I shimmied back into my clothes, tossing on my long coat as I hurried down to the lobby and asked the desk clerk to call me a taxi. He replied it would probably take a good half hour and I’d have better luck heading to Wenceslas Square, so I dashed over. Lo and behold there was one lone taxi pulling up to the curb. A well-dressed man was opening the back door for his wife. “Excuse me.” I waved at them. “Could I please have your cab?”

The man smiled at me. “I’m sorry, but–”

“Life or death,” I insisted, muscling between him and the now-open door.

“We have a meeting,” the woman informed me.

I placed a hand on my stomach, letting out a low moan. “My baby.” I used their momentary confusion to throw myself into the back seat and slam the door. “Bohemia International, please.”

The cabbie eyed me through the rear view mirror.

“Relax. I’m not going to bust out a placenta on your back seat.” Given the breakneck speed of our drive, he didn’t believe me, but he did get me there mostly on time.

I pulled out some Czech koruna from my inside coat pocket, careful not to lose my keycard and phone, and thrust it at him. “This enough?” I was too fuzzy to be certain I had the currency exchange right. He grabbed the money out of my hand at “must seize ridiculous overtipping before idiot tourist realizes mistake” speed.

The Bohemia International was about five times the size of my hotel, featuring rows of stone archways at ground level and a couple of spires for good measure. Hurrying into the lobby and through an airy inner courtyard with liberal greenery and small café tables, I grabbed a glass elevator up to room 614. I wiped the sweat off my brows with the back of my sleeve, smoothed down my hair, and knocked.

The door swung open and I was sucked through.

I plummeted downward, crashing in a heap on a cracked stone floor. Pain spiked through my left hip, stealing the air from my lungs. I rolled onto my back to get a sense of my surroundings. Either the overbooked hotel had resorted to renting out musty caverns or… Well, I wasn’t sure what the “or” could be. None of my research or training so far had made any mention of alternate dimensions. Especially a musty one encrusted with stalactites and stalagmites, pulsing faintly with a dim red light.

I sat up, every gravity-defying inch upwards drawing a hiss out of me. My hip must have fractured. It wasn’t broken because I was able to hobble onto my feet, whereupon my left heel snapped off. I removed my other shoe, tossing them both aside, then took off my stockings as well because they were slippery. Seeing as the ground was rocky but not sharp, I’d manage in my bare feet.

Before I’d taken a half dozen steps, a remarkably well-groomed troll materialized and rushed me, brandishing a spiked club. My arms flew up to block it, which was useless. More helpful was the instinctive full body blast of electricity that forked out toward him. I glowed bright blue from the level of magic I was accessing.

The current snaked around the demon. His body stiffened, convulsing, and he lost his hold on the club. I flinched as it smashed into the ground at my feet, the spike on top splitting the stone to embed itself like Excalibur.

Since the creature was ensnared by my power, I circled it, looking it over. Warty and drab, the sole resemblance this troll bore to its namesake dolls was its shock of bright green hair.

“I’m pressed for time, dude,” I said. The troll bared its rotted teeth at me and I threw an arm over my nose. “Where am I?”

The troll snarled out some words in a language I guessed to be of Northern European origin, since to my ears he sounded like the Swedish chef on The Muppets.

I tapped my ears. “No babel fish. English?”

He spat a phlegmy glob at my feet.

“That attitude won’t get you very far.” I peered into the gloom around me. Whatever portal I’d come through was gone, leaving a lot of stone wall behind me. Up ahead, the cave floor sloped down so I limped over to take a closer look. A dank passageway led off into the pitch black. Probably full of monsters, but it was the only way out of this place.

Since the troll wasn’t going to play nice, and accessing his weak spot meant a lot of time spent weakening his leathery skin, I shot a bolt at one of the heavy pointed stalactites hanging above him. It crashed onto the top of his skull, and while he was literally too bone-headed for the spike to impale him, it still walloped him hard enough to knock him out. His eyes rolled back into his head and he hit the ground with a thud.

“Good talk.”

Keeping one hand on the stone, I hugged the right wall, hoping that I wouldn’t come to any forks in the road. I moved at a snail’s pace, doing my best to ignore the jarring pain with each carefully placed footfall. My shallow breathing was a creepy horror movie soundtrack and the hair on the back of my neck stood on end. If there was ever a place for a hand to reach out and grab me, this was it.

I lost all sense of time down there, hyper-alert for any danger, my pain pulsing in rhythm with the accelerated beat of my heart. The sharp heat of the tunnels pressed in on me, turning my hair into lank strands. I tied my jacket around my waist. A heavy load but I’d need it again if I ever got out of this place.

When I got out.

Eventually, a faint glow of light shimmered up ahead. Half-convinced it was a mirage, I limped toward it, whimpering and glassy-eyed. I came out into a dim, cavernous space, the floor ending in a giant chasm. It was impossible to jump, and I had no rope to swing across. I glared at the black pit. I hadn’t fought demons, and convinced Rohan to do the stupid song, and played nice with the Brotherhood to have my plans for Ari thwarted by a giant hole.

Wings rustled above me.

Fingers of unease slithered down my spine. There was a reason no one ever looked up. I hunched my head into my neck, tilting my entire upper body backward to stare up to the top of the rock wall disappearing in the inky darkness.

I squinted at the pinprick of light at the top. Going back wouldn’t get me anywhere and going forward would end in a “Wile E. Coyote off a cliff” impersonation. I considered my options, quickly realized I didn’t have any, felt for my first toehold, pulled myself up, and screamed. Fractured hips and rock climbing were not a match made in Heaven.

It was incredibly slow going. Two minutes in and sweat ran in rivulets between my shoulder blades. Three minutes in and my vision started to tunnel. Five minutes in and my entire body shook like a nine-point earthquake. I glanced down, finding myself maybe ten feet from the ground. Nowhere close to where I had to get to, but far enough up that I hugged the wall, frozen. Except for my hip joints that blazed in agony.

I was well and truly screwed. And I didn’t mean the fun kind that ended with Rohan’s hands on every part of my body. At least the troll wouldn’t eat me since given the slight curve of the rock wall, I’d be falling straight into the Pit of Despair. Hopefully the chasm was deep enough for the fall to immediately kill me because if I had to lay at the bottom with a broken neck until I dehydrated to death, I was going to be extremely pissed off.

A deep rumbling shook the cavern, raining a shower of small stones down upon me, and knocking me sideways. I swung out, my left arm windmilling as a zmey, a three-headed dragon demon, roared up out of the darkness.

I curled the fingertips of my right hand into the rock face, willing myself to hang on for a few more seconds. Why climb when I could fly? I whistled sharply. “Taxi!”

The zmey flew closer.

Come on. A bit more.

As it opened one of its mouths to belch fire at me, I launched myself off the wall with a scream. The zmey jerked its head up, its flame going wild above my head.

My hand slid over its scales, slicing open my palm. Slick with blood, I grappled for purchase along its body, managing at the last second to grab a back leg. The hot swampy stench of dragon undercarriage assaulted me. I gagged, swallowing against the metallic bile in my throat, hanging on for dear life, one-handed, my feet dangling over the chasm.

The demon shook me harder and harder, trying to dislodge me.

I blasted sharp bursts of current from the top of my head at its underbelly while tugging on its leg, trying to steer it up to the top of the rock wall.

The zmey roared in anguish and dove into a tight spiral, its screeches decimating my poor ears.

Soupy wind gusted against my face, blowback from the flapping of its massive wings. I squinted against the grit blinding me. Deeper and deeper we descended into the chasm, the light growing darker and more menacing. At least adrenaline had pushed my pain back.

A bit of blackened demon flesh plopped onto the top of my head. I yelped, jerking it off me hard enough to crack my neck. Blood streamed down my arm, now shaking with the exertion of hanging on to its flailing leg one-handed.

Blasting the dragon only encouraged it to speed up.

The zmey kicked at me with its other leg, flexing its talon and catching my firing arm. A sharp heat blazed up my skin, black dots blurring the edges of my sight. With a hard buck, the demon dislodged me. Totally enveloped in darkness, I fell the last few feet to the ground.

I landed on something spongy. Partially eaten corpses. I slid in a nest of bones and decomposing bodies that I couldn’t see, but would be able to smell for the rest of my life. It smelled like sulfur and my veggie drawer at home before Mom threw out the broccoli she’d made me promise to eat that I’d let go frothy with mold. Burying my face in my shirt did nothing.

The darkness was so all-encompassing that I started hyperventilating, convinced I couldn’t breathe. That did little against the smell and nothing for my dizziness.

The faintest scrape of the demon’s talons on bone gave away its position off to my right. Unable to rely on my sight, my hearing was jacked to the point of this merest whisper trumpeting like Dolby surround.

I pushed forward in the opposite direction, hands outstretched, wishing the dragon had feathered its nest with, well, feathers instead of people. I groped blindly for the chasm’s wall, but its slime-covered slickness offered no way out.

The zmey changed position, its weight redistribution shifting this garden of people and causing me to sink. Scrabbling for purchase, I seized a rope, using it to pull myself up those precious inches back to the surface.

Not a rope. A length of sweaty, matted hair. Laughter burst out of me like a hyena, wild and manic.

A hot raspy tongue licked up the side of my arm, cleaning away the blood, silencing me mid-chortle. I blasted the giant evil freak. Even if I killed it, I had no clue how I’d climb out of here, but one danger at a time.

The zmey hissed, a sharp pop of sulphur my one warning that I’d displeased it.

I flung a couple of bodies on top of me. Fire rolled over me, the poor corpses I’d pulled over my head barely keeping me from being toasted like a marshmallow. The heat was of an intensity beyond anything I’d ever experienced. I wriggled deeper down into the nest so my clothes wouldn’t melt against my skin. Or my skin melt right off. Even with my lids screwed tight, I’d swear my eyeballs were shriveling up in their sockets like raisins.

Dozens of dead people fingers poked at me, some with fleshy touches, others with boney jabs. My whimpers were audible even over the roar of the flames.

The fire stopped as quickly as it had started, leaving the only sounds my ragged breathing and the demon’s nasally snorts.

I pushed the bodies off me. They’d been so toasted that by this point, they were merely person-shaped piles of ash that fell apart, coating me. Popping my head up, I inhaled a lungful of hot foul air but as I did, my coat slipped off my waist. I fumbled for it, frantic, until I was able to snag a fistful of fabric and clutch it to my chest. It wasn’t a special coat, and I couldn’t say why the thought of losing it filled me with such panic.

How long was I trapped listening to the demon snacking away? A minute? An hour? Long enough for death to howl a lonely dirge in my head. I used to think my death would occur after a long life filled with dance. I wasn’t stupid enough to think tap would ever make me rich, but between the odd Broadway show, performing globally in festivals, and teaching, I’d be okay. More than that, I’d be happy. Living my dance dreams, I would have taken on the world and soared.

When all that came crashing down due to my torn Achilles, I imagined my death a lot then, too. Probably why, when I became Rasha, the fatality rate didn’t freak me out.

Even so, I’d allowed myself to believe that as a hunter, my death would occur in a moment of badass heroism. Hailed and heralded by fellow Rasha for all time, I’d gone so far as to create the perfect “Nava, You Irreplaceable You” playlist. I’d never imagined my death as the pointless end it now seemed fated to be with my disappearance proving a mystery and my body never being recovered. Coldness seeped into every inch of me. I couldn’t stop trembling.

I didn’t want to die alone in the dark.

Green light filled my vision, bright and shocking against the utter black as the zmey turned all six of its eyes my way. There was enough light from those gleaming peepers to see the puff of smoke from its nostril flare and the many sharp teeth as it opened its mouth, sucked in a breath and–

I fell onto a thick cream carpet.

It was super plush, so I relaxed on it for a second to catch my breath and decide if I was actually alive or in some afterlife waiting room. I blinked, the room swimming into focus. I lay between a bed and a chair with a tiny side table and standing lamp. A flat screen TV stood on a long table across from the bed. Best of all, there was no stone cavern and no demon.

As I struggled to sit up, an invisible force shoved me back onto the ground.

Whoops, spoke too soon.