“I’ve got the little knife, and some bobby pins in my pocket. Somewhere,” Chloe said.
“I’ll take that as a no,” I said. “We can’t make nightfire to see. And I bet we can’t get out of the cave now that we’ve gone in.”
“No,” Jude said. “I already checked.”
“So we’ve got to go forward,” I said.
Part of me had expected something like this. Faeries loved their games, and they didn’t like you to have advantages. It was more fun for them if you lost.
“I don’t want to lose anyone in the dark,” I said. “So everyone chain up. I’ll go in front, and Nathaniel in the back since we’re the only ones with weapons.”
“I will go in front,” Nathaniel said.
“Don’t try to be a man,” I said. “I can swing a sword just as easily as you can.”
“I’d prefer if Nathaniel went in front, too,” Beezle said. “I don’t want to be the first in line when some slavering monster appears out of the darkness.”
“Then go sit on Samiel’s shoulder,” I said. “Because I’m going first.”
“I would, if I could find Samiel,” Beezle said.
There was no way in hell I was letting anyone else take the fall. That had happened twice now. First Gabriel had taken the sword that was probably meant for me. And then J.B. had taken Titania’s abuse. No one was standing in front of me anymore, no matter how much it hurt their masculine pride.
“Madeline,” Nathaniel began.
“No,” I said. “You will trust me.”
“There’s no reason for…”
“There’s every reason,” I said, and my tone said that we were done discussing the matter.
I groped in the darkness for the hand of the person nearest me, and Jude was there.
“I’m right next to you, Agent,” he said to Chloe.
There was a rustling as everyone formed in a line. I drew my sword carefully and found that the darkness was not absolute. There was a very faint silver gleam as the blade was revealed.
“It would be helpful if you would light up like you did in the Maze,” I said to the sword.
Nothing. Not even an answering wiggle from the snake tattoo on my palm.
“Who are you talking to?” Jude asked.
“My sword,” I said.
“Don’t ask,” Beezle said. “You’ll just get an answer you don’t want to hear.”
I slid forward as quietly as I could, my hand slick with sweat in Jude’s grip. The others followed.
There is nothing quite like moving in the dark. Your eye creates shadows and movement where there is none. Your mind fills in the black space with nightmares. And all around you, the darkness is like a living thing, pressing on you, making you fear, making you doubt.
I’d spent more than my fair share of time in darkness lately. Maybe one day I’d go to the Caribbean and lie in the sun until all of the dark was burned away.
I already knew the answer to that. The darkness would be with me forever, and no amount of sunshine would ever light those shadowed places again. That was Lucifer’s gift to me—the power of the stars and the universe, cloaked in the black emptiness of space.
We had been walking for some time without incident when I heard Chloe. Her breath had been coming faster and louder gradually, and now she sounded like she was hyperventilating. Samiel must have tried to comfort her because she said, “Not helping. Not helping at all.”
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“I can’t breathe,” she said, sounding strained. “I can’t get enough air in here.”
“You can,” I said, trying to cut through her panic by being firm. “There’s plenty of air.”
“There’s not,” she moaned. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!”
“She’s having a panic attack,” J.B. said, and there was the sound of a struggle.
Jude let go of my hand.
“Hey, don’t let go,” I said.
“I have to get out of here, I have to get out, I have to,” Chloe said.
“Hold her still!” J.B. said.
Sheathing my sword so I wouldn’t accidentally stab anyone in the dark, I turned on the spot and reached out in front of me, trying to find the others by sound.
“Get ahold of yourself, girl,” Jude growled.
Jude, J.B., Nathaniel, Samiel and Chloe were nothing but shadows moving in the dark, formless, indistinct. My hand touched someone’s shoulder, but before I could figure out whose it was, I was decked in the face by Chloe’s flailing arms. I staggered backward, hearing J.B. grunt as Chloe hit him, too.
Chloe seemed to lose more control as the moments passed. Her words ceased to have meaning and instead turned into a low keening noise. None of the men was able to get hold of her. A second later, she bolted.
I felt and heard her go by rather than saw. Her boots crunched in the dirt of the cave floor, and her moan trailed behind her as she ran.
“Chloe!” I shouted, and scrambled after her.
“Don’t go haring off after her, idiot!” Beezle said.
Samiel shot past me, nothing more than a sense of a body moving in space. I knew it was him because he didn’t call her name. I ran behind both of them, deeper into the black.
“Maddy, wait!” J.B. cried.
I should have waited. That was the whole point of the chain, so that we would not lose one another in the darkness. But all I could think was that Chloe was panicking, and Samiel couldn’t call us if he needed help.
Then Chloe screamed, and my blood ran cold.
“Chloe!” I called, running harder. Beezle dug his claws into my shoulder so he wouldn’t fall off.
She screamed again, and it sounded farther away—much farther than she should have been able to run.
“It sounds like something’s carrying her away,” Beezle said.
“I know,” I said.
The rest of the guys were running behind me and soon caught up. We were sprinting together like a pack, me in the center, J.B. and Nathaniel on each side, and Jude behind. The cave tilted downward, and there was a faint illumination ahead.
“Chloe! Samiel!” I called.
“Samiel can’t answer you,” Beezle said.
“I’m hoping he’ll come back to us,” I said.
“He won’t come back if his woman is in danger,” Jude said.
“What’s that ahead?” J.B. asked. “I can see some kind of halo.”
“The walls of the cave are lit,” Nathaniel said.
The cave was gradually getting brighter, the walls shot through with twinkling veins of luminescence. It was a tremendous relief to be out of the suffocating dark.
It was less of a relief when we came to the place where the cave was split.
“Great,” I said, looking at the two identical paths. “How are we supposed to know which way they went?”
Jude sniffed the air. His nose wasn’t quite as good when he was in human form, but it was still better than an ordinary person’s.
“Samiel went this way,” he said, pointing toward the right-hand cave. He then pointed to the other tunnel. “Chloe and some kind of reptile-mammalian thing went that way.”
“Reptile-mammalian thing?” Beezle said.
“I don’t know what it is, but that’s what it smells like,” Jude said.
“I don’t want to meet anything that fell off two branches of the evolutionary tree,” Beezle said. “Let’s go away from the multispecies monster.”
