Page 134 of Thief of Hearts

As did I. After a few moments I corked the waterskin and took the torch from him. “Keep going.”

“Are you sure? We can rest for longer if you need to.”

“I’m doing good. I’ll keep you safe.” I hoped. “We need to get out of this room.”

The box in front of him was so tiny that I wasn’t sure how his tools would even fit. When I said as much, he reassured me that he would get it open.

“And hopefully this is the last one.”

I nodded. If there was a smaller one in there, I wasn’t sure we’d survive the spiders that would emerge.

Because the ones that came out when he began picking the lock were the size of cats. Hairy and menacing and legs everywhere.

“As fast as you can!” I yelled to him as I started killing spiders and kicking others away from us. These ones didn’t seem to care who they attacked and tried to swarm both of us.

They climbed on top of one another in their desperation to get at us. Which made them easier to kill and move away because I could take out the spider on the bottom and the huge tower of them would collapse to the ground.

I heard a noise coming from above me and lifted the torch. Those hairy bastards had climbed the walls and were now dropping down on us from the ceiling. I yelled and stabbed the one closest to my head in the gut while also trying to keep the ones on the ground at bay.

“I got it!” Zain yelled. “I have the key!”

But the spiders didn’t disappear.

If anything, they seemed more desperate to get at us. “Get to the door!” I told him, handing him my sword. I took the accelerant from my belt, tore the cork out, and then put it in my mouth.

It tasted foul, but it was better than being eaten alive by spiders.

I spit the accelerant through the torch and it became a stream of flame. I sprayed it from side to side while Zain worked on getting the door open. I used the torch on the spiders hanging above me, forcing them to fall to the ground.

Taking the rest of the accelerant, I again sprayed down the spiders. It not only caused shooting flames, but drops of it landed on the spiders and caught the beasts on fire. They began to panic and ran into other spiders, catching them on fire as well. They made a horrible high-pitched shrieking noise that I now feared I would hear every time I closed my eyes.

The ones who had avoided the flames still tried to get at me. I sprayed everything until all the accelerant was gone. Then I took out one of my knives to keep killing them.

“It’s open!” Zain shouted, and I turned and ran for the door.

Chapter Forty

As I sprinted for safety, I kicked at spiders and used the torch on them. Zain was busy stabbing spiders who had made it through the open door. Once I ran through, I helped him to push the heavy door shut.

Then I killed everything that had managed to make it into the hallway.

When I was done, I looked back at the door. The spiders were on fire, but they had climbed up and reached for us through the metal bars, shrieking.

“An Epirian did this?” I asked him, and he nodded. “Have I mentioned how much I hate Epirians?”

He started to laugh and I joined him. We stood against the far wall, watching the flaming spiders still trying to get through.

“I’ve never been afraid of spiders before but I’m fairly certain that I am now,” he said.

I nodded. “Me too.”

We stood and watched as the fiery spiders finally succumbed to the flames and fell from the door.

“I really hope there’s an exit on the other end,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen if we have to go back through those rooms.”

What would we do if there wasn’t an exit at the end? I didn’t tell him that when Lia and her sisters had faced these kinds of challenges, the exit had been sealed over and Suri, the one who could manipulate earth and rocks, had created an opening for them. Or that it had taken so much out of her that they couldn’t revive her for a while.

I didn’t think that Invara’s power of seduction would be helpful to me in opening an exit.