Tasia looked at Wyatt with a faint air of disgust. “Perhaps we should find a more suitable place to have this conversation.”
“We have to go after Druja,” Lacy said. “She has the box. If you’re really here to help, then help me get it back.”
“Captain Wyatt, Phane is looking for us,” Wren said. “Will you help us get out of the city?”
“First things first,” Wyatt said, “I like that. Once we’re in the jungle, it will be a simple matter to find the witch. We need to get to the surface.”
“No,” Wren said, pointing at the hole burned through the nearby outflow grate. “Isabel cut a hole through that grate so we could escape.”
“Wait … Lady Reishi is here?” Wyatt asked, alarm in his voice.
“Yes,” Wren said. “Phane has her.”
Wyatt put his hand on his forehead and turned around whispering to himself, “What do I do?”
“You do as you were charged to do,” Tasia said.
“If Lord Reishi knew she was here …”
“He does,” Wren said. “We can’t try to rescue her, if that’s what you’re thinking. She wouldn’t want us to.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because she told me,” Wren said sadly.
“I don’t understand. Why wouldn’t she want us to rescue her?” he asked.
“Phane is slowly gaining control over her free will,” Wren said, a slight tremor in her voice. “Once he has her, she’ll be a threat to all of us and she doesn’t want that.”
Wyatt seemed to struggle for a moment before he nodded resolutely. “I see. We should go then.”
“Are we certain where that leads?” Tasia asked, eyeing the outflow drain suspiciously.
“No, but it’s the only way out of the city besides the main gate,” Wren said.
“No, it’s not,” Tasia said. “We’ll do better to head for the surface and make our escape from there.”
“But how?” Wren said.
Just then, Lacy saw a faint glow in the distance. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing down the tunnel. The glow vanished momentarily, then appeared slightly closer.
“Wraithkin,” Wyatt said. “We have to move … quickly.”
He set out toward the center of the city with Tasia bringing up the rear. Not fifty steps into the tunnel, another light came into view ahead.
“Soldiers,” Wyatt said, unslinging his bow. “Douse your light.”
Wren shuttered her lantern.
“I count six,” Wyatt whispered.
A roar of fire erupted behind them, drawing everyone’s attention, as Tasia directed a jet of blue-hot flame at the wraithkin who had just appeared not twenty feet away.
In the sudden light, Wyatt loosed an arrow at the first soldier in the file. A moment later, darkness engulfed them, a muffled splash reverberating softly down the tunnel. The soldiers started shouting, the sound of their footfalls growing quicker and louder.
Light bloomed again, this time in the form of three fiery orbs, each about a foot in diameter, one hovering over Tasia, the second moving down the tunnel behind them and the third moving toward the soldiers.
“The wraithkin is gone,” Tasia said.
“He’ll be back soon,” Wren said.
Wyatt killed another soldier, causing the next man in line to trip and fall over his dying companion, splashing into the muck. The remaining three men clambered over the fallen men in a rush. Wyatt felled another, leaving him howling in pain. His cries drew shouts of alarm from yet more soldiers searching other parts of the vast sewer network.
“That drain is starting to look like our best chance,” Wyatt said as he sent another arrow at the enemy. He scored only a glancing blow against the lead man’s shield, now held high to protect the advancing soldiers while more men raced to back them up.
Suddenly, the wraithkin appeared next to Wyatt, slashing at him viciously with his long black dagger. Wyatt blocked with his bow, defending against a fatal wound, but taking ruinous damage to his bow. He dropped it, drawing his sword, but the wraithkin disappeared, reappearing in front of Tasia and stabbing at her savagely. Quicker than a cat, she caught his wrist and jerked his thrust wide of her belly, at the same time grabbing him by the throat with the other hand, spinning him off his feet and propelling his head into the wall with such force and speed that the back four inches of his skull caved in, spraying blood across Lacy and Wren. Tasia casually tipped his corpse into the canal and slipped past the three of them to face the oncoming soldiers.
She raised her hands and unleashed a gout of flame that filled the entire tunnel for a hundred feet or more, waves of heat washing back over them, the roar echoing throughout the sewer system. When the dragon fire subsided, all that remained of the onrushing soldiers were charred husks, warped so grotesquely that it was hard to imagine they had once been human.
“Follow me,” Tasia said.
Wyatt dropped back to cover the rear as they set out toward an exit and the surface. Shouting soldiers were converging on their position, but Tasia calmly proceeded onward with seemingly little concern.
Lacy, on the other hand, was terrified. She didn’t know these people, and even though they were fighting to protect her, she couldn’t help but realize that she was utterly at their mercy should they choose to turn on her, especially Tasia. Lacy hadn’t seen a demonstration of such profound power since the dragons had attacked her ship en route to Karth.
At the first ladder, Tasia started climbing. Lacy was relieved to see slivers of daylight through the sewer grate in the road above. When they surfaced in an alley, Tasia melted the iron grate into place to stymie any pursuers before heading toward the nearest road.
“Now what?” Lacy asked.
“You’ll see, Princess,” Wyatt said.
“I don’t like this,” she said. “I want to know how you plan on getting us out of here, and I’m not taking another step until you tell me.”
Wyatt considered her words, openly appraising her.
“Very well, Tasia is going to take her true form and fly us out of here.”
Lacy stood dumbstruck, looking at Wyatt as if the world no longer made any sense.
“What are you talking about?”
“That,” Wyatt said, with an admiring smile.
Tasia was standing in the middle of the road, facing what sounded like a platoon of approaching soldiers. Her form seemed to become indistinct momentarily … and then she morphed into a beautiful, terrifying silver dragon, filling the entire road with her bulk and filling the air with her roar. The angry shouts coming from the approaching soldiers abruptly turned into cries of panic that retreated into the distance.
“Dear Maker,” Lacy whispered, cocking her head in recognition. “Wait … she was the one who saved our ship from the green dragon.”
“One and the same,” Wyatt said. “Let’s go.”
Lacy felt a surreal sense of detachment come over her. She was running toward the dragon, yet a part of her was screaming in terror. Fear bubbled up from some ancient place within, deeper and older than conscious thought-born of pure animal instinct, it seemed to know at a visceral level that the dragon was the ultimate predator, that she was nothing more than prey. She stopped running and started backtracking. No sane person would willingly run toward a dragon.
“Lacy, what are you doing?” Wren shouted.
Lacy couldn’t get any words out past the constricting fear closing around her throat. All she could do was shake her head in denial.
“Wyatt!” Wren shouted.
He looked back, scrambling to change directions when he saw Lacy was trying to run away.
She turned just in time to see a wraithkin appear not ten feet in front of her, faint wisps of black fading quickly in his wake. She screamed. He smiled.
Wyatt’s throwing knife caught him in the shoulder and he vanished. Wyatt grabbed Lacy and pushed her up against a wall, standing in front of her, guarding her and preventing her from escaping at the same time, his sword drawn and his head snapping this way and that, looking for his enemy.