We didn’t talk after that and I honestly didn’t know if he’d come along or not. I spent my wait-time soaking up what sun there was. This far up, the heat felt good on my skin. All too soon, I knew the heat would suck.
The air smelled damp, like it was getting ready to rain. I hoped by finding that voice we could figure out what was causing these wonky weather patterns. I felt it in my gut—the two were related.
Soon enough we watched Bracken’s form breach the trees and tall grass. He walked up the trail holding the now-full bottles. Before he reached us, he tossed half of them to Race.
“Hurried as fast as I could.” Bracken set his half of the bottles down to dump out his pack, packing only the water for us. Race followed suit. I guessed that meant he was coming with.
That was it. I took in a deep breath and started the hike around to the opposite side of the cap. It didn’t take too long for us to reach. I peered down over the side, trying to figure out how I could drop without missing the lip, when Bracken sidled up next to me.
“Race and I are tall enough—hardly be a drop for us. If you lie down on your belly and dangle your legs over the side, we will lower you to the lip. Wait for us, then we will swing you inside the cave.”
A solid plan if also a scary one. I wasn’t sure Race wouldn’t “accidentally” let my arm slip, causing me to fall to my death so he’d be rid of me for good.
But Bracken was right. Both he and Race hovered around 6’5, so a six-foot drop wouldn’t be anything for them, even with having to land on a narrow strip.
Me, on the other hand? Shadow didn’t call me eaglet for nothing.
Once we determined the best spot, I lay on my stomach as directed, dangling my feet over the side. Bracken laid on his belly, getting a firm grip on both my hands, and we wiggled me over the edge of the cap. His whole body constricted when he bent at his waist to lower me the rest of the way. Those Roc men worked mad core muscles, and with his arm span, I had no trouble reaching the lip. As I touched down first on tiptoe, Bracken made sure my feet were planted flat before letting go.
Both men scaled the edge right after, one dropping to either side of me.
“Now is the part where you have to trust us, Meen,” Bracken said as we all glanced down past our feet.
Um… wow. I had no choice. Trusting them was the only way to get me inside that cavern. The problem was one of those men couldn’t stand me and Shadow was the only man I truly trusted with my life for obvious reasons.
I looked between the men, then down at the cave again, took in a long breath, let it out slowly then turned to my companions and nodded. “I’m ready.” I took in another deep breath and swallowed hard as each man held my waist with one hand and my arm with the other.
“Tighten your core,” Bracken ordered. I squeezed those muscles as tightly as I could as the men bent forward. How they were able to keep balance remained a mystery of the ages.
Race and Bracken let go of my waist at the same time to grasp my wrists in a death grip with both their hands and then they swung me. Once, twice to gain momentum and on the third swing, they released my hands. I let out a ridiculously loud scream. Stupid, I knew.
Alert the enemy we’re coming, why don’t you? I thought it, and I thought I heard Race say it. But what could I do? I’d challenge anyone to attempt that feat of acrobatics and not screech their fool head off.
“Incoming,” Bracken called to me right before his feet appeared in the opening, causing me to scramble farther in to give him room to land. As graceful an acrobat as an eagle, he landed much more gracefully in a crouch.
He stood and stepped aside for Race to swing inside, but I didn’t wait for his feet to touch before moving along the cave. It got dark real quick. This kind of blackness proved too much for even the keenest eagle eyes to penetrate. The only option I had was to use the flashlight on my phone until the battery ran out. Thank goodness I charged it fully back in Cloud City. Before we got too far, I switched the setting to low-battery mode to draw it out as long as possible.
As we moved along the tunnel, I realized here was one place that my lack of height benefitted me. Whereas they had to walk perpetually hunched forward to keep from scraping their heads against the ceiling, I got to walk upright.
Most tunnels grew cooler the farther down you descended, but not here. We felt the temperature go up incrementally until the rock walls became too hot to touch. We pushed forward. Down. Down. Down. To where the soles of my shoes started to melt and stick from the surrounding, oppressive heat. No, the magma chamber didn’t connect, but it had to be right on the other side of the shaft.
Unfortunately for us, my battery failed to hold out and the phone powered off. We were screwed. Plunged back into blackness, void of all light. I shuffled my sticking feet along the floor as well as I could given that they, in fact, stuck, but deprived of several senses, when my foot slipped over an edge, I tumbled forward and smacked my head against rock. Instead of a scream, I gasped. Pain radiated and blood gushed down my face while I continued to slide down a steep embankment.
I couldn’t see, and it didn’t feel natural.
Chapter Seventeen:
Hitting Rock Bottom
The ground began to flatten out, allowing the momentum of my slide to slow considerably until I stopped at the foot of a new passageway. This one definitely wasn’t natural. The passage was lit by a glow of red light, showing markings from the tools used to carve it out.
A Roc warrior’s foot landed in my back. It didn’t feel great but didn’t hurt as bad as my head. I turned to see whose foot I had to rip away from whose body. Both men gasped.
“Jesus, Meena. Are you okay?” Bracken asked. Pushing up on his knees, he shuffled a step forward and gently grabbed my chin to check out the wound. No more foot in my back. I’d forgive Bracken. As I liked him and all, he could keep his foot attached.
“I sure as hell hope Shad knocked you up,” Race said as he tore a long strip from his shirt. “That looks bad and we don’t have time for you to heal on your own.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.” I chuckled, though it hurt to do so. “And even if it did, I don’t think we’ve procreated just yet. It was Avalon’s tea that healed me on the mountain. I promise not to let my head injury interfere.”
I was feeling snarky, so there was probably no concussion. That was a good sign. He wiped the blood away from my eye to help me see and double-wrapped the strip around my head, tying it off by my temple to act as a makeshift bandage until I could have it looked at by a professional or it scabbed over.
We’d moved farther away from the magma chamber. The rubber soles of our shoes stopped sticking. I placed my hand against the wall and it was warm but not hot. And that was when I heard it, loud and clear: “Help please…”
Whatever entity called to me; it knew I was getting closer. I felt our connection strengthen. I channeled my energy into my hand and spoke to him in my head. “I’m here. Just hold on.” Even that little bit pulled at my energy. I had to keep going, though. “Where are you?”
“The wheel room,” the voice answered back.
“The wheel room?” I asked out loud.
“Meena, what are you talking about?” Bracken asked.
At the same time Race spoke over him “Shit—maybe her head injury is worse than we thought.”
“No. Shush, both of you,” I said, placing both hands firmly against the wall and concentrating.
“Did you just shush us?” Race asked.
“Do you not understand what shush means? I need to focus.” This time with my eyes closed, I poured every bit of magic into connecting with the voice. “Where is the wheel room?” I pushed the thought out.
And I got an immediate response. “At the end… be mindful… the others…”
The others? What others? What were we dealing with here? Coming to grips with this new turn of events, I shook my head and repeated, “The others…” Race and B
racken’s bodies startled and grew taut.
“Others?” Race asked tersely. His posture shifted from that worried surprise of a moment ago to that of a badass ready to protect his future king’s mate.
I nodded. “The voice said to be careful of the others.”
“Saēna! Just great.”
We began to move tentatively along the corridor, following the path of the glowing light. It seemed that the reprieve from the heat was only a slight one, seeing as the brighter the glow grew, the hotter the air and rock walls became. This could only mean one thing: we were approaching the lava chamber.
The corridor opened up into a cavernous space. The heat generating off the lake of lava already started pinking my skin from just the minimal amount of exposure. We stopped at a ridge jutting out and thinning into a crumbling, one-person bridge.
There were no handholds or railings, just the narrow rock walk even narrower than shoulder width—my shoulder width. I had no idea how the men would make it across without falling in. The cavern was far too hot for them to change into bird, the risk of singeing their feathers, something that would keep them from flying or in this case staying aloft, was too great. Conversely, there was no way to know if the bridge stood a chance at holding their weight, being so much heavier and broader than me.
“Okay, I’ll go first—test it out,” Bracken said. Race nodded first, then me. “Meena, you follow next. Race can go last just in case.”
Slowly, Bracken took his first step, holding his arms out wide for balance. He watched his feet, switching to a shuffle, as shuffling was safer than stepping. Pieces of rubble chipped off, toppling down into the abyss of glowing light below him.
I sucked in a sharp breath. He stopped and turned his head abruptly to look at Race and me. “I’m okay,” he said. “Give me a chance to pass the halfway before you start.”
“Sure… yeah, okay,” I answered, my gaze wavering between his feet and the lava, but never looking at him. If he was scared, I’d be petrified. I felt like I wanted to puke and cry already. The air was so thick with heat it felt like I was doing major cardio in a sauna. We had to get out or we’d steam from the inside out. The burn on my skin was beginning to burn more than pink now.
But what if it turned out to be the last time I ever saw his face? Could I live with myself knowing I didn’t look him in the eyes for a final goodbye? No, I couldn’t. Decision made, I forced myself to give him a confident smile as I found his eyes. He shot me a chin lift, turned back around, and slid his feet, one in front of the other, slowly over the rock again.
When he made it to the halfway point I turned to Race. “Don’t let me die.” I slid my foot onto the rock, holding my arms out like Bracken had, like an eagle gliding, to keep my balance.
Don’t look down… don’t look down… don’t look down… Yeah, that was the wrong thought to have in this precarious situation because what was the first thing I did? Stupidly, I looked down, lost my nerve, and wobbled. I gasped and bent over, gripping the rock to steady my legs.
Pain seared through my palms at the same time I smelled burning flesh. Magic, I needed magic. The trouble was I didn’t know enough of it. Calling to the magic, I tried to create a suitable bridge, I really did. But the most I could conjure up in the tense situation was a blue light that surrounded my hands to cool them and it expanded to keep the oppressive heat at bay. It wasn’t much, but I’d take almost anything at this point.
I stood straight again, arms out again, and continued on with shuffling feet, doing well in my mind, until I hit the crack Bracken had made from his weight. Without warning, a large chunk of bridge crumbled, my foot slipped over the edge, and I fell forward, screaming.
Race lunged, grabbing a fistful of my T-shirt. And as my body dangled, the neckline strangled me. He let go of the tee and I dropped, with Race stopping my freefall by seizing my wrist. We heard the cracking. More rock chips tumbled into the lava.
“Give me your other hand,” he ordered. I did exactly as asked and he wrapped a fist around my second wrist and began to swing me to gain momentum. Four swings, the rock crumbling more underneath him, before he let go and I went flying.
I landed hard on the other side, my thighs not clearing the cliff ledge. As I struggled to pull myself up, the rest of the rock on Race’s side fell away. Bracken grabbed my arm as I threw a hand out to stop Race from falling.
“No!” I yelled and more of that blue light, stronger than before, lifted him, carrying him to us. My head throbbed and a trickle of blood ran down from my nose. Once safely on our side, I looked between the men and whispered, “Water.”
Then apparently, I passed out. At least it was only a second or two. I came to before Bracken had the bottle cap unscrewed. He helped me drink while Race held me up. The water felt good and still relatively cool from the thermoses we used.
“Meena, this is crazy. We cannot go on. Think of Shad,” Bracken said. But he knew how I’d answer; they both did.
I was absolutely thinking of Shadow. That if we were to have a chance at a future together, I had to keep pushing on.
The blue light flickered in and out until it fizzled out completely and the burning sensation sprang back full force. Each man took a side helping me walk. We were getting close to something, I felt it. What? I had no idea, just that we needed to brace ourselves.
Good thing I paid attention to that inner voice.
Just past the bridge, the space opened up to an underground factory teeming with fire people. Like literally. Their bodies held a human form, but they were made of fire.
We stopped before the fire people saw us, keeping to the shadows. “Dangey,” whispered Race, as if I was supposed to have any flipping idea of what a Dangey was.
What exactly were they? Did they like us? Did they hate us? Did they live here? If they did, where did they sleep? Or did they sleep? My mind was all over the place. Seeing these beings seemed unbelievable, and yes, I realized I was a witch who lived with bird-shifters. Fire people were on a whole different level.
Several of them operated a giant machine that broke down material to feed a lava spring. To do this, they shoveled pumice, shale, and silt onto a conveyor belt of which the pieces were pulverized into smaller and smaller bits by a series of large blocks moving up and down rapidly.
Some men or women, I couldn’t really tell from their shapeless forms, did the heavy lifting, while others shouted directions in a language I should have no understanding of, but through these awesome witchy powers gifted to me as the reincarnated spirit of Wilhelmina, I so totally did.
At the end of the belt, the dust spilled into and was swallowed up by the lava. I wasn’t exactly sure about the reason for this, but I doubted it was for the betterment of humankind.
While scanning the vast space, I realized I’d been here before. The very first time I’d connected with the voice it had brought me here. Which meant I knew exactly which direction to go to find the voice. A series of four separate tunnels had been dug out on the opposite of the factory floor, one next to the other. I needed to make it to the tunnel, second one on the left.
Of the things in my life I was most sure about, these were the top three:
1.) My name was Meena Anthony.
2.) Aerie-lord Shadow, the future king of the Roc people, was my life mate.
3.) The disembodied voice resided at the end of the second tunnel on the left.
It came in the middle of mentally plotting how exactly to cross a room full of fire people, or demons, as I was corrected by Race. I stepped forward to get a good look at the space when an arm wrapped around my waist and a hand covered my mouth. I hit Race’s chest and heard his “Shh…” in my ear.
Then he used his chin to point out what I hadn’t seen before. Two exceptionally tall people, one man and one woman, both with raven black hair, exited one of the tunnels, not thankfully, the tunnel we needed. Raven-black hair—the ravens.
Well, that was a hiccup we certainly didn’t need. I’d seen how th
e ravens fought, and worse, we had no idea how many more were milling around.
Shoot. Okay, so avoid fire demons and ravens.
But when I felt Race’s body grow super-taut behind me, I knew something worse than ravens just reared its ugly head.
Race pulled his hand from my mouth to point out a newcomer on the scene and I was wrong—this trouble didn’t rear its ugly head; it reared its absolutely-so-freaking-phenomenally-beautiful-could-only-have-been-formed-by-magic head.
My Shadow was the love of my life and as we were reincarnated from the first Roc and his witch, Wilhelmina, another life, too.
I’d never met a man, even surrounded by the other Roc men, as aesthetically beautiful and powerful as Shadow, either. Yet this ball of lust started growing inside me. Desire dripped from every pore on my body. I bet he could smell it from across the room. If I couldn’t have him physically, I’d tack a poster of this guy above the bed Shadow and I shared so I could stare at it every night.
It didn’t make sense. My breaths came out heavy in a turned-on, not scared way. It was if he drew my very essence toward him and I tried to push out of Race’s arms.
“Meena,” Race said. Admonished, really. “Incubus.”
I blinked. “What?” As if that was supposed to mean something to me?
“He is an incubus.”
Hmm… I’d heard that name before, but it had never meant much to me. Just a legend from childhood. How could anything with a thick head of golden-blond hair, the build of a demi-god and skin that glowed with the luster of gold dust be anything but good? His broad, strong arms and shoulders could hold a woman passionately while he used his long fingers and what was attached to that streamlined pelvic region to pleasure a woman—number four on the list of things I was sure of.
“Meena,” Race admonished again, giving me one hard shake.
Flight: The Roc Warriors (Immortal Elements Book 1) Page 16