Page 63 of A Promise of Peridot
Niclas was making good progress. He was fast enough not to sway, but slow enough to be deliberate. I wondered if years of balancing on an uneven boat deck had granted him great steadiness. Maybe he would make it to the other side, find his ledger. Maybe even the blade...
And then what? Kane would probably pluck it from his hands and toss him to the reapers himself.
“That’s fifty coin to me,” Griffin muttered. Kane only gruntedhis response. Niclas had nearly made it to the end. The man was clearly disturbed, but I was rooting for him. I thought we all were, standing there watching him place one careful step after another.
Until his left foot landed wrong.
And that was all it took. He tried to course-correct—hands lunging out for support that wasn’t there, flailing through the air like ribbons—before he disappeared into the writhing pit.
I got one look at a reaper in a dim shaft of torchlight as it sailed up to meet him. Sleek, agile body of an enormous snake, flexible and fluid. But that face... like a piranha. Ferocious, serrated teeth—layers of them—and rabid, oily red eyes, sunken deep into a face that hadn’t seen daylight in likely millennia—
Then, the violent gnashing of teeth ripping Niclas into chunks as ebony reptilian skin mingled seamlessly with the pitch-black shadows of the pit. Mari squeezed her eyes shut and glued her hands to her ears against the gory sounds as Fedrik looked away, wincing. Niclas’s death was instant—a savage, instantaneous dismemberment—and I thought it was a mercy that he had felt little pain, but that didn’t stop me from retching onto the cavern floor at the sight.
Kane rubbed a comforting hand down my back but said nothing, no witty barb or gallows humor, and I thanked the Stones for that. I wouldn’t have been able to stomach it.
Before any of us could comment on the horror we had just witnessed, the ground beneath us rumbled once again. My hand slung out to Kane’s and clutched, so tight his fingers would have been pale white had I been able to see them in the darkness.
Would the stalactites above fall like heavy spears?
Would another moving partition crush us into paste?
Two twin slabs of stone jutted out from the walls that borderedeach side of the pit and moved inward toward the bridge Niclas had tried to cross. The rocks scraped and groaned, the shuddering reverberating in my teeth and bones until the slabs met each side of the bridge, sealing the pit completely. What had just been a pond-sized expanse was now flat ground. No more pit, no more reapers, no more Niclas.
“How...?” Fedrik tried, but words seemed to fail him.
I could still hear the faint gnashing and shrieking of the reapers underneath the stone floor. Kane pushed past Mari and Griffin gently and placed a tentative foot onto the fresh ground. My breath hitched in my lungs—but when the stone didn’t give way under his weight, he strolled elegantly across and turned to face us from the other side.
“Come on in, the water’s fine.”
I wheezed out a breath and tried not to think that Niclas had somehow offered a sacrifice necessary to cross the reapers’ threshold. We followed after Kane, heels echoing on the stretch of fresh, new stone, until all five of us stood on the other side and faced the dazzling, glittering reflection in the corridor entrance.
“Shall we?” Kane offered, before taking a step toward the stone arch.
But a sinister feeling sank through me, and without thinking I flung my hand out in front of his chest to stop him.
“No,” I gasped out. “Don’t.”
“What is it?”
“Something isn’t right.” My gaze swept the space. “The passage is a fake. A trap.”
“It’s too obvious,” Griffin added.
“A catchall for anyone who makes it through the reapers,” Fedrik tutted. “Horrific.”
“There!” Mari’s voice bounced off the cavern walls as she dropped to her knees beside a hole in the stone to our left, cobwebbed and tucked out of sight behind a jagged rock. Too large to be a creature’s den, but too small for a grown man. Some kind of tunnel.
“No, witch—”
But Griffin’s warning was too late. Her small frame, illuminated by our now fading torches, disappeared into the tight entrance with ease. My stomach seized at the sight. My worst nightmare come alive.
“Someone needs to go after her,” Griffin said, crouching down. His broad shoulders would never make it through.
“Holy Stones!”Mari’s voice was muffled through the rock.
“What is it?” I called.
Griffin nearly jammed his entire body into the solid stone.
