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I took a deep breath. Nicole’s admissions were more than smalls scars, and I wanted to make her feel like she wasn’t alone. Who knew how often she’d had that feeling, and I knew it all too well. Opening up wasn’t something I did, and from the little I knew of Nicole, I doubted she did either.
“After that I got placed with Darryl. Why the state gives abusive alcoholics permission to raise children is beyond me, but his history was evident to anyone who had a brain. Clearly my social worker didn’t. I got bruised up a few times, and then he thought he was really hot stuff when he’d bring out the gun and point it around, threatening me. But it’s just how it was…” I heard myself say the words, just how it was. Sometimes I convinced myself it wasn’t that bad.
The truth was Darryl was an abusive asshole and I’d gotten used to it to the point where it angered me but I’d stopped fighting back. I took it. And knowing that made me sick to my stomach. And I was reminded how I never wanted to feel weak again. Not ever.
Nicole’s arm came around my waist and she gave me a squeeze. “We did the best we could. We were kids. And we’ll fight like hell for ourselves now.”
She knew. Nicole knew. And it was at that moment that I felt a true friendship for the first time in my life. Because the royal guards wouldn’t have the last say, not with us.
I felt Nicole’s stuttered step before I heard her frustrated grunt. “What the hell,” she muttered. “I think there are stairs here.”
I stopped walking and put my foot out, feeling the dip. The wall was still there, steady as it had been the whole time.
“Holy shit, how much farther down can this place go?” I asked.
We didn’t move for a second, both of us inching our feet around to get a feel for the depth of the stairs.
“Come on,” I urged. “We’ve got to keep moving.”
We inched onward, slowly now that we were blindly taking a set of stairs farther into an abyss, deeper into the unknown.
This was a terrible idea. I’d had a few of those, but this one was starting to take the cake. Free-falling into a black hole, to what I was still thinking was a crypt, only to find more stairs leading farther and farther downward into an already spooky pit of nothing. And what if we got ourselves into worse trouble?
Nicole was close by, her arm still touching me every few moments, as if she was making sure I was still there. I was glad for it.
A strange noise grew louder the next few steps we took.
“Do you hear that?” I asked. We’d been alone with just our own voices and breathing all this time; any new sound was a strange addition.
It was like running water. But not from a faucet. No, like the gurgling sound a stream makes. Cascading over rocks and pooling somewhere.
“Water?” Nicole asked.
I nodded before remembering she couldn’t see me. “Yeah, water.”
We kept moving, walking and hearing the noise increase. Suddenly, there was a strange shift and the temperature cooled.
I shivered, but not from crypt ghosts this time, from an actual cold spell that came over us.
The damp must of an enclosed space from earlier faded as we moved onward. Now it was like we’d gone outdoors. I could smell rain, mud, a fresher scent than we’d been moving through.
The space around us didn’t feel so claustrophobic. I kept my hand steady on the wall but felt more confident now. We were getting somewhere closer to open air at least. The stale musk of castle dungeons was all but gone now.
“Is this an underground spring?” Nicole asked.
“You’d know if it existed more than I would,” I answered. “It’s definitely a body of water of some kind.”
The ground tremored beneath our feet and we both stopped moving. “What was that?” I whispered.
“How the hell would I know?” Nicole bit back.
We stood there, unmoving for a few seconds.
The notion that we had to whisper at all while we were alone beneath the castle was absurd, but add in the fact that we both kept asking the other questions we clearly didn’t have answers to and it made the whole thing slightly comical. I chuckled.
“What’s so funny?” she hissed.
I snorted. “Nothing.”
Before I could continue, the ground rumbled again, and this time I pulled my good hand away from the wall and grabbed onto Nicole. She already had me by the shoulders.
My heart pounded in my chest so loud, I was shocked its echo wasn’t reverberating off the walls. What’s happening?
“What the fu—?”
Nicole’s sudden cry was cut short by the third rumble. The ground gave way beneath us and we were free-falling, flying in the nothingness that engulfed us.
