Page 204 of Empire of Shadows

“What did you do?” he demanded.

“I… found a flute,” Ellie awkwardly replied as she waved at the back of the statue’s neck.

Adam met her gaze from across the length of the suicide goddess—then lifted his boot and stomped down on the lever.

Unseen weights moved behind the walls as something ground and cranked into place.

“Was that a good noise?” she asked tentatively.

“Keep blowing and let’s find out,” Adam retorted. He pivoted over to an enormous anthropomorphic spider and grabbed one of its eight arms to haul himself up.

“Right,” Ellie confirmed breathlessly.

She clambered down from the hanged goddess and hurried to the next statue—the bloody-toothed crocodile. She scaled up its body, using its open jaws to pull up to its neck.

She blew through the bone flute that she found protruding from the back.

There was no sound.

Across the room, the spider god emitted a haunting, elegant note.

Adam slid down the front of it. He kicked the lever as he went.

Another scrape and clank sounded from behind the walls.

Ellie half-fell down the front of the crocodile. She ran to a god that vividly resembled a rotting corpse, right down to the wooden maggots wriggling in the gaps of its skin.

She eyed it distastefully, but there was no way around it. Ellie climbed up. Her boots slipped on the slick surface. The decaying flesh had been depicted with such realism that she almost expected it to squish under her grip.

Thankfully, there was no squish.

She reached the top, swung herself around to the back of the corpse’s neck—and panicked.

“It’s not here!” she cried out.

“What do you mean, it’s not there?” Adam hopped down from a handsome male god who appeared to have slit his own throat.

“The… the bone! The flute! It’s broken off!” Ellie exclaimed.

“Skip it and go to the next one,” Adam ordered as he scaled up the torso of a beady-eyed vulture. “If we get through all of them and nothing’s happened, then we’ll know which way it’s supposed to go.”

The suggestion was perfectly sensible. Ellie’s brain took an inordinately long amount of time to absorb it.

The air was making it hard to breathe—hard to think. She felt dizzy and thick.

“Yes,” she said aloud, as though the words could force her body into moving. “Yes, I’ll do that.”

She climbed down. Her grip on the corpse slipped, sending her into a skid. Ellie caught herself on a handful of maggots.

Adam threw her a worried glance from across the room.

His bare chest glistened with sweat in the light of the torch, which he had jammed into a crack in the stones. His hair was damp as well, mussed and unruly above those piercing blue eyes… eyes that went from dangerous to sparkling with humor in a breath.

And that stubble, which was so scratchy and yet soft at the same time. The way his hands felt when he grabbed hold of her—

“Princess?” Adam cut in. His perfect eyes were lined with concern.

Ellie shook her head to snap herself out of it.

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