Girl, Serpent, Thorn(54)

Soon, she found a stairway, and she went down, knowing she would be trapped if she met anyone or anything in this narrow space. She found herself in another, smaller tunnel, but there were no torches here, nothing to light her way as she stumbled along in the darkness, one hand on the wall. She was breathing so heavily that she worried someone would hear her, and so she put her other hand over her mouth to silence the frightened wheeze her lungs were making.

But even with her mouth covered, she could still hear the sound of breathing behind her—and it wasn’t her own.

Soraya ran, all hope of escaping the mountain abandoned in favor of merely finding a safe place to hide. As soon as her hand no longer felt solid rock, she bolted in that direction, moving down another hall that took her deeper into the mountain. The torches began to reappear, though they were few and far between, as Soraya threw herself into the labyrinth of tunnels, trying to outrun approaching shadows and the echoes of footsteps. She didn’t know where to find safety or when to catch her breath. Her heart was racing, the way it had when people kept brushing against her on Nog Roz, never giving her time to recover. Except now she was the only one in danger.

She should have listened to him. She should have stayed in her room. It was only a matter of time before she was too slow or took a wrong step.

Down, she told herself. Just keep going down. It was too late, and she was too lost, to retrace her steps to her room. The only hope she had was to keep heading downward until she eventually reached the base of the mountain.

She kept moving until she found another set of stairs and hurried down them, but instead of leading her into another tunnel, they brought her to a cavernous room—empty, thankfully, except for a fire in the center of it. And beside the fire was something that smelled delicious.

After catching her breath, Soraya went toward the fire. The smell was coming from a piece of meat spitted on a stick—some kind of bird, from the look of it. Thinking of the finite supply of fruit in her room, Soraya took the stick and sank her teeth into the wing of the cooked bird. She gave an involuntary sigh as she swallowed and took another bite.

But before she could swallow again, she heard footsteps coming from the stairs behind her. Soraya dropped the stick at once and looked around for another exit, but the stairs were the only way in or out of this cavern. She should have already known that. She should have turned back at once as soon as she saw this was a dead end, but the smell of the food had been too tempting to resist. She had allowed herself to be caught in a trap.

As the steps grew louder, Soraya moved away from the fire, into the shadows. She pressed herself flat against the wall right beside the opening to the stairwell, hoping she could repeat her trick from the palace and sneak past the div.

The steps slowed, then stopped, and Soraya waited for the div to appear.

And then a large fist slammed into the wall above her head.

Soraya ducked as the div lunged out from the stairway, bits of rock raining down onto the top of her head. He had only missed her because he had struck without looking, and she knew he wouldn’t miss again. She ran for the stairs, but it was a last, hopeless attempt at escape, and she wasn’t surprised when the div clutched the back of her dress and pulled her back into the cavern, throwing her to the ground.

“I heard you breathing, little thief,” the div said in a rumbling voice. He had the torso of a man, his skin deathly white, but the legs and head of a wildcat. “I can smell my dinner on your breath. But that’s no matter—I’ll just eat you, instead.”

“I’m the Shahmar’s guest!” Soraya cried, reaching out an arm as if that could somehow stop him from killing her. It would have, before, she thought with a strange pang. Once, she could have killed him easily, with only a touch. She would have been deadlier than he was. And she wouldn’t have to use the name of her captor as a shield. “He would be displeased if you harmed me.”

The div chuckled. “I don’t know what you’re doing here, human, but it doesn’t matter to—”

He never finished, because two hands appeared on either side of his head and viciously snapped his neck to the side with inhuman strength.

Before the div fell dead to the ground, Soraya’s rescuer jumped lightly off his back and stood with her hands on her hips.

“There you are,” Parvaneh said.

Soraya remained frozen on the ground at first, her mouth hanging open. “I thought you left me,” she said as she rose. “You disappeared.”

Parvaneh shook her head. “I transformed. Pariks all have one other form they can take.” To prove her point, she suddenly vanished—or so Soraya thought until she noticed a dark gray moth hovering where Parvaneh had been standing. In another moment, the moth was gone, and Parvaneh reappeared. “I followed you all the way here.”

“You’ve been here the entire time,” Soraya said, more to herself than to Parvaneh.

“I lost track of you for a while, and by the time I found you again, you were sneaking through the tunnels—which was very foolish, by the way.” She gestured to the dead div on the ground. “If I hadn’t heard you, he’d have eaten you by now.”

Soraya looked from Parvaneh’s disapproving stare to the div. And then, to her own surprise, she began to laugh. She didn’t know why she was laughing, exactly—because she’d almost been eaten, or because she was being lectured by a demon, or because she still had an ally and wasn’t trapped alone in this mountain with only Azad for company after all. She was laughing so hard that she couldn’t breathe, and tears began to stream down her cheeks, and now she wasn’t sure if she was laughing or sobbing.