Lightning.
“Lightning?” I said, and that buzzing came again, setting a riot of understanding through my brain.
Not lightning.
Electricity.
Well, shit on my cowboy boots, this was not going to be so simple as I’d hoped. I got the barest warning down my spine and leapt away from the chain I was on to a neighboring one. The one I’d left lit up, buzzing like mad as electricity rumbled down it and I spun in a full circle on my new lifeline.
I scrambled to swing to the next chain, grabbing hold as the metal around me began to light up in intervals. Part of my brain said this was stupidly like the Culling Trials—a game to beat. But there was no pattern to the pulsing electricity, at least not that I could see yet.
The other part said that at some point whoever was pressing the buttons would just hit the “fry them all” lever and the electricity would run through all the chains.
“Hang on, Gregory!” I hollered as I got closer. Not that he couldn’t see I was coming, but I could feel his fatigue.
Whatever was being done to him was draining him of energy. And some of it was me borrowing his abilities. Which were helping me even then.
I caught hold of one of the chains he was wrapped in, and slid down it, my fingers burning as I gripped at the last second to stop my freefall.
His head rolled, and I could see he was fully bound in not only ropes that held his wrists and ankles tightly, but a collar made of steel that wrapped loosely around his neck. Anger burst through me like the electricity that danced around us. I yanked my knife free and slashed through the ropes first, then with a hard backswing, drove the knife between the links attached to his collar.
“Hurry,” he groaned as the knife stuck against the steel.
“It won’t break.” I shook my head and then looked upward. The hole was well above us and a long climb no matter how I looked at it. But if I couldn’t get Gregory’s collar off, it wouldn’t matter. Unless . . .
“I’m going to use a spell, but we have to time it just right.” I stuffed my knife away and helped Gregory up so we were hanging onto the same chain. I checked the trajectory of the electricity, grabbed the chain next to us, and pulled him with me. The chain we’d been on lit up, went dull again, and I grabbed it, swinging us back. That would buy us some time. Not a lot, but maybe enough.
“Hurry up!” Ethan yelled. “We’ve got incoming!”
Of course we did.
I pulled my wand out and pointed the tip at the connection between the chain and Gregory’s neck. “Soon as it loosens, I’m going to yank it away. We can’t let it touch your skin, okay?”
Gregory nodded. “I trust you.”
Crap, I wasn’t sure I trusted me, not with spells. But it was what we had.
I held the wand tip about six inches up the chain, away from Gregory. “Lavium braken,” I said as I did the whole swirl backward thing. The tip of the wand glowed, but it was black, not red. Sweet baby jeebus, why did it have to be black?
“Hang on, this could go really, really bad,” I said as the droplet of black hung for a moment off the tip of the wand and then dripped onto the chain.
The metal disintegrated just like with Ethan’s spell, and my black spell spread outward—fast. Way faster than Ethan’s. It was at Gregory’s neck in seconds, and I yanked on either side of the collar hard, shattering the last bit of metal before the rapidly spreading spell could touch his skin. Down it went, into the abyss below us.
I looked up as my black spell raced up the chain, leaving a bit of ashy dust behind.
“Thanks,” Gregory grumbled, and then I was dragging him upward as my eyes tracked the patterns of the electricity dancing amongst the chains.
“Why aren’t they just killing us?”
I pulled Gregory up, so he was on my back. He clung weakly to me. “You want them to?”
“It’s a prison. Not the Culling Trials. Why not just blast us? This doesn’t make sense.” Sweat made my hands slippery as I fought to climb the chains, my back and legs burning with the exertion. I couldn’t take any of his abilities anymore. It would eat into his reserves. Gregory’s exhaustion was real, and I did what I could, sending him energy until he patted me on the head. “Enough. I’m awake now.”
“Good, I was starting to get tired,” I said as I counted the beats of the electricity lighting up the space around us and moved us to the left, swinging onto another chain while our original one lit up again, then grabbed hold of it once it had gone quiet and kept on climbing.
So far, as bad as it was, this prison wasn’t as hard as the trials.
I was weirdly disappointed.
And really, that was the moment I knew I needed to have my head examined. Maybe all Chameleons really were crazy. Maybe we all needed a thrill or something? A fix of adrenaline?
I didn’t know and didn’t really care right then.
Because we were nearly out. I could almost reach the edge of the hole, but I didn’t dare. I didn’t know if Ethan’s magic had finished doing its thing.
“Ethan?” I hollered up.
“Ethan?” Gregory’s hold on me tightened. “What in the name of—”
“You said you trusted me, I’ll explain later,” I said then hollered again. “Ethan, little help here!”
“Busy!” he yelled, and there was a distinct sound of bootsteps, a grunt, and a thump of a body hitting the ground.
I stared up at the empty space. Gregory’s hand’s tightened around my shoulders.
“Wild, I think . . .”
I didn’t get to hear what he thought because the timing of the electricity changed.
“Gregory, hang on!” I yelled as the electricity arced through the chain I was hanging onto and every other chain around us. Damn, this was a mean end game.
I threw us off, out into mid-air, missing the shocking jolt that I had no doubt would have killed us.
“Wild, you got wings?” Gregory yelped as we fell straight down. Not touching any of the chains.
“Nope!”
We fell, the electricity danced, and I waited.
The seconds felt like eternity and then the electricity finally died.
I reached for the dangling chains, my fingers slipping over them—two fingers snapping—before I finally got a hold on the very bottom of a chain, literally hanging from the bottom links.
We swayed there a minute. “I don’t think they’ll send any more electricity through.”
Gregory’s weight pulled on me, and I tried to reach up with my bad hand to pull us farther up but even clenching that hand was nearly impossible. “Shit.”
“This is a problem,” Gregory said. “You can’t climb?”
My last two fingers on my right hand were definitely broken, and I struggled to breathe through the sudden sharp pain now that the moment was wearing off. Who knew such small bones could cause such immense hurt?
“Give me a second. I’ll try again,” I said as I hung there, breathing hard.
Gregory climbed off my back and up the chain, nimble as ever. He turned upside down so we were kind of face to face. “Wild, we’re a team. I’ll get help.”
And just like that, we might as well have been back in the Culling Trials. I smiled up at him. “Ethan’s at the top—his father made him kill Colt and help Helix take the rest of you. I trust him. But his magic ate through the floor, and if it’s still active, that would not be good to touch. Same magic as the one I used to break the chain.”