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22
"Run!" I screamed, and shoved my mates down the Labyrinth passage, towards the first door that had roared open. Panic carved through my chest until there was no space for air, cyclopes lumbering after us with deep, throaty grunts.
The ground shuddered with their footsteps, and fear turned my bones to jelly. Cronus really wanted to scare us into obeying him—or punish us for daring to consider any other route.
My lungs burned as I sprinted, my gaze jumped from Kai, to Emlyn, to Harvey held in his arms, to Wynvail running with white light pooled in his hand, and then to the doors groaning open all the way down the passage. Cronus wasn't taking any chances; he wanted us to go through the door at the end even if it killed us.
If I hadn’t been so scared, I’d have been furious.
The cyclopes' heavy grunts followed us from all angles, their footsteps shaking the Labyrinth. They must have been nine feet tall at the shortest. No chance would I win a fight against a single one of them, let alone ten, twelve, more. Fuck, where did they keep coming from? And why did Cronus have an army of compelled cyclopes in the first place?
My stomach dropped when three other doors opened, spilling more cyclopes into the tight stone corridor. They were almost upon us now, could almost grab us with their massive hands. Those things were big enough to crush my skull like a grape. The back of my neck tingled, fear and awareness heightening all my senses until I could smell the sweat and earth scent of them—and the blood soaked into my clothes, drying on my skin.
"Faster," I bit out, terror for my mates' lives making the Labyrinth waver in my vision. I was going to black out, fall, and get trampled by the cyclopes. That was a miserable death. I couldn’t stop, had to stay on my feet and keep running.
"Almost there," Emlyn panted, throwing a look behind us. When the blood drained from his face, I knew we were dead.
But Wynvail followed Emlyn's stare. He let out a fierce snarl when he realised the cyclopes were close enough to kill us. My heart skipped when Wynvail reared back his hand and threw the light he'd pooled there, more gathering instantly in his palm. The moment the magic slammed into a one-eyed giant, knocking them back, Wynvail hurled another burst of light at another, and then another. Buying us a few seconds. We couldn’t afford to waste it.
"Keep running!" Kai snapped. "Faster!"
That's what I said,I wanted to quip but I didn't have the energy. Every breath I took was a wheeze, every exhale a groan. I didn't have enough space to use my wings to propel me along, which was just typical. Wait—I'd flown down this passage earlier…
"The corridor's shrinking!" Kai yelped, realising it when I did and grabbing my wrist in a bruising grip. "Run!"
"What do you think we'redoing?"Wynvail snarled, but breathlessly. He threw another flurry of light behind him, knocking back two cyclopes but not harming them. Like he realised they were under the titan's control, too.
But not killing them implied he was a halfway decent person, and that just seemed unrealistic. He probably didn't want to waste the magic it would take to kill them.
My head spun, either at the exercise or because I was having a full-blown panic attack, and my eyes tunnel-visioned on the open doorway at the end of the path. So damn close. Just a little further, and I could collapse.
Kai's snakes surged, almost knocking me down as they raced past me, drawing a deep bellow from a cyclops behind us.
"In,get in!" Emlyn yelled, shoving Kai through the opening into whatever hellish corridor waited beyond it.1
I hurtled through the door next, grabbing Emlyn's arm and tugging him through. But he dug his heels in, gripping Harvey tight, my mate sleeping through the whole flight. Em didn't budge until Wynvail threw two more bursts of light and staggered through the passage.
My heart pulled tight, and my bottom lip wobbled. Fuck, I'd really messed up. Now Em saw the bastard as one of us; Wynvail was under his protection.
The second we all fell through the opening, the heavy stone doors slammed shut. Locking the cyclopes on the other side. But trapping us here.
Wherever here was.
I slumped against the nearest wall, struggling for breath, my whole chest sliced apart by sharp pain as my lungs protested the last ten minutes of my existence. This passage was shorter than the last one, but just as tall, and equally grey and depressing. No killer hippocampi or army of cyclopes, though. Things were looking up.
Wynvail collapsed at my feet, breaths rattling his bare, bloodied chest and his forehead resting against my thighs. Kai wasn't any better; only Em seemed to recover faster than the rest of us. Probably because he was the only one of my mates who bothered to run for endurance training; I doubted that part of him had changed in the past hundred years.
"Get off," I panted, weakly shoving Wynvail with my knee.
He wrapped bronze fingers around my calf, breathing hard. "No."
"If I wasn't—exhausted—" Kai rasped.
"You'd kill me," Wynvail finished, too wrecked for even an eye roll. "Same old threats, Malakai. You're getting boring."
Their bickering was so reminiscent of Kai and Harvey’s arguments, and the familiarity was comforting. Ijustmanaged to catch my fingers before they tried to stroke through Wynvail’s short, messy hair.
We all jumped when Cronus's voice rumbled through the air. I swore colourfully even pain cracked through my head, every part of me already sore and rife with damage. Any more, and my body would start to shut down. Maybe that was what Cronus wanted; to push me to my breaking point.
