The Marriage Game

In Which Camila Fights a Cave and Mostly Loses

It took two trembling steps for the sun to vanish.

Camila held her flashlight in one hand, a dagger in the other. The cave was silent as a grave and just as cramped. The walls of the tunnel pressed in on her, the space so narrow her shoulders scraped sharp rocks from the stone walls. It sloped downwards at a steep angle.

Her hands shook. Muscles she'd spent years training were weak and trembling, struck with nerves. One wrong step, Rosa had warned her, and the whole cavern could collapse.

She walked with terrified precision.

Camila wondered how long Rosa, Zora, Alex, and Declan would wait for her. A week? Maybe two? She had enough water for the first ten days if she rationed.

Without the sun or a watch, she couldn't track the passage of time. Camila began to count her steps. They were less careful now. She figured if the cave was going to collapse, it would have already.

She was starting to feel bored when the ground vanished beneath her. Her arms windmilled, she stumbled, fell, and for one, terrifying second, her body hung suspended in the air.

And then her hand closed around the jagged edge of the cliff.

Camila hung there, legs scrambling for purchase on the pockmarked rock wall, letting her breathing slow to its normal rhythm. With her werewolf strength, her body felt light as a feather.

"Fuck," she cursed aloud. It echoed across the cavern, a pale imitation of her own angry, frustrated voice. No one responded.

Which, admittedly, was probably a good thing.

The cave was perfectly spherical, as if someone had taken a giant ice cream scoop and dug into the raw earth. The tunnel opened in the center of a curved wall, built from stone so dark in color it was almost black. Faint crystals glittered dully in the pale glow of her flashlight. Far below her, so distant Camila wasn't entirely sure it was real, there was the inky hole of another tunnel lurking at the base of the cavern.

Camila sat down. She dug through the backpack, looking for a rope, a grappling hook, a bedsheet, anything she could use to lower herself into the ravine.

Maybe, with her new werewolf strength, she could climb to the bottom of the cavern. But what if she couldn't get back up? Camila pictured herself, alone and cold, starving to death in a deep pit at the bottom of an underground cave.

She winced.

"Need a hand?"

Camila jumped.

Where before there had been nothing but air and stray specks of dirt, a young woman sat. She dangled her bare feet over the edge, looking up at Camila with eyes as black as oil.

"...How can you help?" Camila set her backpack down. She braced her hands against her hips, a mere inch away from the leather-wrapped handle of her dagger.

The girl moved slowly, like she was underwater. Her pale hair fluttered in a breeze that wasn't there and her moon-white skin glowed softly.

"I'll make a deal with you." Her eyes were wide in innocent curiosity. "Your knives for safe passage."

"And if I don't agree?"

"Then you'll die here. Forgotten and alone." The girl offered Camila her hand. The fingers were small, thin, and white as bone.

Something about the girl sent shivers crawling down Camila's spine. It wasn't the unnatural flow of her movements or the eerily beautiful blond hair, the soft glow of her skin or the way she didn't seem to breathe. It was the empty eyes, the sharp tilt of her smile. Something about her felt malevolent.