Page 155 of Of Nine So Bold

I returned the glare with a wry expression. “It’s true, though.”

His tired look deepened, but he didn’t respond.

Up ahead, Brock’s head turned like he overheard us, though of course the bastard didn’t meet our eyes.

But then, that guy always had been a fucking coward. Nice to know some things hadn’t changed.

We continued deeper into the tunnel, the seven of us sticking close together in case the bastards tried anything. I wouldn’t put it past them, now that they’d had their shiny little bracelets taken off. Dex and the others were equally on edge, though a grin hovered around Casimir’s lips, almost as if—after hours of playing politics with these bastards—he was looking forward to the giants trying to make a move.

Damn, I’d love to see that, at least where a few of these giants were concerned. I mean, shit. Giant blood was one of the best ways to keep a vampire from going insane, and here we were surrounded by a bunch who I wouldn’t mind inviting to leave this life—especially considering they’d spent years doing their best to make sure Lars and I left it first.

So hey, that worked out fine.

“Your expression is damn near macabre, brother,” Lars murmured under his breath.

I didn’t take my attention from Brock and Norbert. “Oh, is it now?”

Lars sighed. “Play nice. For Niko’s sake, okay?”

My eyes cut to him, but I knew he had a point.

Gods,king.Possibly king. Never mind that, honestly, he’d make a great one. He was a dwarf. A dwarf whose treluria was the fucking rightful queen of Aneira, of all things. Everyone and their damned dog would be trying to kill both of them for the rest of their lives, just for that alone.

I didn’t think I’d been this angry in years.

Gwyneira and Niko were the fucking best of us. The idea thattheywould be the ones with the target on their backs… all because giants and humans were total assholes about anything that didn’t fit in their little boxes…

Gods,pure fucking ragedidn’t come close to describing how that made me feel.

The floor beneath us began to descend at a sharper angle, and I scowled, working to keep from slipping on the steep declination.

This was the problem with giant-made tunnels. To them, this slope was nothing. To us, it made it all the more likely we’d fall on our asses.

To say nothing of the way the place was crumbling all around us.

Scowling, I veered around another fallen boulder, eyeing the crevice in the ceiling where it used to live. Whatever had happened to the lake above us, the magic in the earth beneath Syloria was like soggy, swirled mud caked on the stone. The gods only knew what the original purpose had been for all these spells. Now they were just a mess.

But setting aside the trouble-waiting-to-happenthatwas, I could admit the tunnel itself was impressive. Giants were something of architectural geniuses when it came to the manipulation of stone. Hell, Syloria itself proved that, and it was hardly the extent of what they’d made. Throughout Erenelle, there were cities and villages with half their structures built underground in tunnels and caverns, while others were fashioned straight out of the sides of mountains or grown up from the earth itself. We’d managed something similar with our cabin, but we’d also always builtthatto be able to be torn down if needed.

When it came to using stone, giants built shit tolast.

But it wasn’t just the structures themselves that Erenlians had perfected. Generations of giants had created fairly ingenious ways of making the water supply work too.

Big as it was, this tunnel was actually more like a service access. The aqueducts to hold the water for Syloria were inside the walls around us. Initially carved like channels in the stone,they were then sealed away to be completely watertight except for small access ports along the length of this central tunnel.

Except without anyone here to maintain them…

Shivers crept over my skin. The lakebed above us wasn’t the only mystery. The sodden, swirling mud of magic I could feel around us muffled my senses like twenty layers of wet fucking blankets, but the deeper we walked, the more I began to pick up on things.

Thin streams of water still trickled along the bottom of the aqueducts inside the walls, so there was still a water sourcesomewherehere. Admittedly, not much of one, given that those little threads of moisture should be flowing like calm, controlled rivers, their erosive qualities offset by the efforts of the giants in charge of their maintenance. But still, that was a start.

Keeping an eye to the bastards up ahead, I concentrated on pushing my magic farther through the muddy magic. While the larger giants probably had heightened skills with various aspects of the natural world, same as the seven of us, one of the few advantages fate had given me and my friends was that we were actually pretty damn powerful when it came to our various affinities.

But it didn’t mean that those assholes wouldn’t pick up on what I was doing.

None of them turned while I stretched out my power. From the way they were muttering with each other, they didn’t seem to notice what I was doing at all.

Which was just as well, because I definitely didn’t have enough self-control to stop my face from giving away how I choked in horror when the murky truth slowly presented itself past the fucked-up magic.

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