Cold water trickled down the side of Alexander’s face where it was mushed up against an earthen wall. It was dark and cold. Water and mud dribbled along his skin in a steadily falling stream. His legs dangled in mid-air. Something hard and jagged pressed into his stomach.
What? Where was he?
He pulled in a painful breath. That thing that was pushing into the soft part of his belly scraped the bottom of his rib.
He felt around it with freezing hands. Some kind of protrusion of rock.
Panic squeezed his chest tighter. He’d fallen into one of the sinkholes with that monster and a tiger.
The twins had been wrong. The sinkholes weren’t entirely made of sand, but were tunnels of jagged stone, pocked with protuberances and ridges that sand and rain had carved into them over time and right now the only thing that kept him from falling farther down than he had was the narrowing of the walls and the sharp finger of stone that caught him on his lowest rib like a meat hook.
He didn’t think it cut him through his skin, though with all the rain and sandy mud flowing along his body, he couldn’t be sure if any of that liquid was blood.
Pushing his sneakers flat against the slick walls, he tried to get some leverage to push himself up off the protruding lip, but his shoes slid in the flow of water and sand, jarring his rib harder back onto the stone.
Pain exploded across his frame, clenching every muscle up tight, stealing the oxygen from his squeezed lungs.
As he cried out, something came alive above him. The gray of night and storms revealed brief flashes of the monster above him, shaking its large girth wedged in the hole.
Alexander wrenched his face up as claws came at him, narrowly scraping across his hair. Stuck, the beast shrieked, trying to wriggle down through the passage to get at him. Its misshapen folds of skin looked like wax pushing past the stone.
Alexander ducked his head in, the only way he could get out of reach.
The monster wiggled and stretched, scratching at the walls, dislodging clumps of mud and shearing off thin slices of the stone wall. Eventually it would get through.
Something grabbed Alexander’s ankle from below, and he screamed, remembering the tiger.
“Alexander! Lad, cease struggling afore ye harm yerself.”
So no longer a tiger, but a man again.
“Can ye move down to me?”
Down farther? “I’m-I’m stuck and that monster’s trying to get me.”
The monster in question went quiet.
“It’s not going to harm you. I will not allow it.”
“H-how you going to stop it?” Alexander wasn’t proud of sounding like a scared baby, but he was stuck in a hole with a shapeshifter and a monster that wanted to rip his guts out more than it wanted to get out of the sinkhole. Wait. Shapeshifter.
“Can’t you turn into a bug or something and fly out? Can you go get my dad?” Or better yet, get a gun and shoot the sucker.
Light suddenly filled the gloom, emanating from below, the same kind of pixelated light from when the shapeshifter changed into the tiger before. Good. He was turning into something else to get them out of here.
The monster above started going crazy, thrashing, pushing more mud and water over him. In the light, he could see more clearly how its bulbous width was caught up behind a narrow space where the walls pushed together. Narrow enough for a boy to slip through and narrow enough for the long bones of a tiger to pass also, but too close together for the monster though if it kept shearing off parts of the walls, it would force it wide enough.
Alexander scraped his cheek along the wet rock, angling his face for a better view of what was going on beneath his feet.
The light the man was producing was hard to look into, but even it was fading into a dull glow and the guy hadn’t changed into anything yet. His eyes were screwed shut like he was in pain and there was dark blood covering half his face. Tremors shook through the wide shoulders that were curled inward tight against the hole with no room to expand them. It probably hurt to breathe for such a large guy being stuck like that.
All of a sudden, Alexander didn’t think the guy shifting into something else was such a good idea—not when he was barely conscious. He couldn’t say why, he just had a really bad feeling twisting around in the pit of his stomach.
He swung out his feet, hoping to get his attention. “Hey, stop. You need to stop.”
The guy was really out of it, his eyes rolling back into his eye sockets.
“Hey!” Alexander jammed the toe of his sneakers against the rock and used his other foot to pry his heel out of his shoe and let it drop.
It hit the man in the head. The shapeshifter jerked and the light immediately blinked out, slinging them once more back into darkness.