“What is that thing?” Rose muttered to Victor, who was arrested by the sight of the thing taking shape from the tunnel walls.

  Victor only shook his head mutely, standing perfectly still beside her. Rose took the hint and fell quiet.

  With a squelch like an overripe fruit dropped in a well, the wall beside them shivered. Then melted. Then bubbled. The ancient bricks, dry for centuries, began to leak viscous sludge the color of rot and grave moss.

  That’s not horrifying at all, she thought dumbly.

  The stones began to bubble as though they were boiling from the inside out. Then the mortar dissolved with a sickening hiss, and out poured a gelatinous sludge, thick with bone fragments and bad intentions. It began to take shape. A glistening mound, twitching with cartilage and half-digested skeletons. It claimed the bones from the walls, forming limbs that twitched like a very large, struggling centipede.

  The temperature dropped, sending a curdled wind toward them that reeked of carrion and rot, which brought to her attention—it wasn’t just bones that made up the creature.

  Dead rats, coyotes, and a few pieces of animals she didn’t recognize lie partially-dissolved in the creature’s middle.

  “WHAT IS THAT?!”

  Valentin had finally seen the thing.

  He dropped his sack of skulls—all still chanting—which rolled up to the creature’s side as though summoned. The creature gave a lurch, stretching upward. The skulls’ eyes glowing and accusatory, floated in the goo like fruit in bad punch.

  As one, twenty skulls blinked. Their faceless faces grinned. As though in response, the tunnel behind them groaned—and sealed shut with a meaty squelch.

  “Oooh, it’s the Devourer! I haven’t seen him since the library burned down!” announced a skull gleefully from Rose’s sack.

  Rose scrambled to cover it’s jaw—if that would help to muffle the sound. Only to have another of their bagged idiots comment:

  “I once dated a slime. It was brief, but times get desperate when you’re just a sk—”

  “Ssh!” Rose pleaded, too late.

  The mound surged forward.

  Valentin pointed at it and screamed something to cast a ward that fizzled out halfway through.

  “MOVE, Cross!” Victor hollered, already backing into the tunnel. Rose stumbled after him, both sacks of skulls firmly in her grip. “Leave them, Rose!” he barked, the only sane one in the group, it seemed.

  The skulls in her hands went thunking to the ground as the slimy, shambling mound scuttled into the cavern. Rose had the sense to drag Victor by the arm, faster down the nearest tunnel and away from the thing—and not a moment too soon.

  Valentin decided that it would be a wonderful idea to summon balls of fire and hurl them at the monster, which not only was absolutely ineffective, except to further incense the thing, but the air was getting noticeably thinner as the blasts of heat waved at their backs.

  “Will you STOP that?” Rose yelled behind one shoulder. “JUST RUN.”

  Valentin followed her advice—barely.

  “This is your fault!” he snarked, catching up to them in just a few running seconds.

  “Yes, clearly I built the gelatinous death wall with my hands,” Rose panted. “Turn here!”

  The three of them whipped down a narrower corridor as the scuttling mound whipped past, struggling for purchase as it turned on the scattered piles of femurs and ribs. However, if she’d been hoping that it wouldn’t be able to follow them down the narrow path, she was wrong.

  Not only could the thing apparently move through walls, but it could alter itself any way it pleased. Her choice had bought them a few precious seconds, but it quickly became clear that struggling down a single-file path was a poor choice for speed when the monster crunched itself in around its own ribcage and took off after them, taking up even more of the space left in the tunnel as it did.

  “We’re running out of path, Cible!” Valentin snapped angrily from the rear.

  “Faster!” Victor added, though he was the slowest of them all, struggling on his thunking leg to keep up even with Rose dragging him to the point of falling.

  Just when it felt like the path was about to close off on them entirely, it opened into another cavern, this one without a bone in sight, although the architecture had definitely been torn apart by time. Iron rails stuck out in places where a handrail might have been. Otherwise, there were no indicators of what the room might have been used for.

  Rose snatched up one of the bars fallen to the ground. It was heavy and about the length of a crowbar, and it was the only thing she had.

  “Go right!” she ordered, spying a crack in the wall that lead into another, wider tunnel.

  To her surprise, the boys listened to her, and she hoped against hope that her intuition was correct, and she wasn’t leading them into a dead-end. But, as Didymus had once loved to tell her, her sense for mazes was good—hedge mazes, at least.

  Victor’s leg still dragging, a leg of the monster behind them shot out and blocked the path, and though it was only connected now to the body by a thin thread the beast still had full control over it.

  “It throws its own limbs?” Rose half-gasped, half-groaned.

  As hard as her frame would let her, she swung the iron bar down hard into the knee joint of its ramshackle leg, snapping the cartilage. It worked. Well. Sort of. It would have been perfect if the slime creature didn’t throw three more of its sharp, bony legs at her.

  She hit them all with the bar, dirty old bone shards snapping under her strikes, and gooey gelatin flecking to her sides, splattering onto Victor’s arm and face.

  He hissed sharply, ripping at the substance as frantically as she was hitting.

  “It burns!”

  “Come on, Valentin!” she shouted at where he was frozen in disgust. “Can’t you do anything?”

  Because her efforts weren’t accomplishing much. Because even though the creature was hesitant to approach her and her iron bar, she couldn’t do this forever. Because if something didn’t happen soon, it would have them.

  Valentin prepared another blast of fire.

  “Not the fire!” she and Victor snarled at the same time. At this range, it might hit the monster, but it would flambee them all.

  “Well then, what would you suggest?” Valentin returned coldly.

  “You’re one of the upperclassmen!” Rose gasped around another strike, unable to believe this. “Can’t you do anything but fire? Wind? Summon a protector? Cast some spells?”

  “Fire should have dealt with this slime already—”

  “It obviously isn’t a slime, Cross!” Victor roared at him.

  “Well then, what do you suggest, Sethlans? Do neither of you possess ANY combat magic?”

  Of course they didn’t. They were first years. And one of them was a blank, if they were being picky about things.

  “Can you make us a shield ward?” Rose suggested, recalling what Talus had mentioned in combat class.

  Valentin openly scoffed. “I’d have to be a third-degree mage to even attempt one.”

  Rose huffed. “Well? Can you?”

  It seemed that even in the face of certain death, Valentin was unwilling to admit his failings. He tried a ward—or what looked like one before it fizzled out. Then he tried a few other, fancier symbols, drawn in the air with his ring, with absolutely no result.

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “If we’d left when I’d suggested,” Valentin said, face red with effort—

  “Oh, don’t you start,” Victor cut him off.

  He picked up another, longer piece of iron railing, and joined Rose in her endeavor. His strikes weren’t as strong, and were far less balanced, but it was something—something not enough. The creature got closer.

  “It’s going to kill us,” Valentin half-whispered, arms falling to his sides.

  Rose ignored him. She didn’t remember most of her lifetime, the faces of her friends, or her family, but she wasn’t about to die here before getting that back.

  The crunch of iron on bones rumbled in her ears, at the same time as another crunching rumbling began to scrape behind one of the cavern walls. The rumbling got louder, until a massive crack appeared in the cavern wall.

  CRACK!

  The wall exploded in a geyser of pulverized stone and dust, a fissure ripping wide as if the labyrinth itself had lost patience with subtlety. From the rupture came the roar of heat—blue fire surged outward, licking the walls like a living thing, leaving scorched glyphs seared into the stone—a precursor to the other creature clawing into the room.

  A hellhound, easily the size of a carriage, burst through the gap in a blaze of unnatural flame. Its hide was obsidian-cracked, as though its bones glowed molten beneath its flesh. Fire danced along its spined back and licked the corners of its mouth, which was currently occupied with a man.

  Held by one arm like an unruly newspaper in the jaws of a particularly judgmental dog the wolfish thing let out a horrible, ripping snarl as the newcomer twisted something in its toothy mouth. Its glowing cobalt eyes flashed in hate as it dropped him unceremoniously to the ground—singed, smirking, and dusting off his sleeves like this sort of thing happened all the time.

  Rook stood, spat a pebble, and said with galling casualness, “Bonsoir! Apologies for the delay.”

  There was a beat of silence whilst everyone in the room sized up the shock of the situation, ending with a whining groan from Valentin.

  “Lovak. We’re going to die and the last thing I see in this life has to be your face.”

  The hellhound let out a low, rumbling growl that sounded suspiciously like a grumble of agreement. Its tail, trailing blue embers, knocked over a piece of wall as it swung at Rook—who neatly guided the blow right into the shambling terror.

  “Alors! This is the part where we run!” Rook announced cheerfully.

  Valentin swiped up the lantern from where Victor had dropped it and made his way into the tunnel opened by Rook,seemingly determined to be first.

  Rook didn’t appear to mind, waiting for Rose and Victor both to head after him before unstringing the bow at his back. The plain shirt over his shoulders was torn and as dirty as if he’d just been dragged through the debris of a wall, and several other things besides. He wore brown leather pants and hunting boots that looked like they could slide down a rock wall and still come out untorn, however. His sunny golden hair was full of dirt and debris, and somehow, glaring through those eerie green eyes at the beast, he managed to make it all pretty enough to belong in Glassenveil.

  She hesitated.

  “You’re not coming?” she breathed.

  He tipped Rose a cheerful smile, nodding her on ahead. Then, he strung an arrow and fired it, hitting the slimy-bone-mound right in its ‘throat’ right before the hellhound’s jaws closed around it.

  The crunch was loud enough to shake the cavern. He strung another, and fired, this time hitting a crucial joint at its neck. Perfectly. Any point the arrowheads touched froze the slime solid, giving the hellhound a sporting chance.

  “Little filou, you really should run,” he chided, not sparing her a glance. “These arrows will slow it down, but, alas! They will not last forever.”

  As impressed with his unironic use of the word ‘alas’ as she was with his shooting, and, possibly his entrance, Rose did exactly as he asked, turned, and ran, catching up with Victor far too quickly.

  “Come on, you,” she grunted, throwing herself under his arm, and helping him along.

  He stumbled alongside her for a tunnel, and then, two, her calling instructions ahead to Valentin to tell him which ways to go. It was as though the tunnels were shifting around them, giving them firm ground, roots pulling just far enough away from their struggle to keep from tripping them. If she didn’t know better, she would have said that the tunnels themselves were guiding them out—but that would have been ridiculous.

  Behind her, she heard a howl, and a crunching snap—not stone this time, but flesh and bone.

  She shivered, and just like that, she heard frantically running bootsteps behind them.

  “On your left!” Rook announced, not even breathing hard. “It seems the hound did not last as long as I’d expected—mon dieu! Has your leg broken, Prince-de-l’Ingénierie?”

  Victor grunted in affirmation as Rook scooped up Victor’s other side, and helped him along, much faster than Rose was able. It was almost as though the labyrinth had a sense of fair-play—which was also ridiculous—because Valentin was having a terrible time of staying ahead.

  “A fork in the road!” cried Rook, smiling at Valentin’s new deliberation. “Left is doom, right is doom with spikes—how daring do we feel?”

  “Go straight, Cross!” Rose barked quickly.

  “There isn’t a—” Valentin started to argue, when a path dead ahead opened to them.

  Rook shot her a curious look, but plowed on ahead.

  “You know, they told me this would be a quiet evening. I should really stop listening to people,” he said conversationally.

  Victor was breathing too hard for speech, struggling even with the assistance with the pace they were pushing.

  “Shut up, Rook,” Valentin growled, seeming to realize at last that there was no point but to wait for Rose.

  “I’d say we should split up, but then I might miss your death gurgle, and I do hate missing the classics!” Rook retorted with faux-sympathy. “Speaking of which…”

  The tunnel ahead of them burst inward in a shower of rock and dust. The jaws and digging-claws of the hellhound led the way—now controlled and half-eaten by the slime-mound.

  “Oh dear…” Rook hummed, as though he’d just discovered there wasn’t enough sugar for his tea, and not that he’d inadvertently made the monster chasing them so very much worse.

  “LEFT! NOW!” Rose screamed, and the whole party obeyed immediately. “We need an exit!” she panted frantically. “Up! Take the next tunnel up!”

  “I always wanted a dramatic chase sequence,” Rook sighed. “The dramme! L’emotion!—”

  “Rook!” Rose emphasized in tandem with Valentin.

  “Oui?” he responded cheerily.

  “There’s the out!” she cried, spotting the final turn. It was narrow—just enough that the mound would have a hard time getting its new jaws through if it tried, and there was the tiniest bit of natural light filtering down through it—a balm to her eyes.

  They took the turn, maw gaping behind them, and Rose gelt Victor’s weight settle heavily back on her shoulders alone as Rook turned around once more to aim his bow at the creature.

  He stared it down bald-faced from the other end of the tunnel, plugging as many arrows into it as he could.

  “Run, run!” he sing-songed over his shoulder. “These are,” he fired again, “quite,” another arrow loosed, “expensive.”

  Valentin reached the exit first.

  “Rook, I need your help to open this!” he bellowed back.

  “Je viens! Coming!” Rook turned and passed them in an instant.

  Together, he and Valentin raised the stone blocker covering most of the exit—Valentin with magic, and Rook with his own strength.

  You couldn’t have mentioned you can move rocks? Rose thought bitterly. Clearly, Valentin was lacking in creativity when it came to weapons.

  It was open, the night air spilling in, and behind them, the mound was predictably struggling. It wasn’t just half-frozen under Rook’s efforts. It was bigger. Slower. Confined.

  “Ladies first!” Rook beckoned Rose and Victor through the stone archway, and out into the beautiful clear air.

  Victor rolled his eyes at the sarcasm, as Rook nudged Valentin out from his place.

  “Age before beauty!”

  Valentin snarled behind them.

  “And at last—”

  “Go, Rook!” Rose urged, catching a glimpse of the mound slugging once more down the tunnel.

  He let the stone fall back into place with cartoonish closeness to the creature’s face.

  “Is that even going to hold it?” Valentin snapped, edging quickly away from the entrance.

  “Ouais! Indeed it will!” Rook promised, a glint in his eye. “This creature does not like to venture beyond the underground—not that it can’t.”

  Rose shuddered.

  “Is everyone alright? When I noticed your friends emerge, and you still underground I was…concerned.”

  She felt relief course through her. Rob wasn’t still trapped down there with that thing, then.

  “Of course we’re fine,” Valentin grumped, still edging away.

  Rook shrugged, as though this were a given, and turned his attention on Victor and Rose. “And you, damoiseaux?”

  Victor nodded, though she could tell his leg was still bothering him.

  “It’s not every day you outrun soup with teeth,” Rose said vaguely.

  Rook laughed, uncomfortably loudly in the night air.

  “Quite so,” he agreed, narrowing his gaze on her. “Well, as you are just first-years, we’ll leave you to get back. After all, it is our job to inform Baron that his students are safe.”

  Rook caught Valentin by the arm, and began hauling him off in another direction. It was only then with how the mist parted around them that Rose realized where they were—right next to the sunken manor, tucked back against the forest.

  Had they run so far?

  She was seized by the urge to get back inside. She could make now, if she ran, but—and, in another series of serendipitous bad luck, a sinkhole appeared as though from thin ground beneath Victor, and she heard him cry out in pain.

  “That leg seems…” she said, not sure how to put it nicely.

  The moonlight overhead was enough to see through some of the mist, but even without the best visibility, it was clear that Victor’s leg was once more twisted oddly.

  “It’s fine,” Victor gritted through his teeth.

  She shook her head at him, glancing once from the retreating forms of Rook and Valentin, and back to Victor.

  “You need help getting home.”

  “You’ve given me plenty of help,” he said sounding surly.

  “So have you,” she shot back. “The skulls—”

  “Which we don’t have anymore.”

  “Yeah,” she sighed, grabbing his arm without permission, and throwing it over her shoulders again. She was covered in bits of acidic slime, dirt, and other unmentionable substances, and she doubted she made it all look as in-place as Rook. It was more than time to make good on Jared’s promise. At this point, she hardly even cared what it would cost.

  “I’ll make it on my own,” he repeated stubbornly.

  She ignored him.

  “Not looking forward to telling Baron about all this. For now, show me where Ombus dorm is…I’ve been meaning to pay it a visit anyway.”