Brave the Tempest (Cassie Palme) - Karen Chance Page 0,67

in the darkness. I felt around, and it was sort of like a cave wall, if it had been buffed by water for years. Smooth and undulating, but weirdly spongy. “What the hell?”

“I don’t know, but it’s like a maze in here,” Billy said.

“Ghost light,” I told him, and winced as it came echoing back to me. He sighed.

“That’s gonna get old fast,” he said, and then light was spilling out all around us, green-tinged and bright, almost blinding.

“Tone it down,” I whispered, and then, when a thousand voices whispered “DOwn, down, doWN,” back at me, vowed not to do that anymore.

Billy toned it down.

We crept forward into darkness.

It was a maze, I discovered, filled with barriers I couldn’t pass, forcing me to find my way through channels I couldn’t see. That would have been bad enough on its own, but it was also a graveyard. Ghostly images flickered here and there for an instant, echoes in a dying brain. They were pale, translucent, but vivid against the gloom.

A little girl in an old-fashioned frock darted out in front of us, running after an equally ghostly cat, only to disappear a moment later. An old woman picked grapes in a vineyard high overhead, spilling pale light down on us for a moment, before she, too, winked out. And then a massive cavalry charge almost ran us down.

I screamed as what appeared to be every horse on the planet thundered at us out of nowhere. They should have been silent, but the echoes of my own voice pounded against us so hard that they almost had tangible weight. For a moment, it actually felt like we were being trampled under a thousand flailing hooves.

And then they cut out, disappearing like the ghosts they weren’t. Leaving me panting on all fours with my arms over my head. And gazing into blackness so deep it boiled at the corners of my vision, while my heartbeat sounded in my ears like another charge.

Billy pulled himself off the floor, crawled over beside one of the “walls,” and just sat there, shivering and staring at me. “Is that . . . going to keep . . . happening?”

I don’t know, I mouthed.

“Well, that’s not very helpful, is it?” he snapped.

I crawled over beside him. “I think it’s just the last few synapses flaring,” I said softly. Synapses, synapSes, synapSES. “The longer we’re here,” here, hERe, here, “the fewer there should be.” Be, BE, be.

“That does not make me want to stick around,” Billy snarled.

“Me, neither.” NEIther, neiTHer, neither.

“Oh, for the love of—let’s get this crap over with!”

I couldn’t agree more.

We headed for the little light again, which I eventually figured out wasn’t flickering. It was passing behind the strange shapes that clogged the darkness here, misshapen pillars and half walls, and sudden dips or rises that left us scrambling across a landscape filled with pitfalls. But Billy’s light helped, once we figured out how to direct it, and we slowly started gaining.

Ghostly images continued to be a problem, although we learned to ignore them. The echoes became eerie background noises, but they weren’t really an issue, either, because we weren’t chasing whatever was ahead of us by sound. And the weird protrusions and undulating floor got easier to navigate after a while.

Until the latter dropped out from under me a moment later, like I’d hit a fun house slide.

I didn’t scream that time; I was learning.

But I did bounce around, hitting walls, or something like them, while scrabbling for purchase with hands and feet and not finding any. And then having the floor completely disappear for a second, leaving me with the horrible sensation of falling through open air. Before I hit a hard surface, what felt like stories below where we’d started, with a whummp.

I just lay there for a moment, dizzy and freaked-out and very, very, quiet.

And not just because the echoes of my landing were shivering the air all around me, sounding like a thousand lumberjacks chopping a thousand trees.

But because there was something else down here.

I didn’t know how I knew. There was no sound, once the echoes faded, except for Billy’s cursing, somewhere up above. He seemed to have avoided whatever pitfall had caught me, and was calling my name, sounding increasingly worried.

I didn’t call back.

For a long moment, I just stayed where I was, not moving, barely even breathing. Just staring into utter darkness, because I didn’t have Billy’s light anymore. And the strange illumination we’d been following was no