CHAPTER NINE
Ash.
Thick clots of serrated barbs that cut, scraping down my throat. Burn my eyes. I’m choking even before I pry my eyelids open.
There is no light in the forest. No fractured fingers leaking through knotted branches. The clearing is a well of encompassing darkness that echoes with the hiss and snap of the fire.
I scramble onto all fours, gaze searching the dense cluster of shifting shadows pushing in all around.
“No...” I whisper.
“Rina.” His voice is a whisper, urgent and pressing, yet thunders through the silence with the ferocity of a bomb. “You need to let me in.”
Shaking, I push to my knees and up onto my feet. My temper coils with the hard wedge of fear lodged in my throat.
“I don’t have time for this right now,” I snap into the void. “My boys are in danger. I need to go back.”
Like a malicuri birthed from darkness, he materializes before me. A monstrous tower of raw, masculine strength bound by shadows. He’s a looming force that bows my neck back as I’m forced to squint up into the tangle of branches overhead for his face.
“You need to let me in,” he says again in a shredded snarl that washes through the clearing. “You’re in danger.”
Hot, gritty air sweeps around me. Stings my eyes until they burn with tears.
“What’s happening?”
In the distance, something shrieks. A high, piercing wail that spears through me.
“You need to say my name, Rina.” Knees bend as he drops to one and still his face is lost in the murky depths of night. “Say it!”
Breathing hard, I shake my head. “I don’t know ... what’s your name?”
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I jolt awake, coughing.
The gritty soot of fire is replaced with the damp chill of an icebox. The dirt beneath me is rough concrete, moist to the touch and sandy. It scratches my palms as I push off my back and try not to inhale the grimy scent of mold and wet. Just wet. Damp, muggy stone and stagnant puddles.
I’m in the middle of a yellow pool of light. The dingy bulb creaks on its chain overhead. Beyond the border, shapes scuttle. Steel hisses against stone.
“Hello?” I whisper stupidly like every idiot in every horror movie.
A low, deliberate scratch of nails, but no response.
Carefully, I push to my feet. My hands dust my backside as I survey the faint outline of shapes beyond my sanctuary.
I think I’m in the basement. How I got here is beyond me, but I need to find my way back upstairs. I need to find Roan, Lukan and Kellen.
The whisper of chains scatters my thoughts. Their clink and clatter dragging across the cement has the hairs at the back of my neck lifting. My heart stutters, even as the tempo increasesto a deafening crescendo. It takes everything in me not to shut my eyes and ignore the slithering thing stalking my tiny circle of protection.
“Rina...”
Instinctively, I flinch at the hollow whisper of my name brushing through the room with iron spikes. I whip around, expecting to face unimaginable horror, but there’s nothing. Just the rolling darkness stretching far into nothingness. Still, the thing just outside the halo of light continues to circle. Toying with me.
From the corner of my eye, I catch the faintest flicker of something thick and scaly sweep in and out of the circle. It happens so fast that I almost think I imagined it. But it happens again on my other side.
I can’t even pretend this is a dream anymore.
