Bloody Kisses by Virginia Nelson, Saranna DeWylde, Rebecca Royce, Alyssa Breck, Ripley Proserpina Page B

secret places of the castle so no one could ever hurt her.
    So no one could ever take her from him.
    He knew that was completely unreasonable, but it didn’t stop him from feeling it. Adam grabbed the ax and handed it to her. “You’re going to need this.”
    “You know just what a girl wants.” She grinned. “I wonder if there are any more weapons stashed in this place. If I’d been thinking, I’d have grabbed that laser scalpel from the lab.”
    “We’re probably better off with old faithful.” He patted the handle. An ax was pretty much the final solution to most problems.
    “Are you going to make me walk back or can you run?”
    “I’ll go with you. I’ll run to get you away from danger. But toward it? No. That goes against my prime directive.”
    She laughed. “I’m not changing my mind.”
    “I know.”
    “We could possibly sail around to the other side. I thought I saw an emergency raft in one of those bins.”
    “That would be safer,” he agreed. “Did you see rappelling equipment, too? The face of this cliff is sheer. I can jump.” He shrugged. “You, not so much.”
    Elizabeth went to the bins and riffled through them, but found only the emergency raft and a pack of flares.
    “They seem to be big on secret passages.” Adam pressed his hands against the walls. He could jolt them like he had in the lab, but he didn’t want to take the chance it would activate some unwanted failsafe.
    “There are instructions.” Elizabeth held up a booklet. “Apparently, when one is at a loss, one should read the directions.”
    Diagrams within the pages made him think that he’d much rather jump off the side of the cliff. He was right, there was another secret passage, but it was beneath him. A freshwater river that connected the various safehouses with the main facility. The door could only be accessed from inside the safehouse.
    But he didn’t like it. Of course, there wasn’t much about any of this he did like. Just Elizabeth, really. “You don’t think they’ve found their way into the river yet?”
    Elizabeth looked from the raft to him, and back to the raft. He knew what she was going to say.
    “Listen, if we go overland, we’ll be out in the open, but that also means there are more places to run. If we take—” he motioned with disgust “—that thing, we’ll be singularly vulnerable. There won’t be anywhere to run, we’ll be underground. We also don’t know what kind of life has developed in this river. This installation has been here in one incarnation or another for a long time. Do you think this is the first incident to happen here?”
    “The river would empty into sea. Surely…”
    “No, look at the diagram. It’s self-contained. Fed by various creeks and underground pools. There are falls here.” He pointed on the diagram. “The water goes into a pool that eventually wraps around to feed the mouth of the river again.”
    Her eyes brightened. “Now you know I have to go down there. This was not the way to change my mind. When I read about the independent ecosystem in the Movile Cave, a place where animals have no eyes, and they live off carbon dioxide, not oxygen, I almost wanted to become a microbiologist so I could go in the cave.”
    “There are probably leeches the size of my arm.”
    “I guess we’ll just have to take care not to fall in.” She grinned. “Come on, let’s go.”
    He helped her unfold the raft and, when they’d gathered everything they needed, he pulled the tab to activate the self-inflating mechanism.
    The floor dropped out from beneath them and they careened into a sulfuric darkness. The raft didn’t hit the water though. They’d been caught by some sort of lever mechanism that lowered them into the water gently and didn’t disturb the flow. Yeah, leeches. “It stinks like someone’s asshole in here,” he muttered.
    Elizabeth held up the lantern, the soft sallow light illuminating their surroundings. The walls were stone and moist, algae