I’m starting to lose hope. We’ve been in this dungeon for at least a week now and we don’t appear any closer to getting out of this pce than we did the first night. There are no maps, no guidelines, no tips, nothing to give us any clue if we are going the right way or how many freaking levels there are. Apollo brushes his snout against my arm and lets out a sound that strangely reminds me of a purr.

  “Sorry,” I say, petting his head. “I’m just ready for an actual bed again and the sun. Haven’t seen the sun in far too long.”

  “I hear that,” Chloe chimes. “I swear we’ve walked way more than we ever did back at home.” She motions with her hands as she talks.

  “Ugh, that’s because we didn’t have to walk far to get to work,” I point out. Sure, we’ve worked out together here and there, but working out indoors at our pace is much different from walking around a dungeon, ducking monsters, and solving puzzles. It’s hell on me physically and mentally.

  I want a bed and I want a nice hot bath. That’s not too much to ask for.

  “You two cannot be serious,” Katsuro groans. “This isn’t even far. The floors aren’t even that big.” He looks over his shoulder at us and scowls. “Seriously, what kind of zy world did ya’ll come from? This is nothing.”

  “A peaceful one.” I shoot back. “Kind of. There are no monsters or dungeons, or portals, or magic.” I roll my eyes. How many times have we been over this? Roharu sighs next to me. “What?”

  “Nothing. I too tire of this pce. Though I am not tired from the walking. Being trapped here is deying my schedule.” He wrinkles his nose and crosses his arms.

  “Since when do you have a schedule?” My eyebrows hike closer to my hairline. This is the first he’s ever mentioned being on some kind of schedule. What the heck? “Why? Trying to hurry out of here so you can find your mate?” Tensions are high right now. We haven’t had a chance to sneak away and damn me for getting so attached to someone unavaible.

  “I do not need to find my mate,” he quips. “We are overdue for our meeting with the one you call Cupcake. By now he should have received some kind of intel or...” he trails off. “Or perhaps he is the reason we are in this mess, though the longer I think on it, the less I am convinced. He would have needed to gain the support of the vilgers and betted on us assisting them.”

  “So, you think it is a coincidence?” I’ll trust Roharu’s judgment on this. I don’t feel in my heart that Cupcake is behind this either. He seems far too straightforward for something of this magnitude. Unless this boss of his is somehow keeping tabs on us. I peek at Chloe under my eyeshes. The person they could be looking for could very well be her or someone else.

  Too many variables. I hate it.

  “No. I do not believe in such.” He runs his cws through his hair and frowns. “There is a reason the krvak was transported here and there is a reason we specifically are here. I simply do not believe that Cupcake set us up. He is a part of whatever this mess is, but not the mastermind.”

  “The hell you keep going on about a cupcake for?” Katsuro turns and walks backward so he can gre at us. “There’s not dessert around here unless ya’ll been stingy with the food.”

  “The assassins, you dumbass.”

  “Oi! I’m tired of your shit, fox.”

  “Vixen, surely you are in need of a fresh pelt.”

  “Py nice,” I say. The cobbled floor shakes and rumbles. Chloe tches onto my arm and shakes. “That can’t be good.”

  Roharu sniffs the air. “I do not scent any beasts.”

  “Me neither,” Katsuro says, pulling out his whip. “But that doesn’t mean something funky isn’t going on.”

  I suck my teeth as we continue to walk on with Chloe holding on to me. We need to find a way out of here fast. Chloe is falling apart at the seams. “It’ll be okay. We’ve been okay so far,” I whisper, angling my head towards her. “It’s probably just this level’s gimmick since there aren’t any beasts here.” Which is a problem. We need to run into something, so we have food to eat. Turns out, Apollo eats a lot and so does Katsuro. Roharu doesn’t eat nearly as much as I thought he would, though when we settle down for dinner, he spends more time trying to feed me than eating himself.

  I don’t get him.

  “How about it just gimmick away and let us out of here?”

  “That would be nice,” I agree. “But I doubt it. I’m concerned by the ck of beasts. Feels fishy. No offense, Apollo.” Next to me, Apollo snorts. He slows down his strides and walks behind us. Roharu frowns and falls back, too. Ever since they went underwater together, they’ve been moving in some kind of sync. And here Roharu said we couldn’t trust a kelpie.

  “We should keep goin’ to the next floor. Bound to be something to eat there.”

  “It would help if someone would stop eating all the leftovers,” Roharu mutters.

  I suck my teeth. Not much I can say about that. Katsuro eats a lot. He even ate the jerky we had. It’s not an issue until we get to a floor like this where there are no beasts to hunt or pnts we can munch on.

  “Ya keep opening that fp of yours, but you ain’t backing it up.”

  “The only thing straying my hand is that Megan would be upset by your demise. Consider yourself lucky for now.”

  The floor rumbles again, and Chloe tightens her arms around me. She looks up at me and the fear is so tangible; it threatens to choke me up, too. “It’s fine,” I assure her. “We got Katsuro in the front and Roharu and Apollo in the back.”

  “A shaking floor is not a good thing,” she says. “Can’t we make a run for it?”

  “Where?” I sniff. We could run, but why waste the extra energy?

  “Well, straight, of course. The faster we get off this level, the better. I don’t like how the floor is shaking, and I don’t like how quiet it is. That feels like a trap.”

  Katsuro stops and squats. He presses two fingers to the floor. “There were beasts here, but I don’t know how long it’s been.” He gnces over his shoulder. Roharu walks past. His tail brushes against me. He squats next to Katsuro and hums.

  “We need to keep moving,” Roharu says, standing. “Whatever was here is long gone. I cannot scent any beasts here, but these markings are undoubtedly marks left behind. Something must have forced it to leave, or perhaps any that were here were killed off.”

  “Apollo can’t die,” I point out.

  “He probably could. We just have not sliced him up and eaten him.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Roharu sighs. “Figured as much.” He crosses his arms and jerks his head for Chloe and me to keep walking. “Your kelpie is fine for now. He’s given no reason for me to take his head.”

  “Is he always so bloodthirsty?” Chloe whispers.

  “Since I’ve known him? Yeah...” I trail off. Something isn’t right. Or maybe Chloe’s fear is seeping into my pores and poisoning my rationale. The rumbling subsides and starts up again. The floor shakes and I nearly stumble. Sounds like a stampede or something is headed our way. “Maybe we should make a run for it?”

  Katsuro scratches the back of his head and scoffs. “Ya’ll just scared of a little shaking. This is nothing. We run and then next thing ya know, we’ll be in the mouth of something.” He says that, but his hands tighten around the whip.

  “I will carry you,” Roharu says.

  “We are not making a run for it,” Katsuro grumbles.

  I try to shake my arm free, but Chloe is holding on so tightly, it’s like trying to escape a dang snake’s hold or something. “Chloe, you have to let me—”

  Boom!

  The floor rumbles and we’re falling. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I hear Roharu’s frantic yells, but Chloe’s screams are so loud that I must be imagining it. This is like the third time the floor under me has been ripped open and I’m falling somewhere unknown. We crash onto the stone floor and damn, my ass hurts.

  “I knew we should have run for it,” Chloe sniffles.

  I grimace and tilt my head back, looking up at the ceiling. There’s nothing. No hole. No clue. Nothing. The light bugs crawl on the walls, giving us some light. “We need to keep moving.”

  “What? No! We can’t keep going.” Chloe shakes her head. “We have no way to defend ourselves. No, we wait here until they find us.”

  “And how long will that take?” I shoot back. “We can’t just sit here out in the open waiting for something to come along and pick us off. No, we need to keep going. Maybe find a way back to them. There’s a way to get to the floors below us, so there must be a way to get back to the one we were at.” This time, I shake my arm free and stand. “Come on, I know you’re scared, but we can’t just sit here.”

  Chloe sniffs again and stands, though she wobbles a bit. “How are you not breaking?”

  “Because there’s no time.” I shrug. “When we get out of here and things calm down, I’m sure it’ll hit me all at once.” Plus, knowing Roharu is coming for me, for us, is enough to keep me going. “Do you have any weapons? I got one dagger.”

  Chloe shakes her head. “I got nothing. Katsuro doesn’t use daggers and, for the most part, living in the forest was peaceful. Kind of. It wasn’t a mess like this.” She motions with her hands.

  “It’s the ck of sunlight,” I say, trying to lift the mood. “You know, like seasonal depression. Once we get some vitamin D, everything will be good.”

  She snorts. “Vitamin D? You’ve been getting lots of that.”

  My mouth drops. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I grumble. Chloe ughs and the slight frustration fades away. This is fine. If she can ugh, then she isn’t completely gone. We walk for what feels like forever, but realistically has probably only been thirty minutes. Hard to keep track of time around here. With our only light source being the bugs on the wall, there’s no telling if it’s early afternoon, te afternoon, or time for us to find a spot to bunker down at.

  “That room...” Chloe points a finger at the room where the light spills from. “It might be Katsuro? It’s brighter than the others.”

  “... Maybe, but if it were them, wouldn’t they come running this way?” I gnaw on the inside of my cheek and pull out the dagger from my back pocket. It could be nothing. It could be Roharu and Katsuro, or it could be a beast. “If it’s not, then we make a run for it.”

  She jerks her head. Her hands reach out and then she promptly drops them. “I’ll be the distraction if it comes down to it.”

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “No, I’m actually being logical,” she says, but her voice cracks. “If it comes down to it, you have the weapon. I can at least do the distracting if it means surviving.”

  I huff. “I don’t like it, but it’ll be a st resort. Just because I have the dagger doesn’t mean I’m as efficient as Roharu.” The only thing I have killed was that spider beast, but even then, I don’t know how to make my magic work. There has to be some kind of key or trigger to get it to work. I chew on my tongue as we get closer to the room. My hands are sweaty, and I swear my heart is beating so loud that you could hear it from a mile away.

  Oh.

  “Fuck,” I whisper, swallowing the bile down. Candles light up the room. There must be at least a hundred candles here. On the wall are women. Human women. Some are young, like Chloe and me, and others are much older. Though the only thing they have in common is that no one appears to be breathing.

  “We should make a run for it,” Chloe whispers.

  I nod. Yeah, running sounds like a great pn.

  “And miss out on the fun,” a voice says from behind us. We turn around and take a step back. The hooded figure pulls the hood back and smiles at us. His teeth are yellow and jagged. The white tufts of hair on his head remind me of the bristles on a broom. His skin is translucent and there are brown and green moles on his face and hands. “You cannot leave. Why the party has just begun.”

  My stomach drops.

  AutumnBanks

  Thanks for reading!