I curled into a ball and wrapped my arms around my head. It left my injured side completely open. Rocks fell from the ceiling. One of them struck me on my side. I bit my tongue to stifle the pained sound. My skin suddenly felt slick. I was bleeding again.
When the tremors subsided, Andrei grabbed my wrist. Down below, one of the para-humans pushing a wheelbarrow of gold bars had stopped moving. He lifted his head. His stubbed nose sniffed the air in our direction. Para-humans didn’t have a very strong sense of smell, but I imagined if all you were used to was fire and ash, the scent of blood would give you pause.
I was in the midst of shrinking back into the cavern when the whole world began to shake. It wasn’t a build-up like an earthquake but a sudden rumbling roar. It hit hard. My vision blurred. Below, the para-humans became frenzied. Some of them dropped their tools and started to scramble out of the cave along the various paths.
Andrei grabbed me and wrapped me in his arms. And then suddenly we were airborne. He jumped out of the cavern, trying to stay pressed against the wall as though using it for traction. I heard him grunt and felt his muscles contract.
All around us, the world trembled. Orange light blazed against my closed eyelids. I braced my head against Andrei and hoped like hell this wasn’t going to hurt as much as I thought it would. We came to an abrupt halt. The stench of still water and mud filled my nose. My eyes snapped open just as Andrei groaned.
I came face to face with a set of obsidian eyes sunk deep into a brown clay face. A clay golem.
The thing was eight feet tall. It had Andrei and me clamped in its meaty hand. In its other hand, it held the two necromancers pinched by the toes of their shoes. It dangled them in front of its face and sneered.
I heard a scream and turned to see that the others were also trapped. Two other giants had appeared in the aftermath of the earthquake. The one holding the two teams with Fae contestants was a deep, pewter grey. The Fae groaned. Their skin turned a sickly green colour. An iron golem.
The other golem was polished until it almost shone. It stood there like a movie award. It had Max and Bradley in the grip of one hand and a pair of mages in the other.
Another quake hit us. It rattled the room like a child’s toy. My head rolled around but the clay golem didn’t lose its footing. The thing made its way towards the platform. Ah shit.
The dragon gave a corresponding roar when the cavern groaned around us. It threw caution to the wind and tried to yank at its chains. On the throne, the Fae mage shot a fireball of blue light that hit the obsidian walls of the hole. The dragon screeched.
Outside the mountain, something must have picked up the sound of the dragon’s distress. The answering bellow was like nothing I had ever heard before. The vibration started in the core of me. It rippled outwards and tore through my cells. It was as though the scream hit on a different frequency and my body didn’t know how to process it. There had only been one other time I had felt something close to this. It was when I had been temporarily possessed by a demon.
The vibration rammed at the circumference of the seal. There was a split second when I felt my magic surging up to meet the roar before it crashed back and was rebuffed. My nose started to bleed. My head throbbed. I bit the side of my cheek and tried to hold on to consciousness.
Andrei’s head lolled to the side. The two necromancers also hung limp. A quick glance at the others showed me that all of them besides Max had passed out. The lion looked decidedly worse for wear. The parts of his skin that touched the silver golem had started to blister.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted movement clinging to the back of the iron golem. Somehow, Kai had managed to slide onto the thing without being detected. My eyes flicked up to the holes in the wall. Chanelle was perched safely on the ledge.
There was no time to think of a way to drag her down here. We were suddenly in front of the platform. The para-humans left behind had stopped their work and were milling around beneath the feet of the golems. There were so many of them I could no longer see the floor.
From this angle, I could now see into the room at the end of the treacherous walkway. It was very dimly lit by an enormous crystal globe that hung from the ceiling. Shelves had been cut out of the rock. On them sat every weapon known to man and hundreds of others that were beyond our reckoning.
Too bad there was a pissed-off Fae mage in our way. “What’s this?” he said as he stood from his throne. Behind his back, I spotted the other mage team creeping towards the walkway. Those bastards were using us as a distraction. I tugged at Andrei’s shirt, hoping to rouse him. He was out cold.
The mage swept his gaze over us. He stepped closer and looked into the faces of the two necromancers still dangling unconscious. His gaze settled on the Nightblood emblem on Andrei’s T-shirt.
The Fae mage spat on the ground. “So the Supernatural Council would send spies into my mountain to steal my treasure,” he said. There was a part of me that had hoped this was an illusion like some of the other trials. But this wasn’t an obstacle course. Things
