Demon Forged

as far as they could recall: After five hundred yards, this tunnel opened up into a large chamber, which split into three directions. The tunnel on the right, they’d warned, was eventually a dead end, but with enough chambers to hide the nephilim. They’d taken the left tunnel, which in turn broke off into other directions, tiny crawlspaces, abrupt chasms.
    Beside her, Alejandro inhaled, and looked to her with a question in his eyes. “Human?”
    His nose was better than hers. Irena could barely detect the scent of human blood and bodies beneath the reek of rot and the wyrmwolves’ stale musk. But it wouldn’t be human—it was the nephilim. The scent would give them a clearer trail to follow. Irena motioned for Alejandro to take the lead.
    The noise from outside slowly faded, the screams, thunder, and explosions faint in the background. The corridor narrowed until Alejandro was forced to walk at an angle to make his shoulders fit.
    Remembering Khavi’s prediction, Irena frowned. “How would a dragon fit through this space and find the portal?”
    “Perhaps there is another entrance,” Alejandro said. “Or a very small dragon.”
    Alice sighed. “Never would I have imagined myself saying this, but I miss the friendship you shared, when you only spoke to each other in French. How absurd I feel, following a conversation in which one half is Russian and the other Spanish.”
    Alejandro spared a brief glance back. “And now more than half. You choose Russian?”
    “I feel absurd, not foolish. I know better than to poke a bear with a fox’s blade.”
    Irena grinned. The tunnel widened, and she felt Alejandro’s relief as he once again had more room to maneuver. Ahead, the first chamber arched overhead like a cathedral, and stood empty. The scent led them to the far tunnel.
    Of course, it had to be the one tunnel they knew nothing about, Irena thought.
    With his swords, Alejandro gestured to the right and left. “Shall we close them?”
    Yes. Even if any nephilim hid in chambers or chasms, Irena could seal off the mouths of the corridors and prevent the nephilim from coming around behind them. She called in several tons of steel from her cache and set it at the entrance of the right tunnel. When she pushed her Gift through it, the steel flowed upward, outward, radiating into a thick door. She slammed the edges into the stone, setting the door into place. She repeated it at the left tunnel while Alice set an elaborate trap with her webs at the end of the corridor that had brought them to the chamber.
    They made enough noise, Irena thought, to bring an army of nephilim down on them . . . but none came to investigate the sounds or the use of her Gift. Dense stone could muffle psychic senses—but if the nephilim hadn’t heard her ramming steel into stone, they’d have to be much deeper into the mountain.
    Or in human form.
    When the nephilim used their demon forms, their psychic scent didn’t match the humans’—and the body rejected their presence, as it might fight off a sickness. The longer the sickness, the longer the nephilim needed to heal once they reverted to human form.
    Perhaps the nephilim had not been in and out of these caves using the portal. It might simply be the safest location to recuperate.
    Alejandro must have been thinking the same. “I had expected them to seek us out.”
    Irena nodded. “They had guards at the mouth of the cave; I cannot imagine they would not have more inside, particularly if their brethren are vulnerable.” It was what Irena would do, if she had to watch over weakened or injured comrades. “If they are in an easily defensible position, they’ll wait for us to come to them rather than leave their brethren alone.”
    And unable to hide their approach, she, Olek, and Alice would walk into an ambush. Alejandro stared down the darkened corridor, his thumbs rubbing against his sword handles. It was, Irena knew, a gesture that meant the same as a stroke of his finger down his beard: He considered alternatives. He weighed priorities.
    Irena slipped into the corridor, listened. Nothing. The darkness deepened at the end of the tunnel; soon, the dark would be absolute, and they’d have to use a light source to see—making them a brighter target than their movements would.
    She already felt completely blind. The narrowness of the first tunnel had convinced her that the portal could not be this way—no dragon could squeeze through. Yet her certainty came from Khavi