Pure Destiny (PureDark Ones #12) - Aja James Page 0,106

up his sword and a twelve-foot laser beam shot from the hilt, illuminating the darkened cavern in a flash of eerie red light.

But before he could slice it through the body of the demon, one of her tentacles bludgeoned him right off his feet, sending him flying into the rock wall with a resounding thud.

Even so, the edge of the sword caught her side and glanced through half of her neck like a hot knife through butter.

She screamed in agony, all eight tentacles, except the one that held the boy, spinning around her in frenzied self-defense, forcing the warriors to leap away from her or be caught in the deadly spinning wheel.

She oozed across the cavern floor, leaving a swath of black blood in her wake.

You sought your own deaths by coming here, the voice seethed with vengeance.

May this be a fitting tomb, Pure-Dark Ones.

With that, several of her tentacles smashed through rock and stone, crumbling the cavern walls around them. Water began to flood the chamber from all directions, the additional pressure causing more rock façade to splinter and break apart.

“Uncle Tal!” the boy cried, his arms reaching toward the warrior who lay still and prone against the wall where he fell.

“Wake up! You have to get him out! He’s in the coffin! Please! Get him o—”

The last of his shouts were cut off as the monster pushed off with several of her tentacles and shot like a torpedo away from the chamber into a dark, water-filled tunnel. Behind her, two slabs of solid stone slid closed, sealing them in.

Dalair cursed and spun toward the tunnel whence they came, just as another slab of stone shot down from the ceiling to grind into the ground.

Fuck! They were well and truly trapped, water pouring in from all sides. It had already reached their waists.

He calculated about two minutes before they would be fully submerged. With their immortal abilities, they had another seven minutes or so before they started to suffocate.

But it would take hours for beings like them to die of drowning, as their bodies broke down what oxygen they could to keep them alive. All the while, they would grow weaker and weaker, dying by excruciating degrees.

“Can you turn to air to squeeze through the crevices in the rocks?” Dalair shouted at the shadow warrior over the din of water crushing into the chamber.

“I cannot maintain my particle form in water,” the male shouted back. “I need air to dissolve. Water is the one Element that cancels my powers.”

Dalair looked to the eagle spirit who was in his animal form, trying to claw through solid rock with his talons and chipping at it with his beak.

It was no use. The rock that surrounded them was too thick.

Rhys transformed back into his humanoid form and took a series of deep breaths just as the water rose to their necks. Eli pulled Tal up with an arm around his torso. The General was still barely conscious from being flung into the wall by the monster’s giant tentacle.

There was no way out. Surrounded on all sides by impenetrable rock. Water rising too rapidly.

Dalair looked around for something, anything, that could help them pull off a miracle.

But it wasn’t what he saw that made him pause. It was what he heard.

He closed his eyes and concentrated his hyper senses on the sound.

Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.

A fifth heartbeat. Faint and muffled. Slower than the four warriors’. Barely there.

Ba-bump. Ba-bump. Ba-bump.

But it was there.

Dalair took a deep breath and dove, following the softly thumping heartbeat.

The sarcophagus. It was coming from within.

“You have to get him out! He’s in the coffin! Please!”

The boy’s parting shout, Dalair recalled now.

Something was definitely in there. And it was very much alive.

Briefly, Dalair wondered if he was doing whatever was imprisoned in the contraption any favors by freeing it. From one hell into another.

But the boy had been adamant, and Dalair could not help but carry out his command now that it was in his head.

He swam around the coffin-like object looking for a lever to open it. Not finding one after a minute, he unsheathed his half-moon blades from the back holster, combined them into a disk and swung it with all his might into the upper part of the container’s side, cutting through the steel casing. Like a giant can-opener, he used the handle to drag the circular blade through the thick steel, all the way around the object until he met the original place where he’d first cut