Page 115 of Dream Reaper

So far so good.

But how long would this uneasy truce last?

Ava led the way down the corridor, leaving Brynja and Finnr to keep an eye on Talos. At least they were armed and stood a chance of keeping him in line. Unlike herself…

The shadow laughed in the recesses of her mind. Sending out the greeting party, are you, little elf?

She ground her teeth together and tried to close off her thoughts. She didn’t want it to know what they were planning. Their only hope was if they could take it by surprise and drive it back, buying them time for Jerrid and Prince Haryk to arrive.

It won’t work. I know what you’re up to…

Her blood chilled as she reached the front entrance and found it secured tightly. So it hadn’t got in through the entrance. Where was it?

She turned to exchange a look with Brynja. The human girl’s expression was fierce, but her eyes were wide. They all knew this final battle was like spitting into the wind.

Ava took a stabilizing breath and continued down the hall, away from the entrance, toward a winding set of stairs that led upward into the keep. The shadow must have found a window that hadn’t been shuttered properly or a crack in the wall somewhere. All night long it had spiraled around the tower, testing their defenses, trying to find a way in.

It had been inevitable that it would finally find a weak spot eventually.

“Where are you, Jerrid?” she mouthed as she came out onto a landing that split in three different directions.

One path went upward, while the other two hallways angled down long corridors. She stood still, listening and searching the shadows for signs of movement. Behind her, Finnr’s heavy breathing filled the hallway.

Welcome to my kingdom, the shadow hissed in her ear, its laughter igniting terror in her belly.

The hallways before them stretched longer, as if giant fingers had caught the end of the corridor and were dragging it farther than it was meant to go. The walls rippled as they tightened and stretched until the hallway seemed to go on infinitely. There was no end in sight.

“How is that possible?” Finnr rasped.

So, he had seen it too. Ava blinked furiously, trying to make the corridor return to its original shape. This shouldn’t be possible. Walls didn’t just move. Hallways didn’t expand. Buildings didn’t change.

And yet this one, impossibly, had.

Talos cursed under his breath and began to retreat away from the unsettling anomaly.

Finnr jolted forward and muttered, “Oh no, you don’t.”

The dark elf stopped edging backward and stood still, glaring down the hallway. Ava uncurled her fingers briefly before tightening them into fists again. Should they wait here for the shadow to come to them? Or should they venture down that unnatural hallway?

“It’s probably setting a trap for us,” Brynja growled, as if reading Ava’s mind and knowing her unspoken dilemma.

“But is the trap meant to lure us forward or keep us frightened and standing here?” Ava whispered back.

All four of them exchanged glances.

“I, for one,” Talos began, his jaw tight, “have no intention of standing here and being taken unaware. If you want me to fight this thing, I say we keep moving.”

“As loath as I am to agree with anything he says,” Finnr said, jabbing a finger toward Talos, “I do admit I’d rather go down fighting.”

“At least we stand a chance that way,” Brynja muttered, although her mouth pulled into a tight frown as she stared down the endless corridor. “We’re sitting ducks if we stay here. I vote we go onward too.”

Ava didn’t disagree with them, and yet…

As her gaze returned to the hallway and the wrongness of what they were looking at, Ava couldn’t shake the feeling that the corridor was somehow alive. She did not want to walk down that passage. She didn’t want to know what waited for them at the end of it—if anything waited for them at all.

What if it just went on forever, trapping them in a journey that never ended? No end in sight and no way back? What if that was the trap?

Where are you, Jerrid?