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“How deep?” Emma asked. “How soon can we get out? I need to rejoin my pack.”
“I can’t tell, but we need to get moving for now. Every nine hundred meters, there’s a junction that has some information, and should be able to get us a level above, or point us in the right direction. So we just need to head toward one.”
“Sure,” she replied, giving him a once-over. Hunt paused, wondering if she was sizing him up, sexually. He smirked, and she turned away, gesturing to him. “Lead the way.”
Hunt turned left and began walking. It didn’t matter which way he went, the tunnels ran underneath all of Orin City, most of them built almost a century ago. There were newer ones, which were used for sewage and electricity and gas, but from the looks of things they were deep in the abandoned tunnels from quite a while ago. There was no full map of the thing, but Hunt had been there long enough to know how it worked.
“So what’s the deal with Garret?” Hunt asked as they walked through the tunnel.
The lights overhead were spaced out, giving short windows of illumination before long spaces of pitch-darkness. The floor underneath their boots was nothing but plain dirt. There was an old track running through the center of the tunnel, most likely for shuttling small carts of supplies through the tunnels when they were first dug.
“Bad guy, trying to do bad things. Have to stop him,” Emma replied plainly.
Hunt grunted. She walked behind him, because she still didn’t trust him. She was right to do so. With a single slice fromhis blade, he could kill her. She wanted to see it coming, she wanted to be ready. If their roles were reversed, he would do the same.
“Yeah, but he knows your name. Seems personal,” Hunt pressed on as they walked into a light.
Dust mites floated around in an invisible wind, bouncing off of Emma’s hair as she walked. Once again, Hunt was smacked by just how good-looking she was. He gritted his teeth, hating himself for even thinking that. She was a Werewolf, everything he had been taught to hate. The same thing that had taken his family away, and turned him into the killing machine that he was.
“It’s not your business,” Emma replied as they continued walking. “Wait, do you have a phone?”
“What happened, did they take yours?” Hunt chuckled.
“Yeah, when I got knocked out. I need your phone to reach out to my pack, to let them know I’ve found you. If I can bring them here, we can take on Garret here and stop him!” Emma exclaimed. “God, why didn’t I think of this sooner?”
Hunt shook his head. “Sorry to burst your bubble, love, there’s no cell service down here. You need to get to the surface before you’ll get anything. Also, I don’t use a phone.”
“Well, that’s just…” Emma grunted in frustration, picking up the pace as she walked.
“If I’m going to help you, I’ll need to understand why Garret has a hard-on for killing you,” Hunt repeated.
“You’re helping me get out of here. We can’t take him on, not on our own. He’s too powerful, so you don’t need to know squat,” Emma replied. “I spared your life because I need someone who’s going to get me out of here. So do that.”
Hunt watched her face as she spoke. She paused midsentence and took another look at him before she continued. A small part of him wondered if that was really the only reason she had spared his life. In the small closet where they had hid from Garret and Conan, Hunt had felt something. He wasn’t sure what it was, but there was something.
He shook his head, forcing the thought out. He had to be losing his mind if he was considering being with a Werewolf. “What’s that?”
Emma looked ahead. Shifting her eyes, she shot through the darkness and saw the thing that Hunt had spotted. It was a large pile of rubble. “Rocks, looks like a part of this system caved in. The path is blocked.”
“No, something’s wrong,” Hunt replied, picking up the pace as he ran toward the rubble. Even if there was a cave-in, it couldn’t have happened before the junction. They had been walking for a while, they certainly should have gotten to a door long before the rubble.
“What do you mean?” Emma asked, easily keeping up with his sprint. “What is it?”
“The junction, it should be here. Even if this had caved in, we’ve done over a kilometer, we should have seen it by now.”
Emma raised an eyebrow. “What if we went the wrong way? Maybe it’s back the way we came?”
Hunt paused for a moment, trying to think. He recalled the portal that had brought them here. He had been trying to get Garret as far away from them as possible. But then his attack had supercharged the portal and burned out the talisman. “Oh, for fuck sakes!”
“What is it?” Emma yelled.
“Your Garret friend sent us to the deepest chambers of the tunnels. We’re at least six miles underground, probably the oldest chamber ever built.”
Chapter 5 - Emma
“So what now?” Emma asked, confused. She was stuck in the heart of a massive labyrinth, with no knowledge of where to go or what to do. Her best guide out of the place was a man who had spent his entire life hunting people like her. Emma had hit the literal rock bottom.
“I need to think,” Hunt said, pacing back and forth.
