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Phasing to get through the boulders, Cain, Raven, and I take off after North, following him across the chamber. I can see it now too, in between the boulders that cross my field of vision—a stairway leading down.
The three of us make it across as North leaps down from a boulder, landing safely in the entrance. The moment we step onto the first stair, the boulders disappear.
Panting, I stare at the now-empty chamber. That was why it was cleared of everything—to give the boulders room to move around. “There’s definitely something valuable in here,” I announce.
“No shit,” North mumbles.
I put my arm on his shoulder. As hot as it was to see him leaping over the boulders, showing how strong and agile he is, it still put my heart in my throat. “You okay?”
North nods. He looks down at my hand on his arm, looking surprised that I’m asking. “You?”
“I’m okay.”
“Good,” Cain says, “Because those boulders were just the opening act.”
He’s joking—I can tell by his tone—but my pulse quickens. Because serious or not—I’m pretty sure he’s right.
Nobody just makes one trap and is done with it. You don’t have just one spot where your burglar alarm will go off. You need multiple.
Yeah. That was just the opening act.
CHAPTER15
Raven steps around me so that he’s in front, peering down the stairs. I don’t know much about gargoyles, but he seems to have no problem seeing in the pitch-dark ahead of us. “Goes down for a while.”
Cain steps up right behind Raven, then raises his hand, a fireball appearing between his fingers. He holds it aloft, and now we can all see that the stairs do in fact go down for a while. I can’t see where they even out.
North shifts so that he’s behind me, putting a hand on my shoulder.
“Shall we?” he rumbles.
The men are surrounding me now, I can’t help but notice. They didn’t say anything or even look at each other, but by now I’ve seen the way they are with each other—how comfortable they are, how well they seem to know each other. The way they work as a unit. They don’t need to communicate with each other to act out a plan of surrounding me to keep me safe, they’ll just do it.
“Let’s,” I say, responding to North. If I wasn’t okay with a little danger, I wouldn’t have become a thief.
North squeezes my shoulder reassuringly, and Raven starts to move forward. I follow him and Cain down the steps, North a warm presence at my back.
No axe blades come out of the wall to slice at us, although I do check the walls and the steps every so often to make sure we aren’t going to trigger anything. Whoever created the boulders is a magic user, obviously. They must expect whoever tried to get in here would also be a magic user. That means we have to be prepared for anything.
I’m not sure how deep down the stairs go, but it feels like miles. Cain had said that there were huge tunnels reaching all over underneath this building. Are we going to have to go through a huge maze to find this gem? How deep into the earth are we talking, here?
Just when I think I might start to panic a little, the stairs even out, the walls retreat a little, and we’re in a hallway. It’s not quite big enough for two of us to stand next to each other, but I can breathe a little easier.
“Watch out for pressure plates,” I warn Raven, since he’s at the front.
Pressure plates are usually used in safes. If you lift an item off of the plate, it’ll trigger an alarm unless you put in the right code first. I know of a couple owners who forgot they had pressure plates and activated them, sending security teams to their apartments for no reason.
Raven nods in acknowledgement, and we head down the hallway, moving slowly as Raven and I keep checking to make sure we’re not about to activate any booby traps or anything.
We haven’t hit any trip wires. Iknowwe haven’t. I would feel it—but there’s absolutely no warning before I hear something whistling through the air. I don’t know what it is, I just know that it’s bad, and guessing by the boulders, it’s headed for us.
I try phasing out, and I can’t. I’m stuck. It feels like I’m trying to clench muscles I don’t even have, and I grit my teeth. “I can’t phase!”
“Neither can I,” Cain admits, sounding frustrated.
“Spears!” Raven yells. I can just barely see over his shoulder, hurtling toward us, what look like about a dozen spears.
North grabs me, shoving me behind him as if he’ll shield me with his body no matter what the cost—and then Raven transforms. He grows bigger, his skin turns gray and solidifies, his tattoos vanish into his skin, he becomes monstrous…
