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Cooper twisted the guard’s head almost clean off, snapping his spine with a loud pop. He tossed him down, the body twisted like a pretzel.
“Someone’s a little cranky.” I nodded at the dead man, pulling Sprig out of my pocket.
“He shot me,” Cooper snarled, his long teeth making him lisp over his words, his features slipping back to normal, his claws retracting. He patted the bleeding wound in his shoulder, already starting to heal. “Fucker.”
In the distance, yells permeated the darkness, coming from the top of the hill, alerted to the commotion here.
“Fuck.” I shoved Sprig toward the lock on the doors. “You’ve got to hurry.”
“You can’t rush the magic hands of a Monkey God King,” Sprig huffed, stretching his fingers like he was warming up.
“Want to bet?” I snapped, my shoulders rising with each tick of the clock, ready to see Killian’s soldiers invade this area at any moment.
Sprig’s forehead creased, his fingers digging into the lock.
More ruckus came from the palace, tying my muscles into knots.
“Hurry the fuck up, gopher.”
“Keep your sword sheathed, pussy-raider.” Sprig’s face twisted up. “I almost… got… it.”
Tick. Tick.The sound of time clicked loudly in my ear.
“I hear horses coming,” Katrina hissed at us.
“Sprig,” Cooper growled in warning, his feet bouncing, his eyes tainting red again. “Open it now!”
“This takes skill and stamina, murder-cat. Somethingneitherof you would understand.”
My fingers itched to strangle him, my jaw locking down until it popped.
Finally, the chains fell away from the lock, clanking loudly to the ground.
“Happy now?”
“Ecstatic.” I shoved him in my pocket and ripped open the gate. The glass entrance, which used to be behind the gate, was long gone. “Come on.” I waved everyone in as the sound of horses could be heard along the paved road.
Slipping inside the pitch-black space built inside the mountain, we moved deeper into the cavern. Pulling out my torch, I took in the rough arched ceilings and empty rooms. Rooms that housed religious prayer and sacrifice long before any human religion or history book, when fae ruled Earth.
The place was small, directing us to a connecting tunnel off the side of the main room. The passages were as ancient as the monastery but had firebulbs flicking every twenty feet or so, lighting the way as we zigzagged deeper into Gellért Hill. Sweat dripped down my back, and I tried to rush us through. If Killian’s men had found their dead comrades and saw where we went, they would cut us off at the top.
At the end of a steady incline, we finally came up to a leveled area, the floor recently cemented. The base for stairs had been set in to dry, but the actual stairs were missing, leaving our exit out of reach.
“Fuck!” Cooper yelled, staring up at a door at least two stories above our heads. “What the hell do we do now? There is no way we can get up there.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Katrina travel to the wall, her hand moving over the stone.
“What?” I followed her.
“That is freshly poured.” She nodded at the cement. “And there are no stairs to get in or out.”
“Yeah, so?”
“That means they had to get heavy cement and builders in here.” She moved to another section of the wall, the dim lights making it hard to see anything. “There’s got to be a door. Somewhere they could get all the material and people in this room, right?”
“Fuck.” Cooper nodded, realizing Kat understood something neither of us probably would have.
My girl was smart, sexy, funny, and badass.
