“No! Don’t kill yourself for me. You need to get out of here too. If anyone deserves to get out of here, Logan, it’s you. I’m not going to take so much from you that you can’t even stand up straight.”
He had a pretty good idea what she would think about his plan for her to be the only one, if it came down to that, so he settled for just saying, “We’re both getting out of here.”
“Then we keep thingsfair,” Iz said fiercely.
Despite everything, he felt the corner of his mouth twitch. “Okay. Fair—”
Sounds good, he had been ready to say, but Iz’s air-snake interrupted him. It uncoiled from her arm and flew out, hovering midair in its serpentine, wriggling way.
Its jewel-toned tongue flickered out, tasting the air, and then it wriggled again, somehow more excitedly this time. Excitedly andimpatiently, like a kid on Christmas morning.
They stared at it.
Iz said, “Maybe it can taste the fresh air?”
“Maybe. I vote we follow it, unless all our instincts wind up telling us to go another way. We might as well give it a chance.”
“I think so too. Okay,” Iz said, addressing the air-snake, “lead on.”
It wriggled again and then shot forward, a blue bolt disappearing into the dark, and they took off after it.
The adrenaline surge of having to keep up with Iz’s snake felt like the only thing that was keeping him from falling over. At least the animals didn’t have days of starvationandthe psychic toll of experimental, mythic mind-meldsandmajor personal revelations to contend with. They were following along eagerly enough, committed to staying together even if they didn’t know where they were going.
The tunnels smelled wild and wooly now, musky from all the animal sweat and exertion and the sheer number of bodies crammed into the narrow space. Iz’s faint grapefruit scent was getting lost in it all, and for some reason that felt like a lifeline slipping away from him.
It was the worst possible time for them to run into Randolph Sebastian. So, of course, they did.
The air-snake let out an unearthly shriek and jetted back towards Iz, wrapping around her arm as tightly as a python.
Sebastian stood at the other end of the tunnel, staring at them. It was the first time that Logan had ever seen him look shaken.
Whatever he’d expected to find when he came down here, a whole zoo escape obviously hadn’t been on the list.
And he was some distance away from them, in a dimly lit stone hall. Maybe he couldn’t see how wan they were. Maybe it was only obvious up close that all their strength was just about sapped.
He and Iz glanced at each other, and somehow he knew she was thinking the same thing:Don’t let him see that we’re vulnerable.
She tossed her filmy blonde hair over her shoulder. “Hi, Randy.”
“Randy,” Logan said. “I like that. We should only ever call him Randy. It’s a lot more approachable than Randolph.”
Sebastian didn’t move. It was like he was frozen stiff: the prey this time, not the predator. He was way too far away to use the basilisk-wyvern fang.
When he finally spoke, hesoundedthe same as ever—arch and unruffled—but Logan suspected he was putting on just as much of an act as they were.
“If you don’t mind my asking, how did you manage to get out?”
Logan minded him asking. And he sure as hell didn’t want Sebastian to dwell on that question for too long, just in case he somehow came up with the right answer and worked out just how much it had cost them.
“Better question,” he said. “How do you thinkyou’regoing to get out?”
“Oh, thatisa good question,” Iz said.
Logan might have lost his phone, but he still had his shiftsilver-infused handcuffs clipped to his belt. Touching them, as always, made his fingers itch—like a minor magical allergic reaction—but it was worth it. Even this far away, he could see the look on Sebastian’s face when Sebastian saw them.
Of course the guy who built freakish magical cages to control other people’s shifts wouldrecoilat the thought of having shiftsilver cuffs snapped around his wrists.
“I can see you know what these are,” Logan said.