“You can,” I said, trying to cut through her panic by being firm. “There’s plenty of air.”
“There’s not,” she moaned. “I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!”
“She’s having a panic attack,” J.B. said, and there was the sound of a struggle.
Jude let go of my hand.
“Hey, don’t let go,” I said.
“I have to get out of here, I have to get out, I have to,” Chloe said.
“Hold her still!” J.B. said.
Sheathing my sword so I wouldn’t accidentally stab anyone in the dark, I turned on the spot and reached out in front of me, trying to find the others by sound.
“Get ahold of yourself, girl,” Jude growled.
Jude, J.B., Nathaniel, Samiel and Chloe were nothing but shadows moving in the dark, formless, indistinct. My hand touched someone’s shoulder, but before I could figure out whose it was, I was decked in the face by Chloe’s flailing arms. I staggered backward, hearing J.B. grunt as Chloe hit him, too.
Chloe seemed to lose more control as the moments passed. Her words ceased to have meaning and instead turned into a low keening noise. None of the men was able to get hold of her. A second later, she bolted.
I felt and heard her go by rather than saw. Her boots crunched in the dirt of the cave floor, and her moan trailed behind her as she ran.
“Chloe!” I shouted, and scrambled after her.
“Don’t go haring off after her, idiot!” Beezle said.
Samiel shot past me, nothing more than a sense of a body moving in space. I knew it was him because he didn’t call her name. I ran behind both of them, deeper into the black.
“Maddy, wait!” J.B. cried.
I should have waited. That was the whole point of the chain, so that we would not lose one another in the darkness. But all I could think was that Chloe was panicking, and Samiel couldn’t call us if he needed help.
Then Chloe screamed, and my blood ran cold.
“Chloe!” I called, running harder. Beezle dug his claws into my shoulder so he wouldn’t fall off.
She screamed again, and it sounded farther away—much farther than she should have been able to run.
“It sounds like something’s carrying her away,” Beezle said.
“I know,” I said.
The rest of the guys were running behind me and soon caught up. We were sprinting together like a pack, me in the center, J.B. and Nathaniel on each side, and Jude behind. The cave tilted downward, and there was a faint illumination ahead.
“Chloe! Samiel!” I called.
“Samiel can’t answer you,” Beezle said.
“I’m hoping he’ll come back to us,” I said.
“He won’t come back if his woman is in danger,” Jude said.
“What’s that ahead?” J.B. asked. “I can see some kind of halo.”
“The walls of the cave are lit,” Nathaniel said.
The cave was gradually getting brighter, the walls shot through with twinkling veins of luminescence. It was a tremendous relief to be out of the suffocating dark.
It was less of a relief when we came to the place where the cave was split.
“Great,” I said, looking at the two identical paths. “How are we supposed to know which way they went?”
Jude sniffed the air. His nose wasn’t quite as good when he was in human form, but it was still better than an ordinary person’s.
“Samiel went this way,” he said, pointing toward the right-hand cave. He then pointed to the other tunnel. “Chloe and some kind of reptile-mammalian thing went that way.”
“Reptile-mammalian thing?” Beezle said.
“I don’t know what it is, but that’s what it smells like,” Jude said.
“I don’t want to meet anything that fell off two branches of the evolutionary tree,” Beezle said. “Let’s go away from the multispecies monster.”
I was less worried about the reptile-mammalian thing than I was about the fact that Samiel and Chloe had entered different passages.
“We have two choices,” I said. “We can all stay together and go after Chloe, then come back here to try and find Samiel after we retrieve her.”
“And the second option is that we divide forces,” Nathaniel said. “The answer is no.”
“I second that,” J.B. said.
“It’s impractical for us to move like one big amoeba and leave Samiel alone,” I said.
“I’ll go after Samiel,” Jude said. “And then I’ll find you. I can follow your scent easily enough.”
“Thank you,” I said, keeping my eyes firmly on his face. His clothes were somewhere in the woods. “I’m going after Chloe. You can go with him or go with me,” I said to the other two, and I started jogging down the tunnel on the left side.
“I don’t think it’s good for you to be friends with Jude,” Beezle said. “He enables your bad decisions.”
“No,” I said. “Jude trusts me, which is more than I can say for anyone else.”
“I trust you,” J.B said, running up on my left.
“You just don’t think I can do anything without you there to keep me safe. And that’s what Nathaniel thinks, too,” I said, as the angel silently joined us. He ignored my jibe. “Nothing to say?”
“A wise man knows when to keep his own counsel,” Nathaniel said.
“And you know that nothing you say will stop her, anyway,” Beezle said. “Wait—I just realized we went down the tunnel of the freaky combination animal thing. I don’t want to go down this tunnel. I want to go with Jude.”