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I worried my hands together at once.Great Mother have mercy, if my mate should actually be that thin.
What had they done to her?
It didn’t matter—I set myself a firm line, and began to lower. If I dropped into their midst, I’d crush two, and then use the claws of my feet to sever the necks of a third and?—
“I ought to shove your head through there, and make you fit, to go after her, Reg,” a different man complained.
“I’d like to see you try.”
“If she dies, we have nothing to show for this. Nothing!”
“Perhaps more importantly, if she dies—there’s no way he’s going to dig us out.”
I needed to know who they were speaking of. I would kill anyone involved with my mate’s torture. And then I heard an echoing cry that reverberated into my very soul.
The men standing below heard it too. “Fuck!” one of them shouted—and on that we were in agreement.
As much as I wanted to murder all of them, I knew my mate was in danger—I wheeled myself back up my main line and raced across the ceiling to exit through another tunnel.
I tore through the caves, following her scent, my shoulders and back getting nicked by jagged stone, until I reached a smaller cavern. It was full of bioluminescent fungus that illuminated a human woman being herded by a protective lasher with its barbed tail out. It didn’t want to hurt her, it was just protecting its nest, which I could see off to one side, but she was right to be frightened of it—it would sting her without thinking.
She was Sloane Marlow, I was certain, but where was my Arachnaea?
And then a sobering realization flowed through me—there was no Arachnaea.
The scent had been Sloane all along.
My jaw dropped, just as she looked up and realized I was there.
She shrieked again in fear, and bolted, leaping over boththe lasher and its nest, racing blindly down a tunnel. I heard a snap and then another shriek and I rushed after her, pulling my gear off, looking for the translation unit I’d packed up days ago.
I found it as I caught up to her, but it didn’t matter.
She was on the ground, passed out—her ankle had twisted in one of the many holes in the floor here and snapped her leg right above it. Bone hadn’t broken through the skin, but it was bent badly.
I didn’t know why she’d passed out. Perhaps she’d hit her head on her way down, or maybe the pain was too much—or it was because I had scared her.
The thought of that gave me pause as I put the translation device on. “Sloane?”
I’d never heard my voice quake the way it did as when I reached for her, to carefully pick her up, sending a searching hand over her head, making sure her thin human skull-shell was intact.
“Sloane?” I tried again.
The dimly glowing fungi illuminated the fact that her skin was covered in dirt, and her hair was dull. She was much thinner than she’d been in the photos her father had given Monster Security. She was cold, and now one of her legs was broken—because of me.
I wanted to beat my own chest for scaring her—and I wanted to go back and kill every man in the prior cavern—but I had to put aside all of my anger and shame for my actual priority.
Keeping her alive.
This human, that was somehow meant for me.
I set her on the ground again, as gently as I could. I knew the way that human-shells worked—I needed to straighten her leg out as soon as possible.
“I am so sorry, my love,” I said, then held her upper leg as straight as I could, while yanking on her lower leg swiftly with my middle legs, feeling her bones grind as they snapped together. She cried out again softly, but her eyelids didn’t flutter.
I sensed her with every piece of my body, and realized she was closer to death than I was.
I could not have met my mate only to have her die on me.
