Page 212 of Of Nine So Bold

The Voidborn’s body turned to dust and disappeared.

I blinked. Well. That worked, then.

A groan came from the dying wolf. Except… it wasn’t a wolf any longer, but instead a man lying on the stone floor. His blond hair was matted into thick braids, and blue ink stained his temples and forehead. Sticky and red, his hands grasped his bare midsection, doing little to stem the tide of his blood pulsing away.

Barely focused, his light blue eyes found me. He coughed, struggling to make a sound. “Thank… you,” he rasped, his accent so thick, it nearly obscured the words.

His body sagged back to the ground, the life leaving his eyes.

Huh.

Turning, I took off down the tunnel again. The scent of damp fur, pungent smoke, and anxious sweat hung in the air. The first was likely from the creature behind me and the last one?—

A chunk of wood swung at my head, accompanied by a panicked cry.

I ducked, and the wood splintered against the corner of the tunnel.

“Sorry!” Niko emerged from behind the turn, gripping the piece of wood with embarrassment coloring his cheeks. “I thought you were a— Never mind.”

I straightened again, huffing out an irritated breath. He looked mostly intact, though one cheekbone bore a bloodied scrape that was starting to swell. It didn’t look like a cut from claws. More like he’d crashed into the stone wall or floor, possibly when the gateway spit him out.

Regrouping quickly, Niko dropped the wood and retrieved a torch that was wedged into a sconce on the wall. “Any idea how to get out of here?”

My nose twitched, testing the air again. Grunting, I jerked my fanged jaw toward the tunnel beyond him.

He nodded quickly, and because he was a smart man, he stayed behind me when I set off again.

My claws would protect us both.

Especially since the thought of doing magic in these close confines, surrounded by this climbing rot, seemed like a terrible choice, somehow. These tunnels werewrongin a way that made my skin crawl.

We hurried onward, tracking the tunnel as it curved in an erratic path through the ground. “Something bad happened down here,” Niko murmured as if in an echo of my thoughts.

I grunted in agreement. The earth felt… split. Like two tectonic plates had slammed into each another, causing one tobuckle and be pulled beneath the other. But… not in a physical sense. An energetic one.

It made my head hurt.

Up ahead, a stairway came into view beyond a small archway. The steps were worn down and nearly lost in shadow, but the stone was still stable.

I slowed anyway, sniffing the air.

“What’s wrong?” Niko peered past me. “Oh.”

I glanced back at him.

He met my eyes resolutely. “I’ll guard our backs. You take care of anything coming down at us.”

I didn’t move. Those steps were a bottleneck. I couldn’t smell anything coming, and the asshole gods knew I couldn’t feel another way out of this place. But we’d still be vulnerable.

“We’ve got this,” my eternally hopeful friend assured me.

We’d see.

I strode onward, taking the short, human-sized steps three at a time. Niko jogged after me, the torch clutched in his fist. The firelight played across the walls, casting strange shadows from the blackened rot climbing the stones even here. But I trusted my nose more than my eyes to warn me of threats, and it said we were alone.

Barring this gods-forsaken rot.

Eyeing the vines warily, I kept climbing. Nothing in me wanted to let my fur come anywhere near those things. Up close, they really did look like a fungus. Slightly furry fungus that glistened strangely in the firelight and pulsed like veins in a living being.

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