IT WASN’T TOO BAD AT FIRST. IT WAS PITCH BLACK AND THE AIR FELT BOTH COLD AND STIFLING, AND SMELLED strongly of dirt, of course, but Livy had enough room to crawl at a reasonable pace. The frozen ground hurt her knees through her jeans, and roots sticking out the top and sides of the tunnel scraped slimily against her on her way. She’d be a muddy mess by the end of this. But she wasn’t claustrophobic, at least, so she could manage this element.
Then the tunnel started narrowing as it slanted deeper. She bumped her head against roots more frequently, and her shoulders met the side walls. Her breath came faster. This was a little too much like those dreams where you were trying to squeeze yourself through a small opening for some unknown reason. She couldn’t see a thing at first except the path’s lines, which glowed with a faint green light, but her eyes began to adjust after a few minutes, showing her a little more of the tunnel.
Things whisked past in the corner of her vision from time to time— earth-element fae, she supposed. One moved slower than the rest, and she sucked in a frightened breath when she glimpsed it: a tiny skeleton, like a warped four-inch-tall human, who turned a blank skull-faced stare upon her, then dug swiftly into the tunnel wall and vanished.
Onward she crawled. Clods of dirt dropped onto her head sometimes as she brushed through the dangling roots. Or perhaps not exactly dirt: something was moving in her hair. Livy hissed a breath inward and swatted at the back of her head. A clump of soil dropped down to the base of the tunnel, rose up on root-thread legs, and walked away across the back of her hand, leaving a phosphorescent slug-slime trail on her glove. She shuddered, but she was already so mucked up, she didn’t even bother trying to wipe it off.
She kept forward. Where else could she go? Backtracking at this point wouldn’t be any more pleasant than going onward. The lit-up path of bugs stayed with her, at least. It felt a little bit like company. Not that she cared for it at all when a small centipede—or some fae version of it—dropped onto her shoulder, crawled under her collar, and took up residence against her bare skin. She gritted her teeth and slapped at it— gently, not wishing to offend the creature—but it was cagey. Its crawly sensation vanished in the spot she’d last felt it, only to reemerge in a new spot under her clothes a minute later. None of her attempts to find it and get it off her were successful. Another test of her endurance, she supposed. Whimpering, she crawled onward.
Glimpses of white bony fingers and black spiders flickered alongside her as she passed. She tried not to think about them. But they made themselves harder to ignore as she progressed. The finger-bones took to stroking her legs, vanishing when she looked back, giving her only a glimpse before withdrawing into the dirt walls. And on three separate occasions, a spider—not a charming glowing green one, but black and apple-sized and long-legged—dropped down on a silk thread to hang an inch from her nose, forcing her to stop with a yelp. Each one drew upward again, letting her pass, but the centipede hiding in her clothes tickled her each time as if to tease her.
“How goddamn wide could this island even be?” she said aloud after a while. She now squirmed forward on her belly, roots clawing at her on both sides.
Don’t panic. Don’t panic.
Crabapple Island was narrow. So, assuming the geography hadn’t changed too much in the fae world, she had to be getting close to the end of the tunnel, even if she had to crawl the entire width of the island to get from Kit’s shore to the mainland-facing shore on the other side.
A glimmer of purplish-blue at eye level caught her attention. It radiated from what looked like a gemstone in the tunnel’s wall. Though it lay outside her designated line, Livy gave in to curiosity and poked at it with her fingertip.
It dropped away inward, as if there were open space on the other side of the wall. The purplish-blue light streamed from the little hole. Livy put her eye to the spot where the gem had been, and took in her breath in wonder.
This couldn’t be. There weren’t any subterranean cave systems on Crabapple Island; there just weren’t. Anyway, if there were, they’d be full of seawater. But there it lay, fifty feet below her: a cavern from a tale of treasure-hoarding gnomes, all stalactites and rock-hewn stairs and piles of precious stones in a rainbow of colors, glittering softly. In fact, the gems seemed to be the source of the light.
A roar echoed through the cavern, and a green eye as large as her head appeared right up against her hole. Livy shrieked and reared back, hitting the opposite wall of the tunnel. A rock slammed into the hole, blocking the view and quenching the light. Dirt rained down from the impact of the blow, then the earth fell silent again.
Right. Don’t go outside the path. Remember that.
Livy skittered onward.
And upward. The path began to rise up again. She slogged through the frosty grime, grabbing roots to haul herself ahead, her centipede hitchhiker tickling her in the armpit, the hip, the nape of the neck. One arm-length down. Another. Another. Definitely an up-slope to the path now. Oh, please…
A breath of snowy, fresh air swept in, and the tunnel’s height expanded enough for her to rise back up to hands and knees. She moved faster. Another few yards, and after ducking under a tangle of roots, she spotted the exit, a mouth of gloomy night, almost bright after the underground passage.
Livy crawled out of it and rose, feeling as triumphant as a goddess being born from the earth itself, despite the pain in her knees and back. The centipede crawled out the bottom of her shirt and dropped onto the snow. “Thank you,” she muttered in relief, looking down at it. It was only an inch long, and looked about like the ordinary centipedes she’d seen hundreds of times in rotting logs. This one drilled through the snow to vanish beneath, and where it had descended, a tiny mushroom sprouted up within seconds, shining the pale green of glow-in-the-dark toys.
Livy stood still a moment, straightening her spine and looking around at the snowy wilderness. Forest lay behind her, beach in front of her; still no cabins or bridge or other signs of humankind. But from the narrow shape of the waterway she faced, she guessed she had reached the other side of the island and was looking across at the mainland, toward the huge forest where they’d taken Skye.
“Okay.” She closed her hand around the ring, just in case that was necessary. “Now what?”
The path sparkled into view.
The next element was apparently water. Sand dollars and sea stars, glowing blue, blossomed up through the snow to form twin lines. They led into the Sound and vanished a few feet out from shore, under the weight of dark, cold seawater.
This piece of Puget Sound was half a mile across, and over a hundred feet deep through most of it. She didn’t see a boat, a bridge, or scuba gear. Just a path to follow. Underwater.
Livy stared at it in despair.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE