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I ran to her.
But I never made it.
Something pinched my neck. I stumbled forward, my vision darkened, my limbs grew heavy.
And down I went.
* * *
A poundingpain shook my skull and I woke up with a groan.
It all returned to me in a second—Raika and I went down in the flower meadow—and I sat up with a start.
Where was Raika?
I glanced around. The first thing that registered was the handful of naked lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling, and the three narrow windows with wooden bars cut through the top of the opposite wall—it was dark outside.
I was in some sort of wooden cell, clearly not made for someone as big as me, in a room with at least five cells like this one. One of the prison walls was the rocky side of the mountain. So we were probably in a bigger cavern inside the mountain, or we were at its side. That must have been the chimney smoke I had seen earlier.
Raika rested on the rough ground of the cell next to mine. I scooted closer to her and reached through the wooden bars. “Raika?” I touched her arm.
She groaned and her eyes fluttered open. Then she promptly pressed them closed again. “Ow, my head.”
“Yeah, I know. Whatever they gave us to knock us out has lingering effects.”
Raika pushed up until she was sitting in the center of her cell. She looked around as I had done, taking everything in. “Who are they?”
I shrugged. I hadn’t seen anyone before blacking out, and so far I couldn’t tell where we were. It would be easy to let panic call the shots now, but I wasn’t going to give in. I had escaped from worse situations, and I would make sure Raika and I got out of this one too.
I reached for my phone, but of course, it wasn’t on me. I looked for it and found our bags across the room, in another empty cell. Shit, calling Ariella or Evelyn and Ash was out of question.
I grabbed the thick wooden posts and gave them a nice tug. “I think I could break these.”
“But we don’t know what we’re up against. What if you break these down and once we run out there, we face a hundred minotaurs or something?” I stared at her and chuckled. She crossed her arms. “What’s so funny?”
“You read a lot and it shows.”
She bit down on her cheek again. “I don’t remember reading, but I know I love books.”
“You have probably read thousands of books,” I told her. “Each time I saw you when we were growing up, and it was almost every day, you had a different book in your hands.”
She looked down, the knot returning to her forehead. She had run from me after looking at the pictures on my phone, she had almost cried, and I desperately wanted to know what she had felt, if she had remembered anything. But I could see how bringing up the past was bothering her.
I would dial it down a little for her, but I wouldn’t give up. At some point, a gesture or my words had to break through the spell Paimon and Dot had placed in her mind, and she would remember everything.
“I still think we should wait to see what we’re up against,” she said, her voice low. ”Then we can make a better escape plan.”
I nodded. “Agreed.”
It didn’t take long for us to find out who had captured us. The prison door opened and three creatures walked in—they were short and the tallest of them probably didn’t come up to the middle of my chest. They had pale-green skin, huge, pointed ears, flimsy dark hair, and scrunched, ugly faces.
Goblins.
I had heard of them before, but I had never seen them.
Dressed in crude leather outfits and with rough axes and maces hanging from their belts, the three goblins halted before our cells.
“What were ye doin' with our flowers?” the tallest one asked.
