Page 87 of Creatures of Chaos

“I don’t know how much of that you inhaled, but if you slow me down I’ll put you out just as easily,” he says, and then walks into the next room without a backward glance.

Titus looks into the next room with weary eyes, and then turns to Talon and me. “Come on. We’d better keep going. Who knows how many of these little hellscapes we have to get through to get out of this place.”

He slips through to the next room, and rather than following right after, I wait for Talon to near.

“Are you okay?” I ask, trying to catch his eye.

“I’m fine,” he says, but the next step he takes he has to steady himself on the wall.

“Are you two coming?” Kiaro calls from the next room.

“Yeah,” I yell then lower my voice to hiss at Talon. “You’re not fine.”

His eyes are glassy. He shakes his head as if trying to clear his now hazy mind.

“I’ll make it through. I can’t fail this trial,” he says as he grits his teeth. But I easily see the spark of vulnerability and fear he’s trying to hide. He knows he’s in trouble, but he’s not going to stop until he reaches his goal.

“Come on,” I say, pulling him forward. “I’ll get you through the rooms.”

I can’t believe I have to endure this entire trial for nothing. When this is done, Talon is going to owe me another huge favor.

Thirty

We makeit through the next three rooms with varying degrees of difficulty. In one room we have to use light and dark magic to activate a secret compartment in the wall that reveals a riddle we have to solve in order to figure out which of two doors to go through. Thank goodness Titus is good with riddles; the rest of us had no clue how to solve it. For the most part, Talon seems okay after we make it through the first room, but every once in a while he jerks away from something that isn’t there or stares at nothing for too long.

The next room after the light and dark magic room has a giant puzzle in the middle with missing pieces scattered throughout the space. Kiaro and I search for the pieces while Talon and Titus work on solving the puzzle. We must take too long like the game master warned us against doing, because halfway through solving the puzzle the room starts to fill up with freezing water. The water gets all the way up to our hips before we complete the puzzle, which reveals the location of the key we need to get out of the room.

The next room is like an icebox, literally. Clues to figure out a keycode to open the exit door are frozen in the middle ofice blocks. Stryder’s fire magic would have been really handy, but since he’s not with us we use brute force and body heat, which after being drenched in the previous room I don’t have much of, to get to the clues. By the time we pull the clue cards out of the ice and decipher what turns out to be a cryptogram, I’m shivering badly, and the tips of my fingers are a little blue. Titus’s bare chest is tinted blue as well, and it takes Kiaro three tries to punch in the correct code because he’s shaking so badly he keeps hitting the wrong numbers.

When we pour into the next room, it’s filled floor to ceiling with some sort of fog or mist. I wave my hand in front of me to try to clear some of it, but it doesn’t do much.

“It’s been an hour and twenty-three minutes,” Titus announces, which means we only have roughly twenty minutes until sunrise. That’s not a lot of time and who knows how many more rooms we’ll need to make it through before we can escape the asylum.

It’s difficult to see more than a couple feet in front of us, and so we cautiously explore the parameters of the new room. I have a hard time concentrating on much because violent shudders keep racking my body, but I do find a door. It’s flat with no handles and looks like it slides into the wall like a pocket door rather than swings open.

Moving around the mist-filled room is disorienting. I lose sight of the guys more than once. Kiaro calls out that he’s found a pedestal with a mirror on it that swivels and tilts, and soon after Titus announces that he’s found another. I continue to check the walls and find the Chaos emblem painted on one of them. I turn to call out and announce what I’ve discovered, but my legs don’t seem to be working properly and I stumble, face-planting into Talon’s chest.

Talon’s hands quickly clamp down on my arms to steady me.

“You’re a block of ice,” he says. Wrapping his arms behind me, he hauls me closer.

When I look up at him, he stares down at me with a frown.

At each room, I considered just waiting the rest of the trial out, but then I’d catch Kiaro watching Talon closely with a calculated gleam in his eye and I knew Talon would never make it through the next room without me. Talon has been trying to hide it, but his symptoms are getting worse. He’s talked to himself more than once, and his gaze goes in and out of focus. But the effects of the shade ivy spores seem to come and go, and I can tell by looking into his clear gray-blue eyes that he’s having a moment of lucidity.

“You’re not much better. How are you not shivering?” I ask.

“The cold doesn’t bother me much,” he answers as he begins to run his hands up and down my back, trying to warm me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help much. Talon is just as wet and cold as I am, so my shivering just gets worse.

“How about you two stop trying to feel each other up and help us out?” Kiaro says, appearing out of the mist.

“Chill out,” Talon snaps. “I could hear her teeth chattering from the other side of the room. She’s practically hypothermic.”

“So are all of us. Titus is half-naked, and snake shifters aren’t exactly known to like the cold, so I’m not living my best life over here either. She needs to suck it up like the rest of us.”

“Just give her a minute.”

“We don’t have a minute,” Kiaro barks, but then melts back into the fog to keep looking for clues.

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