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“He’s sending a message!” I dropped my invisibility.
There was no point in it now. The guard had delivered his message. A smile reached the corners of his lips. He looked to me with triumph in his eyes. I pointed my crossbow at him and fired because I’d run out of patience.
He hadn’t lied, though. If they weren’t in the basement, then the message he’d kicked into the floor never would have reached them. It would have been muffled by the massive house and lost between the many rooms.
“We need to get moving,” I said, turning to find a door to the basement below.
The rumble of the floor made me pause. I knew who was coming. I didn’t have to see him. Now that Locke knew that I was here, he’d sent the one person that he thought capable of stopping me.
“Are you ready?” My breath rushed out of me, but I knew that Arven had my back.
The ogre was just another man, and all men could fall. He couldn’t touch me if I didn’t want him to. I was faster and smarter. Brute strength could not stop me, not anymore.
The ogre’s jilted laugh bellowed through the room.
Arven howled and lowered his head for a charge, but the ogre set his sights on me. I expected my body to rebel and freeze once more. A pulse of adrenaline hit my veins. I was powerful, and I could not be stopped.
With a smile on my lips, I glanced past the ogre. He’d left the door behind him open, and I knew exactly where it would lead. Locke had kept the ogre close until he knew that I was here. That could only mean the ogre had come from the panic room in the basement.
Body falling into muscle memory, I slapped another bolt in the crossbow. The ogre licked his lips like I would be his next snack. He must have thought that he was so intimidating, but I paid him no mind when I had the massive Golden Beast at my back.
I fired a shot at the ogre. He laughed at me.
“You missed.” He started to amble forward only to come up short.
For several heartbeats, confusion consumed his expression. Then, he looked down and saw that I’d pinned his foot to the floor with my bolt. My poison wouldn’t be enough to freeze someone of his size, but it was enough to buy me some time and give Arven a leg up on the competition.
I gave the ogre a snarky salute and rushed to dive past him. He tried to smack me out of the air, but Arven caught the might ogre’s wrist and shoved it back.
“Good luck!” Arven shouted after me. “And have fun!”
I snorted and leapt onto the stairwell railing so I could ride it down in one sweep.
The basement was dark and gloomy, much like a classic castle dungeon. My dark vision was better than that of most elves because of my Eveningwind blood. There was a reason thateveningwas in our name.
We were night elves, our purple skin tone helping us blend into the dark shadows in the dead of night so that we might perceive the stars uninterrupted by passersby. While my ancestors had sweet intentions with their abilities, I used my improved night vision to scan the room.
I noticed the foot of a guardsman poking out from behind an iron maiden. The man thought he was hidden, but his toe gave him away. Though I wanted to laugh, if there was one guard lying in wait, that meant there would likely be others.
Reaching for my utility belt, I plucked a small round bomb from my pocket. With a flick of my fingers, I lit it and tossed it into the room. It wouldn’t hurt them. Instead, true darkness unfurled and swallowed us all.
I’d made these knowing that my Eveningwind vision would be able to cut through even the darkest of shadows. The other guardsmen shouted to one another in alarm. I almost laughed, hearing their panicked footsteps as they tried to find me in the dark.
Would Locke be this easy to kill? Were all of his traps a flimsy as a few guards hidden behind some décor? I doubted the man was really that stupid. There was something ahead that we hadn’t taken into consideration.
I tried to consider everything he could have gotten his hands on. Locke traded in all sorts of magical items, artifacts, and…beasts.
The smell of murky waters rose and tickled my nose again. Adrenaline shot from my heart to my toes. The kelpie was a hunter and a beast, which meant that the dark wouldn’t do much to dissuade it from its hunt. The creature would have my scent from the last time Locke had sent it after me.
I scanned the magical darkness for the creature but saw nothing. Then I heard the telltaleplop plopof dripping water behind me. I tucked and rolled forward, letting my crossbow sling under my arm as I hit the ground.
Two guardsmen shouted in alarm as I slipped past them and brushed their outstretched arms. The sound alerted the kelpie. I heard the creature toss its head, spraying water in every direction. Its roar was sickening and warped, a sound that shouldn’t have come from any horse’s mouth.
I turned on my heel and shoved the two guardsmen into the kelpie’s path before lurching deeper into the dark of the basement. The men grunted and screamed when the kelpie collided with them. The moment they made contact, they were stuck to the beast.
It wasn’t done hunting, though. The kelpie had my scent and it cared little for the two that it’d already caught. I could hear it thrashing behind me. The two men stuck to the beast were tossed around without care. The beast smashed them against walls, the iron maiden, anything that got in its way.
I closed my eyes against the chorus of breaking bones, but it did little to quell the guilt building inside me. This had to be taken care of quickly. I wasn’t a beast hunter, but beasts were no different than men.
