“Hello?” I called, crouching beside the open hatch.
But the response came from behind me, not in words but in the quiet scuff of a foot across stone. I spun, still crouched, to find the man with the squashed nose, Goon, and his braided crown partner rushing towards us. They cleared the two metres between us in a matter of seconds. Before I could even stand or think to raise my gun, Goon crashed into me so that I tipped backwards, right into the hatch.
I smacked my head on the way down, stars bursting across my vision, but I still lashed out as I fell, my fingers catching briefly on cloth before they slipped free, then I was plunging through the darkness.
The fall didn’t last long. Within a few seconds, I slammed into the stone ground, losing every bit of breath in my lungs as pain raged through my body. Dimly, I heard someone shout, and then a weight landed on top of me, an elbow driving into my stomach, a boot cracking against my knee. I yelped and flailed my fist, though I caught only air as the person groaned and rolled off me.
The light above disappeared as the hatch slammed shut, and I heard something slither through the air and hit the ground with a light thud. For a long moment, I just lay there, trying to catalogue every ache in my body. Amazingly, nothing was broken. The darkness felt oppressive, as if the walls were closing in, and the very air had weight, pressing down from up above.
“Callum?” Fletcher asked tentatively.
I groaned in response. “I think you broke my spleen.”
Her hand patted my face, nearly poking my eye out, and I grabbed her wrist as I sat up, freeing my phone from my tangled duster and turning its torch on. The screen was cracked in several places, the largest shot right across the notification from fifteen minutes ago. I began to laugh as I read the message and turned the phone around to show Fletcher.
“I’d love to, as soon as you're free,” the text from Lena read.
Fifteen
I swept my phone’s torch around the room. We were alone. I couldn’t tell if Finn had ever been there. The room was completely stone, matched to the weathered grey blocks up above, though oddly, it seemed larger than its counterpart upstairs. One corner had been recently excavated, dug out with no consideration to the preservation of the ancient stone.
“I think it’s safe to say they were expecting us,” Fletcher said.
“Are you hurt?” I asked. My gun was no longer in my hand, and I hunted around for it, amazed that it hadn’t gone off in the fall. I found it near the severed rope coiled beneath the hatch, glinting in the white light, and I holstered it with a sigh.
Fletcher patted herself a couple of times. “I’m okay. Did I hurt you when I landed on you?”
I shook my head, though my head throbbed, and I could feel a smidge of blood on the back of my skull where I whacked it on the edge of the hatch’s opening. I’d be surprised if I didn’t have a concussion when all was said and done.
I no longer had service, though I had a few bars down the road where we parked the car. That was the Highlands for you. We had backup coming, but no way to contact them when they arrived or to tell them to hurry their asses up.
“They set us up,” Fletcher said. There was a bruise blooming on her cheek, just beneath her eye.
“I don’t think they were ever keeping Finn here.” Looking around, it seemed far too hard to get an unwilling captive down here without just dropping them like the kidnappers did us, and I couldn’t imagine anyone throwing a kid down a hole, even someone who’d already threatened his life.
“What were they doing?” Fletcher clambered painfully to her feet and went to examine the small excavation site.
I wasn’t quite ready to stand yet, but I spun around on my butt to watch as she poked through the rubble.
“There’s nothing here. Have you ever heard of something being hidden underneath this castle?”
“No.” I crawled forward so I could shine my light further into the hole. It was about the size of a small suitcase, and a broken wooden handle lay inside like a lonely little sentinel. “Do you have service?”
Fletcher checked her phone but shook her head. “How far out do you think Dunnel is?”
“Hard to say. Hopefully, no more than twenty minutes.”
I was going to go crazy if we had to sit around in this small room for much longer than that.
My head swam as I stood, and I braced my hand against the cold wall until my vision cleared again. Then I went to stand under the hatch and stare up at it, struggling to maintain my balance as I tipped my aching head back. The basement had a high ceiling, but if Fletcher stood on my shoulders, she could probably reach it.
“Get on my shoulders,” I said, waving her over from her continued examination of the hole in the wall.
Fletcher looked at me doubtfully. “You’re going to drop me.”
“I won’t,” I promised. “Come on. We have to get out of here.”
“How many times did you get hit in the head today? I’m not climbing on your shoulders.”
“Every second we sit down here, the perps are getting further away. We’re alone out here. We’ve got to get ourselves out.”
“Yeah, and who’s idea was that?” Fletcher snapped. “I said we should wait for backup. Finn isn’t even here!”
“We didn’t know that!” My raised voice echoed around the small
