Page 7 of Bite Bonded Bride

"I say it when I mean it."

She holds my gaze for one more beat. Then she looks away — not out of submission, I think, but because she has decided the conversation is over and she is already thinking about the next problem. I watch her eyes move back to the ceiling. Back to the stress fractures in the stone.

Still mapping.

I am already turning toward Veyrik to close the matter when the first alarm sounds.

Not one. A sequence of district signals, each one activating a second after the last, traveling upward through the underground city from the eastern lower passages like a crack moving through ice. I know that pattern the way I know the sound of my own pulse.

Breach.

Veyrik's head comes up. Around the chamber, the few remaining civilians go very still in the particular way that prey animals go still when listening and calculating.

The second sequence of alarms hits before the first has finished echoing. Followed, distantly, by sound: stone breaking under force. The wet, grinding impact of something large moving through a passage not built for it. And underneath that are civilian voices, rising.

"Eastern perimeter," Veyrik says. Again, like I don't have ears.

"I heard it." I reply in irritation. Veyrik and I are already moving.

The corrupted creatures have been pressing the lower passages for weeks. We have held them. I have held them, personally, in three separate engagements that left my armor cracked and my soldiers exhausted, because the alternative was letting them reach the civilian districts. The rotation I assigned this morning was meant to hold through the sleep cycle.

It has not held.

I am halfway across the chamber when Veyrik's voice cuts after me. "The human⁠—"

"Handle it later." I do not slow down. "Get her somewhere secure and keep her there."

The sounds from the eastern sector are getting louder. Somewhere below us, my people are fighting, and somewhere below that, the mountain is breaking apart in ways I have not yet found a way to stop. The human woman with her inconvenient amber eyes and her infuriating refusal to perform fear are a problem I will return to when the kingdom stops collapsing long enough to permit it.

I clear the throne chamber entrance in full stride and don't look back.

5

CYBELE

The first thing I understand is sound. A pressure wave hits from the eastern passages, then the creatures arrive. The guards break before anyone can form a line or issue an order. The second thing is that what’s coming through the breach is wrong and I don't have the words for it. They move like they once knew how to move and forgot why. Limbs bent at impossible angles, reshaped by an anomaly other than injury. Eyes catch the cavern’s glow and reflect nothing. They aren’t hunting, spreading and different in a worse way.

The guards assigned to hold me last approximately forty-five seconds before the fighting swallows them entirely.

I do not run. Running blind in an unfamiliar underground space is how people die faster. I find the nearest wall and put my back against it while trying to read the geography of what is happening, which direction the pressure is coming from, where the defensive lines are thinnest, and whether there is a passage behind me that is not compromised. This is what my father taught me. When you cannot see the whole tunnel, find your anchor point first. Then look.

I am in the middle of finding mine when a hand closes around my arm. The grip is not gentle. It does not ask.

"Move," Zareth says, shoving me forward, and then we are moving.

He pulls me into a side passage and I have seconds to either trust it or dig my heels in before the main chamber ceiling comes down behind us in one definitive, catastrophic movement. Stone fills the passage like a sentence ending. The dust hits us in a wave and I press my face into my sleeve and cough through it, and when it clears we are alone in a tunnel that is dark and narrow and smells of ancient old stone, cold air, and disuse.

The sounds of battle above us are already muffled. Too much rock between us and everything else. I look at Zareth. He is looking at the tunnel ahead with an expression I cannot read.

"Where are we?" I ask.

"Inside."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one I have at the moment." He starts walking.

I stare at the back of his head for a while before I follow, because the alternative is standing alone in a collapsed tunnel in an underground kingdom I found by accident twelve hours ago, and I have limits.