THE DARKNESS CLOSED IN AROUND ME, SEDIMENT AND DUST SHOWERING
down, the ground rumbling and cresting beneath my feet, the sound of stone on stone blaring in my ears.
Arwen’s scream pierced the tumult like a fang through skin.
My hand slammed into the stone that separated us, hard enough to send a crack rippling through the trembling rock. “Arwen!”
They were calling to me, she and Mari both, voices faint through the stone.
Muffled further by the absolute roaring of the cave collapsing on itself.
I pressed my ear to the wall, its shaking plane cold against my face, but I couldn’t make out words.
The reverberations below my feet had become almost too strong for me to keep myself upright. I locked my knees and steadied my palms against the rock.
Solid, suffocating rock—
Power menaced at my fists as I readied them against the barrier between
us.
But I didn’t get the chance to strike.
My instincts sent me to the left, barreling into a spiky cluster of fallen
crystals just as a boulder the size of a carriage dropped directly where I had been standing.
“Kane!” Griffin’s voice.
I whirled. He and Fedrik were trying to make their way to me, dodging falling sheets of rock and crumbling, jagged stalactites.
“You have to go back,” I yelled over to them.
Another angry layer of rock broke loose and plummeted from above, right over their heads. I raced for them, but I wouldn’t make it—
In the split second before impact, Fedrik shoved Griffin out of the way. And the sheet landed on the prince with a sickening crunch.
My gut clenched at the sight.
Fedrik screamed in agony, his leg pinned underneath the slabs of rock.
“Go!” I roared to Griffin once I had made it to them. “Get Arwen and Mari.”
Griffin was way ahead of me, sprinting through the hail of boulders. I couldn’t hear the women anymore. Panic thrummed through every inch of me, the lighte under my skin demanding that I crush, break, tear everything apart until I reached them. Until I reached her. So fierce I nearly had to brace myself against the rocks atop Fedrik.
I assessed the damage: even with my strength, I couldn’t lift the heaviest stone clean off him. I’d have to slide the largest one, likely mangling his leg.
The prince seized my shin. “Kane, leave me,” he gritted out. “We both know. There’s nothing . . .”
“Don’t be a martyr. Can you imagine how much your parents would hate me then?” I shoved with as much strength as I had, drawing the lighte from the soil deep beneath the cavern floor. Fedrik choked on anguish as the mass slid along his leg, shattering his bones.
Finally, the thing heaved off him. The ground continued to shake.
“Can you move?” I didn’t have time for anything else. I needed to get Arwen.
“Yes,” he said. “Run.”
Fedrik heaved onto his stomach in an attempt to drag himself toward— Toward what?
There was no safety down here. Not with these rocks falling, the cave collapsing. He’d be squished like a snail underfoot.
He needed to get out. We all did.
“Griffin!” My commander’s glossy emerald power had barely made a dent in the enchanted stone that held the treasure room. “Get Fedrik back to camp. I’ll find them.”
Griffin gave an agonized look toward the wall he had been slicing through—
“Now,” I roared.
He hurtled back to us, slinging Fedrik’s arm around his neck and taking off without so much as another look in my direction. They barreled across the stone platform above the reapers, following the path Mari’s luster had left. They would only make it as far as the cave-in and then . . .
I didn’t have time to think about what might happen then.
It was all I could do to dart back for the wall to the treasure room, over crushed stone and dirt and debris. I heaved what rocks Griffin had broken loose away, one by one, sweat rippling on my brow, muscles straining at the effort. My lighte spilled out of me, wisps of barbed smoke and thorn cutting through the stone where Griffin had etched deep grooves with his own power. My arms, now two of eight, the wisps working in tandem like I was a creature of great myths.
“Arwen, can you hear me?” Nothing.
I wasn’t breathing.
“Mari?” I roared. “Arwen?”
“Kane.”
“Yes, my love.” Sweet relief.
“We’re trapped!” Mari screeched, the walls now thin enough to hear through as my lighte broke down and shoved boulders the size of wheelbarrows out of the way.
“Try to stay calm.”
Skin was ripping off my hands in coin-sized chunks. There was too much rock, too much stone, even with my shadow arms of smoke and thorn and wings. I pulled and pulled, until there was nearly a path through for me above the tunnel they had crawled through.
But still—more rock. More stone. Each bigger than the last, the more I broke through it . . . Was the wall between us rebuilding?
Fuck. I couldn’t do it alone.
“You have to use your lighte.”
“It’s not working—I’m trying but it’s not working!”
“Breathe. This is nothing for you. You have endless power. Draw it from the air.” But I was no Dagan. There was no sun. Not much air left to draw from. I could only hope Arwen hadn’t come to the same realization.
“Kane, get yourself out of here. Get Fedrik and Griffin to safety.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You have to. The whole cavern is going to collapse. We’ll find another way out.”
“I’m almost through.”
But I wasn’t. I had just narrowly squeezed into a carved crevice, and it was already sliding back together. I’d have to rebreak through solid, ancient, cursed stone. I slammed all the lighte I had into the wall and tiny fissures spider-webbed along it. I struck again, bones in my hands cracking, muscles in my back aching and screaming in protest.
“No, you’re not. I can see the wall re-forming.”
“Kane!” Griffin’s voice. I spun, but it wasn’t a call for help. It was a warning.
The reaper pit was opening, the platforms that had sealed it sliding back into their original slots in the cavern walls. Reptilian screeches joined the earsplitting chorus of thunderous falling rock.
Gods damn it. This death trap had been a Gods-forsaken, failed waste of fucking time, and now it would claim all of our lives.
“Kane!” Griffin, again.
“I heard you,” I shouted back.
“Listen to me.” Arwen’s calm voice was barely muffled through the stone anymore. I was so close. “We found another way out. And you can’t get through. Not in time. I will never forgive you if you die trying to save me. Do you understand? Never. You get everyone else out. We’re going to be fine.”
There was a fail-safe. There had to be. A way out of the treasure room, for the pirates or Gods or sorcerers or whoever had moved the goods in there over the many decades. Warring against every instinct, every cell in my body, I pressed my hand to the fissured stone and yelled back, “Fine. Hurry.”
“You, too” was all she said, and then I knew she was moving, and I had to do the same.
I dove for the sliding platform, now only a ledge against the cavern wall beside the pit, a hair wider than the beam along the middle. The pungent smell of rotting human flesh stung my eyes and tongue. The stone was growing narrower, and I sprinted past a single bloodstained fang that reached up to scrape my boot.
Tumbling onto the ground on the other side with a mere second to spare, I watched between heaving breaths as the slab sank fully back into the wall from which it came.
My chest constricted as I beheld the writhing pit of screeching reapers that now separated us. I had left Arwen. And I was going to tear this entire world to pieces if she didn’t make it out. Starting with myself.
I careened back down the same tunnels we had come through, following Mari’s line of painted light, until I reached Griffin and Fedrik at the solid stone wall that had trapped us inside mere hours ago.
Fedrik was on the ground, Griffin slamming arcs of emerald lighte into the wall where Mari’s luster ended.
“It rebuilds itself.”
“Where are they?” Griffin bit out. “They’ll be fine.”
Fedrik’s face leeched of all color. “You left them to die?” He turned to Griffin. “We have to go back.”
“I left them because Arwen begged me to save your life.” The words were like ash in my mouth. “She said they found another exit.”
Fedrik panted. “How could you—”
“Enough,” Griffin barked. “Arwen and the witch will survive. They’re strong. I need Kane’s help so we can do the same.”
Drawing every last drop of lighte that I had inside me, pulling from the very marrow of my bones, I drove a wall of black mist like a knife against the stone. Griffin did the same, his translucent, tourmaline lighte funneling out of his palms like blown glass. Layering on mine, filling in gaps where I was ragged, patchy, faltering—
Slowly—agonizingly slowly—our powers carved and splintered the sediment until a single crack cleaved the stone in two.
I heaved, bracing my hands on my knees. I heard Griffin spit into the dust beneath us.
And still that merciless, uncompromising, ravaging force shook the ground beneath our feet.
“Quick,” I breathed. “Before it reconstructs.”
Griffin helped Fedrik up and grunted as his lighte flowed out of him once more in an incandescent aura, pushing one side of the crack we carved with his shoulder and trying to force it open like a jammed door.
I moved next to him and did the same, my boots grinding into the shuddering floor. The cave wall that had come down of its own accord was silent against my pressed ear, and yet awake . . . Listening. Breathing. Restless.
The solid rock held firm, and that peculiar feeling fueled me to push harder, and harder still, until at once it rotated open, enough for us to release our hold and gulp in matching breaths of air.
I could smell the twinges of the rain forest, the slight heat that was slipping in through the tunnel we had split open.
Fedrik limped through on his crushed leg with no further urging, Griffin after him. I slipped out last, allowing myself one final look at the crumbling cavern behind us. But I felt no release of the oily dread that coated my throat.
She would make it out. She had to.
We ran for the mouth of the cave, each step bringing another bird’s call, a waft of fresh air, a fragrant damp breeze, until we were spat out where we had entered.
I sucked in steadying gulps of humid, floral air as Griffin lowered Fedrik against the trunk of a palm and knelt to inspect his leg.
Not a minute later—when we had scarcely caught our ragged breaths—a deep, guttural roar erupted from the mouth of the cave. Hideous groaning rang through the trees, sending creatures rustling overhead and at my feet.
The cavern . . . it was closing. Sealing shut—
I moved without thinking, faster than I’d ever moved in my life— Thicker than the stone I had used nearly all my power to break through,
a slab from the top of the cave’s open mouth crashed into the earth long before I could reach it. I slammed my fists against what just mere moments
—seconds—ago had been the wide-open jaws of Reaper’s Cavern.
Against what was now a mountain of solid rock.
