Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80829 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Two stalker corpses lay in the flowers, torn apart, and in the lake itself, a large shape waited, hidden in the water. It flared with bright yellow. Danger. Chances of survival: nil.
The world restarted with my next breath. I didn’t have the luxury to freak out about it. We had to run. Now.
I pulled Bear to the left, where a chunk of the wall protruded in a miniature plateau. We couldn’t crawl onto it, but there were boulders around it. It was the only cover we had. Anything else would bring us too close to the lake.
We dashed through the flowers. My heart was beating a thousand beats per minute.
A screech erupted from the tunnel.
We reached the ledge, and I ducked behind a large boulder and pulled Bear close. She squatted by me, and I hugged her, my hand on her muzzle, and whispered, “Quiet.”
The shepherd stared at me with big brown eyes.
A monster burst out of the passageway. Its front end resembled a silverfish that had somehow grown to the size of a rhino, with razor-sharp, terrifying mandibles. Its tail was scorpion like, curving over its head, and armed with another set of flat pinchers, studded with sharp protrusions.
The monster paused. Its tail blades sliced the air like two huge shears.
I held my breath.
The creature skittered forward, straight for the stalker corpses on the shore.
The thing in the lake waited, still and silent.
The bug monster reached the closest stalker corpse. The mandibles sliced like two sets of shears, cutting the body into chunks, dissecting it. The first shreds of flesh made it into the creature’s mouth.
The thing in the lake struck. A blur erupted out of the water, lunging onto the shore. Somehow the bug monster dodged and scampered back, out of reach.
The lake owner paused, one massive paw on the torn-up corpse. It was huge, ten feet tall, thirty-five feet long, and it stood on four sturdy legs armed with eighteen-inch claws. Its body was a mix of dinosaur and amphibian, dark violet, with scales that shimmered with indigo and pink as it moved. A massive fin-like crest crowned its head and flared along its spine all the way to the tip of a long, thick tail. Its head with four small deep-set eyes and a wide, triangular mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth was straight dragon. There was nothing else to compare it to. It was a lake dragon, and it had sighted an intruder in its domain.
The bug monster scurried backward, then sideways, its tail raised high, ready to strike.
The dragon’s flesh rippled. Pale pink spots appeared on its sides, near its crest, glowing softly. Was it a warning or was it trying to mesmerize the bug?
The monster silverfish veered left, then right, but did not retreat. Bugs weren’t known for their strategic thinking. There was meat on the shore, and the bug wanted it.
The silverfish lunged forward, the bladed tail striking like a hammer. The dragon shifted out of the way and the chitin shears hit rock instead of flesh. The dragon lunged, swatting at the bug with a taloned paw. The silverfish dodged and charged in from the side.
I grabbed Bear’s leash, leaving her six inches of lead, and moved carefully away, past the boulders, along the ledge, toward the back of the cavern. Bear made no noise. She didn’t bark, she didn’t growl, she just snuck away with me.
Behind us, the bug monster screeched. A deep eerie hiss answered, almost a roar.
I picked my way along the wall, through jagged boulders. On our left, the cavern’s sides were smooth and almost sheer. On our right, the river that flowed from the waterfall rushed to the lake.
I flexed again. The water was twenty-two feet wide and seven feet deep. Too deep to easily cross, and the other shore sloped up, littered with large rocks. A chunk of cave ceiling or one of those stone bridges above must’ve collapsed and broken into big chunks. Too hard to climb.
I kept scanning. There had to be a way out of this deathtrap.
My vision snagged on something ahead, where the wall curved left. A dark gap split the rock face, twelve feet high and fourteen feet wide. I focused on it.
No dice. The gap was fifty-three yards away, and my talent told me that there was nothing valuable in the rock wall around it, but I couldn’t tell how deep it was. My ability was always tied to my vision. I could sense things buried within rock, but I still had to look at the rock while doing it. If I closed my eyes, I got nothing, and that fissure was just a dark hole. Once I entered the gap, I could scan it but until then, it was a mystery.
There could be other passages on the other side of the cavern, but I didn’t want to risk it. There could be nothing there.