If her deepest, darkest nightmares could chew a place up and projectile vomit it out, it would be this cave.
Adrianne cringed as something buzzed by her left ear. “How much farther?”
Gabriel tightened his grip on her hand. “Almost there.”
“You said that an hour ago.”
He snapped his fingers and a small flame appeared in his palm, which allowed her to see that he was side-eyeing her. “We’ve only been in here twenty minutes.”
“Feels like much longer,” she grumbled.
With a shake of his head and a smirk, he snapped his fingers again and their only source of light vanished.
The dark was better, he’d explained. He could see just fine and could guide her through the tunnels, and her lack of sight was a bonus in this situation.
And based on the scurrying and buzzing sounds going on around her, she couldn’t really disagree.
The tunnel was only about an inch taller than Gabriel and not much wider. If she spread her arms out, she thought she could touch both sides of it.
Not that she’d do that. The walls were teeming with life. She could hear it and smell it. The whole thing reminded her of that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where Kate Capshaw had to rescue Indy from the bug-covered cavern.
Indiana Jones would’ve died on Adrianne’s watch. Of that, she was certain.
She shuddered at the thought. Or maybe she was just shivering from the temperature drop.
While it was somewhere around seventy-five degrees in the forest, it was a good twenty degrees cooler in this godforsaken tunnel. Wet, too. The smell of stagnate water in the walls suggested that when the rains came, this tunnel had the potential to flood.
So, basically, the scariest environment imaginable for someone like her.
Gabriel tugged her closer to his side. “OK, we’re here.”
He palmed another ball of flame and Adrianne blinked a few times to adjust to the new light.
The small tunnel they’d been in had dumped out into a larger cavern, and branching off of that were even smaller tunnels that seemed to be lined with rows of cages.
Cages that looked big enough to hold people.
“This is your father’s dungeon?” she whispered.
He snorted as he closed the door to the (hopefully) secret tunnels behind them. “No. The real dungeon is in the basement of the keep. This is where my father dumps the prisoners he’s done with.”
She didn’t even want to contemplate what done with meant in this scenario, because based on the smell that was currently seeping into her nostrils, she’d say not every one of these prisoners was still alive. A few of them might’ve even died a long, long time ago.
“Are there guards down here?” she asked.
“Most of the guards are in the main dungeon. There’s usually one guard assigned for this place, and he might come through a few times a day, but no more than that. And it’s usually one of my father’s worst guards, or someone he’s trying to punish, because nothing much ever happens down here. The prisoners are usually too weak to try anything. Nothing we can’t handle. We just have to stay far away from the main tunnel that leads up to the keep.”
He said all that like he was trying to reassure her. She did not feel reassured. She was going to tell him so, too, but a soft whimpering sound caught her attention.
Adrianne cocked her head and followed the sound to a little pit of black…goo in front of one of the tunnels. She pointed with her pinky. “What is that?”
Gabriel squinted in the direction she pointed, then frowned. “Hound.”
Adrianne recoiled, remembering the last time she’d seen a hellhound. She’d been thirteen and had watched helplessly as one of them tried to kill Mischa. Then Lane had (rather inexplicably) made its head explode with nothing more than a scream and it wasn’t so scary anymore.
But as the hound flailed, trying and failing to pull itself out of the goo pit, Adrianne got a good look at it.
“Oh, I think it’s a baby,” she said. “Why is there a baby hellhound down here?”
And even more important was the question she was too scared to voice—where was its mother?
“It looks like the runt of the litter. Its mother most likely dumped it in the pit to die. She probably couldn’t take care of her other babies and one that needed so much attention. You know, survival of the fittest and all that.”
So, it had a few problems and its mother dumped it somewhere to die?
Adrianne’s eyes filled with tears. She related to this poor little hellhound more than she’d like to admit.
She impatiently brushed at her eyes and moved around Gabriel to the pit. He grabbed her upper arm. “What the hell are you doing?”
Duh, she thought. “I’m pulling it out.”
Gabriel looked at her like she’d lapsed into a different language. “It’s a hellhound,” he said slowly.
“Yes, I heard you. But I’m not going to leave it to die in there because its mother didn’t want it.”
Gabriel’s expression softened. He knew exactly where she was coming from. She’d been that hellhound, tossed into the pit by her mother, and Harper and her father had pulled her out. Given her a chance at a real life, a real family. This little hellhound deserved the same.
After what must’ve been a long, heated battle in Gabriel’s head between his desire to protect her and his desire to make her happy, he let out a resigned sigh. “Fine,” he said. “Take off your T-shirt turban. We’ll wrap that around it to keep the gunk off us when we pull it out.”
She quickly complied, and after a few minutes of grunting (Adrianne, because this baby was much heavier than she’d initially thought), cursing (Gabriel), and nervous squealing (the hellhound), she found herself flat on her back with a goo-covered baby hellhound on her chest.
Gabriel made a move to grab it, but stopped short when it began wagging its little stub tail and licking her face. “I’ll be damned,” he muttered. “Looks like you made a friend. Congrats. It’s a girl.”
Adrianne giggled as she tried to dodge the little beast’s aggressively joyful kisses. “Geez, I guess so.” She patted her new friend’s back. “OK, OK, sweetie, I get it. And you’re very welcome.”
It took a few minutes, but Gabriel was finally able to pull the squirming hound off her and help her to her feet.
She tossed the ruined T-shirt into the pit and glanced down at the baby.
For a hellhound, she was oddly adorable.
At his current height, the top of her head was about knee-level on Adrianne, and if she hadn’t missed her guess, she weighed about fifty pounds. She had a round little potbelly, wiry black fur, and a head and paws that looked about a size too large for her body. She clearly still had quite a bit of growing to do.
But what Adrianne found really endearing was her bulldog-like under bite and the soft, adoring gaze she was aiming at her. The fact that the hound was wiggling with joy was also pretty cute.
“I’m going to call you Fluffy,” she said.
She wiggled faster, clearly on board with the name.
“Fluffy?” Gabriel asked, raising that smartass brow of his.
She shrugged. “When I was growing up, I always wanted a dog named Fluffy. But my mom didn’t want to deal with the mess.”
“That is not a dog. And she definitely doesn’t look like a dog named Fluffy.”
“Well, what would you call her?”
“I wouldn’t.”
Adrianne rolled her eyes. “Then it’s a good thing she’s mine, not yours.”
Fluffy took that as her cue to look Gabriel right in the eye defiantly and fart. Loudly. Then she blew out a snort, tossed his head, and leaned her fat little body against Adrianne’s leg.
Adrianne burst out laughing. “Well, I guess she told you.”
Gabriel’s world-weary sigh was in direct contrast with the humor glinting in his eyes. “Now that you have your new pet, can we finally go, wife?”
Adrianne’s breath caught in her throat. Wife. She was actually married to Gabriel. And she was now part demon. And she had a hellhound as a pet.
How had any of this happened?
And more importantly…why in this moment, stuck in a hell dimension in an underground dungeon, did she feel happier and more hopeful about the future than she’d ever felt before?