As my hand made contact with the cold metal surface, I could feel a pull from inside me. I’d heard about this strange sensation before from people who had come to the Fates for help.
I didn’t like the feeling.
“When do I get my answers,” I said, frustration dripping from the words.
“The answer you seek is … Morpheus.”
Morpheus? The trough shuddered and began to close. I yanked out my hand just in time. The window along the other wall began to collapse as the upper and lower parts pushed together.
“Wait!” I screamed. “What does that mean?” There was no answer. “That can’t be it. That can’t be all there is!”
The platform that held the picture of Tommy and Nikki started to sink. I don’t know what triggered my next action. Maybe it was total frustration over such a cryptic response. Maybe it was … regret. Whatever it was, just before the pedestal disappeared beneath the ground completely, I grabbed the picture. And ran.
I was so screwed.
Stone spikes exploded out of the floor and ceiling. I dodged them for five or six steps before one dropped down from the ceiling, glancing off my shoulder. For a split second I lost my balance. And then I felt a blow on the back of my head.
I hit the ground with a thump. As the darkness closed around my vision, I caught a final glimpse of a gloved hand taking the picture from my fingertips.
Then I was swimming in a sea of black.
“Cole?”
Fingers as soft as feathers stroked my forehead, then my cheek. She softly tapped. Not quite a slap but stronger than a touch. It didn’t do anything to dispel the darkness.
“I’m sorry, Nik,” I mumbled, though at the moment I couldn’t really remember what I was sorry for.
“What happened?” she asked, her voice delicious with worry. “What’s wrong with you?”
I opened my eyes, looking at the wooden rafters overhead with sad tinsel streamers hanging down. The Christmas Dance. The one where I took in a giant breath of Nikki and Jack’s collective broken heart and blew it out all over the crowd.
Another rule broken.
I turned my head away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
She forced my head back toward hers. How many times had I longed for that? Of course, not exactly in this context. “You don’t get off that easily,” she said.
I almost laughed. Who was she kidding? Nothing with Nikki was ever easy. “Tell me what happened,” she said.
I looked into her eyes. She blinked a few times, and suddenly her face began to distort. Her eyeballs sank slowly into the back of her head.
“Nikki?”
She went to speak, but when she opened her mouth, her jaw fell off. I wasn’t sure if I should hold her close to keep her together or push her far away to keep from getting slimed by her innards, but then the decision was no longer mine because her skin turned black and floated away in charred flakes. The walls and ceiling of the farmhouse disintegrated, revealing the dark night beyond.
Everything was black again. I felt nothing. Except for the ax stuck in my head.
NOW
The Delphinian Dungeons.
Who knows how long after I was knocked out.
I mean, it had to be an ax stuck in my head. Nothing else could account for the pain.
“It’s not an ax.” A voice came from somewhere to my right. I opened my eyes. At least I thought I’d opened them. But it was pitch-dark.
“Where am I?” I asked the voice.
“Delphinian Dungeons. And like everything the Delphinians do, it’s impenetrable. Even by light.”
I rolled over onto my side, my cheek brushing against the cold, damp ground. “You’re wrong,” I said, directing my voice toward where his voice had come from. “There is an ax in my head.”
“Okay,” the voice said.
I pushed off the ground and immediately collapsed again.
I didn’t think I’d made any noise, but my neighbor said, “I wouldn’t move so fast if I were you.”
I shook my head. “How did you know I was moving?”
“When you spend so long in the dark, you develop heightened senses.”
I blinked hard a few times. Shades of dark lines and less dark lines became differentiated, but that was all. On one side of me, the darkest lines seemed to be parallel, straight, and running from ceiling to floor. At my head, another set of dark lines. The voice was coming from that set.
“It’s a cell,” I said. “I’m in a prison cell.”
“A cage,” the voice replied.
“How do we get out?”
My question was met with a rueful laugh. I guess that was my answer. I let my head fall back against the ground, pushing the imaginary ax even farther into my skull.
My eyes shut involuntarily. I was stuck inside a Delphinian
Dungeon. I wasn’t going anywhere for a long time.
NINE
NOW
The Delphinian Dungeons.
“Cole,” a beautiful voice whispered. “Cole, wake up.”
“Hmmm,” I said. I forced my eyes open only to find a pair of big brown eyes staring down at me. Familiar eyes. Eyes that could see through me.
Nikki.
She was reaching for me through the bars of my cell. When she saw that I was awake, she smiled. And I was awake. This was no dream like before.
“Max told me where you were,” she said. She pulled a hairpin out of her hair, releasing several strands into beautiful waves. She bent and twisted the pin and then jammed one end into the lock of the cell. “I had to look up on YouTube how to pick locks.”
I smiled and army-crawled over to her. “Nik … you came for me?”
She paused her finagling of the lock and gazed at me. “I know what you did for me. I know what you did for Tommy. Max told me you saved him at the last minute.”
She gave me a faint smile and went to work on the lock again. I watched her for a few moments, unable to grasp—or even name—the overwhelming emotions I was feeling at seeing her there.
“But how did you get in? How did you get past the guards?”
She bit her lip, her focus on the lock. Suddenly, with a turn of her wrist, there was a metal clink.
She grinned as she yanked on the door. “Let’s go.”
My mouth hung open. I couldn’t move for a moment. Overwhelmed by what had just happened. Nikki Beckett had saved me. Not only that, but she could pick locks. There was nothing sexier in the world.
She grabbed my hand. I crawled forward as fast as I could, and just as I was about to get out, something whacked me on my forehead.
“Ow,” I said, rubbing my head.
“What’s wrong?” Nikki asked. She tugged on my hand.
I looked through the open doorway, trying to figure out what had hit me. “I bumped my head.”
She rolled her eyes. “Let’s try it again. And hurry!”
I got on my hands and knees again and scurried forward, toward Nikki. Toward freedom. But just as I reached the threshold of my cell, something flat and hard clobbered my nose, and I heard the crack of a bone. I fell to the ground, holding my nose as blood gushed out of it.
“Ahhh!”
“What’s the matter?” Nikki asked.
I opened my eyes. Nikki was holding out her hand, a confused look on her face. I was about to ask her what she was missing when her head jerked to the side, so fast that it went blurry for a moment.
I blinked a few times. Did I really just see that? Or was this some sort of concussion?
“What’s the matter?” she said again, in the exact same tone of voice as she’d used before. Her head jerked once more, like a malfunctioning robot.
“What the …” I said.
Suddenly a man’s voice cut through the dark. “It’s a hallucination, neighbor. Whatever you’re seeing, it’s not real.”
I watched in horror as Nikki faded out and disappeared, replaced by a thick cement wall.
“You’ve been ramming your head against that wall,” the man’s voice said from the cell next to mine. “I tried to get your attention after the first time, but Delphinian hallucinations are potent.”
A hallucination? I expelled all the breath out of me, squeezing my face in pain. She wasn’t real. I’d actually believed that she would’ve come for me. I didn’t even hesitate.
Was I really that delusional? I swore, gingerly pressing the swelling bump on my nose. A goose egg had already formed on my forehead. Then I had a moment to think about what had just happened.
I lay back and put my arm over my eyes. “So I got on my hands and knees and propelled my face into a stone wall over and over?”
“Yep. Not as bad as what the guy before you did, but still pretty bad.”
“What did the guy before me do?”
“He believed someone had thrown him a rescue rope. He wrapped it around his neck and hanged himself.”
Again the air left my chest. These were anecdotes I could do without. “Who are you?”
I heard the sound of my neighbor scrambling closer. “Name’s Devon. I live next door. Welcome to the neighborhood. The parking sucks, but you can’t beat the view. And who are you?”
“Cole.”
There was a long pause, as if he was waiting for me to say something else. I didn’t.
“So, Cole, whatcha in for?”
I rolled onto my back and stared upward, imagining I could see the ceiling above. Maybe my eyes were finally adjusting. I wasn’t sure how much of a conversation I wanted to strike up with this guy, since I didn’t plan on being here long. No prison was escape proof.
“You can ignore me for now if you want,” he said. “We’ve got all the time in the universe.”
“I wasn’t ignoring you,” I said. “I’m here because I paid to get some information from the Delphinians … and then I sort of tried for a refund.”
Devon broke out into disbelieving laughter. “How’d that go over?”
“Not exactly as I’d hoped. But this is only temporary.”
Shifting onto my stomach, I grabbed the bars and shook, hoping for some give. Some sign of weakness.
Devon snorted, presumably because of my attempt on the bars. “Let me ask you something. Do you think the Scholars—the world’s oldest and smartest Everlivings—and the Fates—who can see the future—would make a cell you could break out of?”
With every word Devon spoke, the air in my cell seemed to become tighter. Less abundant. The walls closer.
I released my grip on the bars and ran my fingers downward to where they met the stone ground. I dug hard, but the rock stayed firm.
“No prison is impenetrable,” I said.
“Impenetrable usually refers to breaking in. And breaking in isn’t the problem,” Devon said. His voice sounded like one big sigh, as if he was already tired of having this conversation even though we’d only been speaking for about five minutes.
I rolled onto my back. “How did you end up here? Couldn’t pay the price?”
“The Delphinians stole something from the woman I love. Loved. A relic that had been passed down to her for generations. I was stupid enough to think I could steal it back. I was a mercenary on the Surface. New to the Everliving life. I didn’t know about the ruthlessness of the Delphinians.”
“Did you get it back?”
“Yes. Then I found out they were coming for me, so I hid it. When they captured me, I wouldn’t give up its location. So they fired a warning shot.”
“Warning shot? What kind of warning shot?”
“They killed the woman I love. Loved.” A heavy silence filled every corner of his cell and overflowed into my own small corners.
“That doesn’t sound like a warning shot,” I finally said.
“Yes, well, the Delphinians fail to grasp the subtleties of words like warning. And temporary. And no, thank you. But it worked.” He took in a breath. “I was warned.”
“But you’re still here.”
“Once they took her away, I had nothing left to lose. The fact that I still haven’t given up the location is the only reason I’m alive.”
Absentmindedly, I reached up and felt the ceiling, half listening to Devon, half plotting my escape. Something at my fingertips came loose, and I only had a moment of relief thinking maybe not all of the cell was indestructible before the thing that came loose fell into my eye … and scurried across my face.
It felt as big as a mouse, but there were definitely more than four legs.
“Shit!” I brushed roughly at my face and heard something that sounded like a walnut hitting a rock wall. I scrubbed my arms and legs with my fingertips, suddenly feeling prickles everywhere. “What the hell was that?”
“What kind of noise did it make?”
“Does it matter?!” But as I thought about it, I realized it did make a clicking noise as it moved. “It clicked.”
“Probably a cockroach.”
“It was the size of a Mack truck.”
“Yeah, they grow them big down here. You do realize our prison hovers on the outskirts of the Everneath? The critters here aren’t exactly the kind you’d find on the Surface. But they’re attracted to noise, so if you stop moving around so much, they’ll leave you alone.”