The largest of the troll warriors, the one who had knocked at their door earlier, slowly turned his enormous head and looked back at them.His gaze didn’t lock on Nick.
It locked on her.
On the curve under her cloak.
And in a voice that rumbled through the corridor like the mountain itself was speaking through him, he said one word.
“Hurry.”
CHAPTER15
"Ancient creatures always think keeping secrets makes them wise.Most of the time it just makes everyone else homicidal."~Kara
The troll warriordid not elaborate, which, honestly, felt rude considering the whole ominous mountain vibration situation currently unfolding beneath Kara’s feet.
Hurryapparently covered a lot of conversational ground in troll culture.
Nick tightened his arm around her waist as the warrior pivoted on one massive heel and started down the corridor at a pace that bordered on insulting for anyone under eight feet tall.Kara gathered the front of the heavy cloak in one fist before she tripped over it for the third time in as many days, her boots scraping unevenly against the stone as the floor sloped downward beneath them.The mineral veins overhead pulsed in time with their footsteps, silver-blue light rippling along the curve of the ceiling like the corridor itself was breathing.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw that Rachel and Gavril fell into step a few paces behind.Their voices, normally a low, easy thread woven somewhere in the background of Kara’s awareness, had gone quiet.She could hear the soft scuff of Rachel’s boots and the heavier tread of Gavril’s, the occasional brush of armor against fabric where his hand stayed fixed at the small of his mate’s back.Farther behind them, Zara walked beside Wadim, her fingers wrapped white-knuckled around his forearm.
Aphid drifted between all of them like a bird that couldn’t pick a branch, sharp eyes darting from the trembling floor to the glowing walls to the warriors clearing the corridor ahead.
The trolls moved deliberately aside the moment Kara and Nick approached.
Heads lowered.Weapons angled away from Kara’s path.Massive bodies stepped back against the cavern walls in perfect, unspoken sequence, as though instinct rather than command had pulled them aside.
Kara’s discomfort climbed another notch.
“Okay,” she muttered as they passed between two warriors with axes that hummed faintly under the silver light.“I officially hate being looked at like I’m either royalty or a natural disaster.”
Nick leaned down without breaking stride, his mouth brushing briefly against her temple.“You’d make a terrifying queen.”
“That is not comforting.”
“You’re armed with sarcasm and unresolved trauma.Entire kingdoms would fall.”
A laugh slipped out of her before she could stop it, quick and breathy and slightly hysterical around the edges.
The mountain pulsed again beneath them.
The sound rolled through the corridor like a giant heartbeat muffled beneath layers of stone, deep enough that she felt it in her teeth and in the hollow space behind her sternum.Dust drifted from the ceiling in thin gray curtains, settling on the shoulders of the warriors flanking the walls.Two of them exchanged a look Kara didn’t like at all.
Behind her, Wadim swore softly, the words unmistakably profane even though Kara did not speak Romanian.She glanced back again and saw Zara’s grip on his arm visibly tightened.Rachel had gone pale, her healer’s instincts no doubt screaming at her in all the different languages she spoke that something deep beneath the mountain was very, very wrong.Gavril’s free hand drifted toward the weapon strapped across his back, his stance shifting half a step closer to his mate without ever fully turning his head.
Yeah, something was seriously not okay.
The corridor widened ahead, then opened all at once into the massive chamber they’d entered earlier, and Kara nearly stopped walking on sheer principle.
The atmosphere had shifted completely.
Warriors lined every bridge and stone walkway threading across the chamber, shoulders braced, weapons drawn or close to it.The blue mineral veins running through the walls glowed brighter than before, their light reflecting off armor and axe-blades in fractured ribbons that slid across the cavern in restless, shifting patterns.Low voices rumbled through the chamber in the troll language, sharp and clipped now, the sound of people working very hard not to panic.
At the center of it all, the black corruption spreading through the stone had grown.
Kara stopped walking.“Okay, either they have a serious mold problem, or it’s worse.I vote mold.”
The dark veins stretched several feet farther across the chamber floor, branching outward through the glowing mineral lines like rot moving through living tissue.And it wasn’t merely black.
