Page 67 of A Promise of Peridot
The reaper pit was opening, the platforms that had sealed it sliding back into their original slots in the cavern walls. Reptilian screeches joined the earsplitting chorus of thunderous falling rock.
Godsdamn it.This death trap had been a Gods-forsaken, failed waste of fucking time, and now it would claim all of our lives.
“Kane!” Griffin, again.
“I heard you,” I shouted back.
“Listen to me.”Arwen’s calm voice was barely muffled through the stone anymore. I was so close.“We found another way out. And you can’t get through. Not in time. I will never forgive you if you die trying to save me. Do you understand? Never. You get everyone else out. We’re going to be fine.”
There was a fail-safe. There had to be. A way out of the treasure room, for the pirates or Gods or sorcerers or whoever had movedthe goods in there over the many decades. Warring against every instinct, every cell in my body, I pressed my hand to the fissured stone and yelled back, “Fine. Hurry.”
“You, too”was all she said, and then I knew she was moving, and I had to do the same.
I dove for the sliding platform, now only a ledge against the cavern wall beside the pit, a hair wider than the beam along the middle. The pungent smell of rotting human flesh stung my eyes and tongue. The stone was growing narrower, and I sprinted past a single bloodstained fang that reached up to scrape my boot.
Tumbling onto the ground on the other side with a mere second to spare, I watched between heaving breaths as the slab sank fully back into the wall from which it came.
My chest constricted as I beheld the writhing pit of screeching reapers that now separated us. I had left Arwen. And I was going to tear this entire world to pieces if she didn’t make it out. Starting with myself.
I careened back down the same tunnels we had come through, following Mari’s line of painted light, until I reached Griffin and Fedrik at the solid stone wall that had trapped us inside mere hours ago.
Fedrik was on the ground, Griffin slamming arcs of emerald lighte into the wall where Mari’s luster ended.
“It rebuilds itself.”
“Where are they?” Griffin bit out.
“They’ll be fine.”
Fedrik’s face leeched of all color. “Youleft them to die?” He turned to Griffin. “We have to go back.”
“I left them because Arwen begged me to saveyourlife.” Thewords were like ash in my mouth. “She said they found another exit.”
Fedrik panted. “How could you—”
“Enough,” Griffin barked. “Arwen and the witch will survive. They’re strong. I need Kane’s help so we can do the same.”
Drawing every last drop of lighte that I had inside me, pulling from the very marrow of my bones, I drove a wall of black mist like a knife against the stone. Griffin did the same, his translucent, tourmaline lighte funneling out of his palms like blown glass. Layering on mine, filling in gaps where I was ragged, patchy, faltering—
Slowly—agonizinglyslowly—our powers carved and splintered the sediment until a single crack cleaved the stone in two.
I heaved, bracing my hands on my knees. I heard Griffin spit into the dust beneath us.
And still that merciless, uncompromising, ravaging force shook the ground beneath our feet.
“Quick,” I breathed. “Before it reconstructs.”
Griffin helped Fedrik up and grunted as his lighte flowed out of him once more in an incandescent aura, pushing one side of the crack we carved with his shoulder and trying to force it open like a jammed door.
I moved next to him and did the same, my boots grinding into the shuddering floor. The cave wall that had come down of its own accord was silent against my pressed ear, and yet awake... Listening. Breathing. Restless.
The solid rock held firm, and that peculiar feeling fueled me to push harder, andharderstill, until at once it rotated open, enough for us to release our hold and gulp in matching breaths of air.
I could smell the twinges of the rain forest, the slight heat that was slipping in through the tunnel we had split open.
Fedrik limped through on his crushed leg with no further urging, Griffin after him. I slipped out last, allowing myself one final look at the crumbling cavern behind us. But I felt no release of the oily dread that coated my throat.
She would make it out.
