Page 87 of Unleashed

They turned around and went back, their pace a little slower than it had been on the first trip. Vortok found himself often stepping in his own hoofprints. The more he thought about that, the more it felt like they’d wasted their time, like they’d done exactly what Kelsharn would’ve wanted them to do. What if there were some unspoken time restraint on this? What if their people were subjected to more and more suffering the longer Aduun, Balir, and Vortok took to find them?

Vortok stared at the tracks as they walked. When Balir stopped abruptly, Vortok bumped into him from behind, nearly knocking the smaller valo over.

“What is wro—” Vortok began, but his words died as he looked up and to the left.

The sky had darkened with the approaching sunset, and it cast an orange glow on everything through the clouds. There was a large opening in the side of the cliff before them. There’d been no attempt to make this opening look natural. Quite the opposite — a carved stone roof extended from a massive recess in the cliffside, supported by six tall columns that were shaped to look like Vortok’s people. The statues supported the roof on their backs, their bodies hunched as though the weight would break them, their features warped in sorrow and agony. Light stones embedded in the bases of the statues cast soft light and hard shadows up at the stone carvings, enhancing the sense of suffering. The light stones ended before reaching the rectangular opening, which led into total darkness.

At the front of the overhead slab, a huge, familiar shape was mounted, looming above everything else — Kelsharn’s horned mask.

“That… How?” Nina frowned, brows drawn low. “We felt the rocks, and Balir didn’t detect any entryways.”

“We…we just walked farther than we thought,” Vortok said, suffused by a sense of numbness. “We just overshot our starting point.”

“Vortok…” Something in Aduun’s quiet tone demanded attention.

Vortok followed Aduun’s troubled gaze to the ground just in front of them, where a large branch jutted up from the mud. The branch he’d placed as a marker.

His thoughts faltered, and for several moments, only one word remained in his mind, echoing between his ears in his own voice and Nina’s —how?

“More games,” Balir growled. “There must be certain conditions that dictate when this entry is revealed.”

“Bahmet has many hidden rooms and doorways,” Nina said. “When you activate the mechanisms, they open, and they always fit in so perfectly that you forget they were practically invisible a moment before. But…we’ve never found anything likethis.”

“So what triggered this? What prompted it to open?” Aduun asked.

“It could be…where we walked, the time of day, or…anything,” Nina replied with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter. We should go in before it’s gone again. This,” she waved toward the statues, “could be it.”

Aduun drew in a deep breath. “All right. Balir, you take the lead. There doesn’t appear to be any light inside. We will have to rely on you for guidance again.”

Balir hesitated for a moment before he stepped forward. Vortok wondered if the same sense of dread had overcome him, as well. It slithered through Vortok’s gut, cold, oily, and heavy. He was not proud of it, but he could not shake it.

He barely suppressed the shiver threatening to course up his back. Through all these struggles, through all these trials, they’d been moving in the direction Kelsharn wanted them to go. When he stopped to think about it, that was a disturbing notion.

But Vortok would not allow that to stop him. He would protect Nina and his companions, would find his people, and would reclaim his life.

Balir started forward. Aduun followed a few steps behind, and Nina after him. Vortok didn’t allow himself any hesitation; he walked with his head high and plunged into the darkness behind his companions.

Chapter Nineteen

Nina pressed deeper into the dark passage, clutching Aduun’s tail in her hands for guidance. If she held him too tightly, he made no complaint. Vortok kept a hand on her shoulder as he followed behind her. Despite being in physical contact with her mates, despite sensing the pulses of their minds nearby, her lack of sight made her uneasy.

This entire place made her uneasy.

The light behind them had disappeared shortly after they’d passed through the opening, punctuated by the boom of an immense stone barrier falling into place, and now there was nowhere to go but forward — wherever that would lead them.

Come, Nina, the voices beckoned and begged, louder and stronger than ever.Help us, before it’s too late. Free us, Nina.

The voices were growing increasingly difficult to block. She shouldn’t have wanted to; these were her mate’s people, hertribe, and yet a sliver of fear raced down her spine every time they connected with her. They felt…wrong.

“How long is this passage?” Aduun whispered.

The entryway had been twice as tall as Vortok, wide enough for all four of them to walk through side-by-side, but they’d maintained their single file formation. She sensed the tunnel around them hadn’t become any smaller as they walked, but the walls seemed too close all the same, the darkness too cloying.

“I cannot tell,” Balir replied from the front. His throat clicks echoed softly off the stone walls, lending an eerie quality to their sound. “Wherever it ends is too far away for me to sense.”

“Can you detect any—” Vortok’s words were suddenly cut off, and his hand abruptly left her shoulder. He yelled, the sound echoing and distant, diminishing with each second.

“Vortok!” Nina cried, turning and reaching out blindly. She tilted, falling. What should have been the ground that Vortok had been standing on was…gone.Hewas gone.

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