The compass spun wildly in the half-second before a pair of massive jaws clamped down on my arm; the Autoplate Pauldron and Voltsmith’s Grasp took the worst of the crushing bite, and I felt needle-thin teeth shattering and snapping, but though the armor held, a few fangs plunged into my arm like daggers.

  Howling Moray: Level Forty-Two Boss

  Current Difficulty: Trivial

  The Howling Eel hunts the upper reaches of the Watery Grave, keeping even the most powerful of interlopers at bay through its knowledge of the labyrinthine tunnels and its unique amphibious nature.

  Camouflaged - This boss blends in with its surroundings.

  Venemous - This boss’s attacks apply the Venom debuff, causing damage over time.

  Puncturing - This boss’s attacks inflict the Hemorrhage debuff, causing injuries to bleed more and heal at a reduced rate through Body leveling and magical healing.

  The boss’s scream echoed around the caverns, multiplying and bouncing across each other as it dragged me away from Tori and Bobby. I revved the Trip-Hammer, but the weapon’s torque spun me around almost as much as it did the two spiked hammers. The impact was enough to force the gigantic, yellow-green eel to drop me; I hit the cavern floor with a sickening crunch. Two more skeletal corpses lay next to me, but I didn’t have the time or energy to examine them.

  The water was only a foot or so deep. I splashed to my feet and raised the hammer. The motor whirred as I took in the half-dozen holes in the ceiling; the lowest was at least ten feet up, and about four feet across.

  The gigantic eel was gone.

  A wave of pain washed over me, and I sucked in a breath as I looked at the broken teeth stuck in my bicep. The veins near the puncture wounds were already turning an angry dark red. I reached for the needle-sharp spikes, then stopped.

  This was a trap, but there wasn’t a correct solution. I could pull the teeth out. If I did that, they’s probably tear on the way out, and I’d start bleeding. The Hemorrhage debuff would kick in, and I didn’t see a way to stop it. Or I could leave the fangs stuck in my arm. It’d stop the bleeding, but they were already pouring poison into my body. It’d kill me just the same as the bleeding did. Either way, I was in trouble. The Howling Moray didn’t even need to fight me; it just needed to leave me here to die.

  The only way to win was to get out of this cave, but even though the rocks were rough and full of handholds, my arm wouldn’t support my weight, and the ground felt solid. I didn’t have a way out—and without a way out, all I could do was wait.

  Wait…and think.

  I spread my Voltsmithing supplies on the floor.

  “If you’re done screaming, Miss Vanderbilt, let’s figure this out,” Bobby said.

  Tori was, in fact, done screaming. She was a Level Forty-Six Dungeon Delver, dammit, not some scared teenager. Or maybe both, but now wasn’t the time to be scared. Now was the time to be decisive. She took a deep breath, then another one, as screams and howls echoed through the labyrinthine tunnels in the stone.

  Her feet were on concrete, and she had an ally—Tori wasn’t going to drop everything to trust Bobby Richards or anything, but for now, they were on the same side. The breathing helped more than she expected. “We need to make a play. Do you have any way to get in there and go after the boss?” she asked.

  “No. Bobby Richards is fast, but climbing? That’s not my thing. I’ve got nothing to get us into those caves,” Bobby said.

  Tori thought for a while. Some of her favorite raid bosses in the MMOs she’d loved were the ones where her class got to do something weird—whether it was caster-tanking, using movement spells to move a puzzle piece through a death maze, or teleporting the entire raid group out of danger. The screams faded as she stared up at the rock wall, leaving only silence—and the crashing of small waves far below.

  Hal would have figured this out by now, she thought. Then again, most of her experience was in MMOs, where the real challenge wasn’t the fight. It was getting twenty people to do everything correctly. Hal was good at on-the-fly thinking—like when he’d told her to throw him onto the Beast Glatisant in the—

  “I’ve got it!” Tori said.

  “Got what?” Bobby asked.

  She didn’t reply. Instead, she cast Push.

  The thing I’d built was…messy.

  That was the most charitable way to describe it, but I didn’t have time for anything cleaner. The veins closest to my wounds were blackening, and the red had crept closer to my fingers; the Voltsmith’s Grasp was already harder to flex into a fist.

  I stared at the compass; it kept spinning between two points. One had to be the Howling Moray, but I couldn’t figure out the second. Neither was moving, though, and that was a concern.

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  But it was a concern for another time. I checked the Voltsmith’s Grasp’s Charge level.

  Stored Charge 15/15

  At least that was maxed out; that’d buy me something. It might not be much, but it’d be better than nothing.

  I took a deep breath and revved the Trip-Hammer.

  The device I’d built activated, the engine revving and howling, and both hammers tried to spin, but couldn’t. Strain built up in the thick steel axle as it pushed against the rock wall, also unable to move. I could almost see it bend—something had to give.

  I stood on the other end of the crude teeter-totter I’d slammed together, hoping it’d be the hammers and not the axle—and that the next thing to give wouldn’t be my skull.

  The engine screamed. Something clicked. Both hammers finally spun, whipping through the air and thudding into the far end of the improvised lever. The steel bars bent from the impact. Huge slivers of metal tore free from the impact plate. And I catapulted into the air.

  I almost made it.

  My stomach landed on the edge, feet hanging precariously over the pit with the skeletons below. I strained and pulled, inching myself up into the tunnel; it took a few seconds of squirming like a worm on a hook before I heaved myself all the way up. The tunnel would be just tall enough for me to walk through if I bent over and kept my head down, but it wouldn’t be big enough for the Trip-Hammer to be of any use.

  That was fine, though, because the Trip-Hammer was currently idling in the bottom of the Howling Moray’s feeding chamber, ten feet down, and I wasn’t going back for it.

  I had the Voltsmith’s Grasp, two rail gun shots, and a handful of toxic fangs jammed into my arm that were pumping more and more Venom into my body.

  It was time to go hunting before I ran out of time to hunt.

  The Rose-Tinted Compass was a life-saver.

  Without it, I’d have been lost in the maze—as it was, I doubted I’d be able to find my way back to the feeding cave on a time limit. But I knew exactly where I needed to go, thanks to the needle. It kept me on track: a left here, then two rights, then straight even as the main path whirled in a corkscrew.

  I was closing in on something. The Venom was closing in on my chest and neck. It felt like a war—like two armies fighting in my body. One of them was my Body points, rallying to try to keep me alive. The other was the Venom. It was a four-way race between the poison, bleeding, my Body points, and me leveling. And right now, the Venom was winning.

  Something had to change. The needles had to go—even if I bled out, if it’d give my Body a chance to beat the Venom, I had to take it. I closed my free hand around the first fang and pulled.

  Sure enough, it ripped muscle and skin on the way out, and a spurt of blood followed it before trailing off to a trickle. I took a deep breath, gritting my teeth and steeling myself for another round, and yanked out a second, then a third. With every pull, my head grew lighter, and instead of pulling the final two, I left them in place. Any more blood loss would be disastrous, and I needed to ride the line between death by poison and death by bleeding.

  If I could balance on the knife’s edge, I’d be okay.

  If.

  Something screamed in the distance. I checked the compass; the arrow rotated between a point in front of me and one far behind me, but I had no way of knowing which was the Howling Moray and which was…whatever else I was tracking.

  I pushed forward, the Voltsmith’s Grasp held in front of me like a cannon ready to fire and my free hand braced against the tunnel’s wall to keep myself steady. My only hope was that the Howling Moray would be up ahead, or that the tunnel I was in would lead me back toward the point behind me.

  As I closed in, the scream echoed through the cavern a second time. It sounded like Tori—or did it? I couldn’t be sure; then again, I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t her, either.

  Beth had screamed like that once.

  She’d been playing near the ditch. Dad had always told us not to play in the ditch. The currents were too strong, and the banks too steep. But Beth? Well, she’d never been the best listener. Even at six, she was already a stubborn girl, and one whose imagination got away from her at the best of times.

  Her scream was still a shock, and so was the frantic splashing.

  I ran over. She wasn’t drowning—not quite—and I figured I could probably stand on the bottom if I had to. I threw myself into the water after her. It was deeper than I’d realized, and the banks were slippery. We got sucked toward a culvert under the farm’s dirt road, hollering and yelling at the top of our lungs.

  Dad fished us out and handed us over to Mom. That was the only time I could remember her swatting our butts. She’d cried the whole time, and so had we.

  I tried to clear my head, but shaking it only made me dizzier. The compass’s arrow was fixed on the closer of the two living threats. If Tori was in trouble, I needed to be there, and I needed to be there right now.

  I staggered down the tunnel, trying not to stumble or fall, but my foot caught a rock, and I overbalanced. My face rocketed toward the blurry ground, and my good hand tried in vain to catch my weight. I splashed into a puddle as the world went black.

  Hal had ruined Tommy’s goddamned life.

  He didn’t want more responsibilities. He didn’t want to act as a security guard and muscle for two weaklings—no matter who they were or how kindly they were treating him now that he’d saved a couple of kids’ lives. And he definitely didn’t want to be on the wrong side of the other gangs who’d worked for The Captain.

  What he wanted was to get the hell out of Museumtown—and maybe Chicago—before the other gangs figured out he’d betrayed the Raging Bulls and The Captain. If he didn’t, it wouldn’t matter how much he insisted that the Bulls were all dead before he cooperated with the Voltsmith, or that his choices were to narc or die. All that would matter was that he’d narced.

  Oh, sure, Hal was rewarding him just fine for finding those god damned twins. And yeah, that reward came with more responsibility. And Jessica, despite being an icy bitch, had forgiven him for the cut that had only half-healed on her face.

  It was almost enough to make him cry.

  But the gangs were definitely going to do something. One of the first rules of the street that Eddie had taught Tommy was that you never took a slight to your rep without fighting back. It was only a matter of time before the clap-back hit, and Tommy didn’t want to be here when it hit.

  Once again, it’d be different if Hal was around to keep him safe. Instead, he was waltzing through some dumbass dungeon with the other two most powerful Delvers in Museumtown, leaving the whole damn place ripe for whichever gang grew the balls to come back first. No, whether Hal rewarding him with more work was a good or bad thing, Tommy was sure that being here was the wrong call. He just needed to get a plan together to get out of Chicago.

  And maybe figure out some insurance in case the gangs came calling.

  He turned. The kid—Zane—was staring at him again, his expression cold and emotionless. He’d been doing that a lot lately.

  One more reason for him to get the fuck out of here.

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