to the side at an impossible angle. Waiting.
“I’ll go with you, but free my family, friends, Ryder and his family.”
A slight shake of the head. “You think you are in a position to make deals, little girl? This is my game. You are merely a puppet.”
“One you need, apparently.”
“You overestimate your worth, as so many in your world are wont to do. I am the ruler of mine. The Supreme Being. All bow to me. You are nothing but a vessel. I can use another. Your mother, perhaps.”
For as much as my own mother hated me, as much as she tormented me, had made me pay for her mistakes, I still loved her. I blurted, “Over my dead body.” Clichéd, yes, but also on point.
“As you command.” He reached a hand toward me, claws extended and glistening sickly in the dying light of the flares.
Jared’s body flashed between us, aiming for the Scrim, but the giant sidestepped and Jared’s cougar form padded silently to the ground.
The Scrim took a menacing step toward me and in quick succession, Ryder darted between us as Jared pounced again. The Scrim grabbed Ryder by the neck, shaking him like a rag doll.
“How sweet, your plaything tried to save you. Mine!” the Scrim proclaimed in a bellow before vanishing in an actual puff of smoke, taking my beloved human snitch with him.