“Remind me why this exists?” she hissed.
“It’s a runoff tunnel,” Cedric muttered ahead.
“Please do not tell me I’m crawling through a fucking sewer.”
From directly behind her, Elyria snickered, and Kit fought the urge to kick her leg back.
“It’s not a sewer, Kitty Kat. Bathwater and laundry runoff, right?”
“Right,” agreed Cedric, his voice bouncing down the stone. “It leads up to a servant’s entrance in the lower cellar, if I remember correctly. And if we’re lucky.”
“If we’re lucky.” Kit scrunched her nose. “Yes, I am truly feeling blessed.” A squelch sounded as she shifted her hand forward, and she didn’t ask what she’d touched. She didn’t want to know. “If I catch some sort of cursed underground plague down here, I want it on record that I died for friendship.”
“Noted,” said Elyria, ducking beneath a large stone that was slick with lichen. “I shall ensure your epitaph reads, ‘Here lies Katerina Ravenswing, braver of mold and mildew.’Good?”
“Tenny had better cry at my funeral.” Kit harrumphed into the darkness. “Somehow, I pictured this whole rescue mission very differently.”
“We are rescuing a damsel in distress. Does it get any more classic than this?” Tenebris Nox’s voice was laced with their telltale amusement as it wafted down the tunnel.
Kit exhaled through her nose, which turned out to be a terrible idea due to the inevitable inhale that followed. “Each of you owes me a bath and a hot meal after this.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Elyria said. “Assuming you do not, in fact, die?”
“If I do,” Kit grumbled, “you can rest assured it’s your ass I’ll be haunting first.”
Eventually, the runoff tunnel sloped upward, narrowing one final time before light appeared, and, with the screech of metal as Cedric pushed open a rusty grate, they exited into a cramped chamber.
Elyria shifted so she was no longer standing directly on top of Nox’s feet. “I guess it’s just as well I left my staff at home,” she muttered.
“I’ll take being crammed in here together over that disgusting tunnel we just clawed our way through any day,” Kit said, doing her best to wipe the slime from her hands and knees. She leaned against one wallas Cedric cracked open the door, surreptitiously checking for anyone lingering outside.
No one came.
There was no alarm, no shouts. Just the low flicker of the torches lit on the walls and the distant echo of footsteps above.
Cedric was already moving into the empty hallway, his jaw set. “Family quarters that way,” he said, pointing down the corridor. “Take the stairs around the corner up two floors, then take a right and head to the end of the?—”
“We will find her,” Nox said. “And you?”
Elyria and Cedric exchanged a look. “We go for Malchior,” she said.
“You and I are unable to shadowstep in here, Revenant,” Nox reminded her, their lip curling with irritation. “Should something go wrong...”
Elyria’s wings burst from her back. “It’s a good thing we both have other means of making a quick escape then.”
Kit shook her head, freeing her own wings with a flash of magic.
“Besides,” Elyria added, tossing her braid over her shoulder before folding her wings down, “what could go wrong?”
Kit and Noxcrept through the halls of the Seastone estate, swathed in shadow.
“How is it that you’re able to do this,” Kit whispered through the darkness, her hands gripping either side of Nox’s wrist, “yet you cannot shadowstep us to Tenny?”
“Shh,” said the nocterrian, sweeping their arm back to flatten Kit against the wall. Footsteps sounded, and Kit held her breath as a man strode into view at the end of the corridor, wolven medallion bouncing on his chest. Blessedly, he did not turn. He didn’t even spare a glance down the hallway, just continued forward, disappearing around the corner.
“Let’s keep it quiet,” Nox murmured, pulling Kit into motion once more.
“It’s already too quiet,” she whispered back.
