Page 88 of Unleashed

Aduun caught her, banding his arms around her middle and yanking her back before she could fall through the hole.

“Vortok!” Nina fought Aduun’s hold, panic and fear rising like bile in her throat. She threw herself forward, reaching for Vortok, her desperation to save him overpowering logic and reason, outweighing her fear.

Aduun grunted and staggered, his hold on her slipping slightly. It wasn’t enough for her to get away, but it was enough for her fingers to scrape over the solid stone floor.

The hole was gone.

“No!” she rasped, frantically sweeping her hands over the stone. “Balir, where is it?”

“It’s…gone, Nina. It closed,” Balir replied, his voice wavering.

Aduun drew her back against his body; this time, her struggles meant nothing. “We will find him, Nina.”

“The ground swallowed him,” she cried, throat tight. “What if…what if it…”

She couldn’t allow herself to imagine the ground closing around him, crushing him,killinghim.

“Come, Nina,” Aduun said gently. She felt the pain in his heart, knew he was barely holding himself together as he took a step backward, pulling her along with him. “We need to keep—”

The ground beneath them disappeared. Aduun’s hold on her tightened as they were suddenly falling, plunged into even deeper darkness. Nina’s terror stole the air from her lungs; she couldn’t even scream.

Balir’s shrieking roar sounded from somewhere above, echoing to envelop them completely as they fell down, down, into nothingness. His call was abruptly cut off. She had no idea if he’d fallen, too, or if the hole had simply closed above them.

Their direction altered suddenly; instead of falling, they were now hurtling through the darkness sideways, though they’d hit no physical object to redirect their momentum. Nina clung to Aduun and struggled to breathe. Air rushed past, whipping her hair back, and though she had no visible means of judgment, itfeltlike their speed was increasing. She clenched her teeth. They were going to hit a wall, were going to crash with such force that every bone in their bodies would shatter, because Kelsharn would have found it amusing to have them come all this way, surviving so much, only to be splattered like bugs.

Their speed faltered abruptly, manipulated by some unseen force. They fell again, but this time solid ground met them. They tumbled, Aduun’s muscles tense as he fought to shield her from as much harm as he could, and finally came to a full stop. Nina squeezed her eyes shut, her body aching and bruised from the fall. She panted to catch her breath, wondering how they were alive, almost unable to believe they’d survived. She tightened her grip on Aduun.

“Are you two all right?”

Her heart skipped a beat; that low, rumbling voice belonged to Vortok. She opened her eyes and lifted her head. To her surprise, Vortok was standing over her, every bit as large and powerful as ever.

And she could see him.

She disentangled herself from Aduun and leapt at Vortok. He caught her, his strong arms drawing her into a mutual embrace; she desperately needed to feel him, toknowhe was here, that he was solid and alive.

“I thought I’d lostyouthis time,” she whispered into his mane.

“Hard to lose someone as big as me,” he replied, holding her tight. Despite his humor, his voice cracked, revealing an underlying vulnerability he’d rarely displayed.

A pained grunt and the sound of a body tumbling over the floor drew her attention to the side. Balir spread his claws and brought himself to a stop. For a moment, he lay with limbs splayed out, and then he slowly pushed himself onto hands and knees.

“That was unpleasant,” he muttered.

Aduun helped Balir to his feet. Nina released Vortok, and he guided her to stand beside him. The others joined them, and all four pressed close to one another.

“What is this place?” Vortok asked.

Though their bodies were illuminated by an unseen source, the space around them was black; the only indication of a floor was the feel of it beneath Nina’s feet. This was familiar; she’d seen this in her dreams each night. This was the black place from which the voices always seemed to call her. She shuddered.

Lights came into view, hundreds,thousands, so faint at first that Nina wondered at first if they were figments of her imagination, a desperate attempt by her brain to reconcile what it was experiencing here. But as they brightened, she understood.

They were stars. Countless stars of varying brightness and hue, hanging in the blackness all around. But it wasn’t blackness anymore — swathes of deep blue and purple, clouds of subtle color, filled in the spaces between and within the thicker star clusters.Galaxies. That was Quinn’s word for them. Nina had never quite been able to picture what Quinn meant by it, but she knew now.

She looked down, and a sudden wave of dizziness struck her. She gripped Vortok’s arm and closed her eyes.

There were stars beneath them, too. Instead of a floor, space stretched on into infinity under their feet, surrounding them completely, giving her a disorienting, nauseating sense of being lost in the night sky.

“This is…” Aduun’s voice trailed off with a mixture of wonder and fear.

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