Walking Shadow (The Darkworld Series Book 2) by Emma L. Adams Page A

coldness. The light had dimmed to a faint glow from the flickering blue candles in brackets along the walls, and I didn’t dare conjure my own light. I was in enough trouble as it was. A sense of suffocating claustrophobia descended on me.
    “Nervous?” said the boy.
    I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure I
could
speak.
    “I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “You might get lucky and miss out on the Angel Box, since it’s your first time.”
    “The what?” I croaked.
    His white teeth shone in the darkness as he grinned. “You’ll see.”
    Asshole
, thought the part of me that wasn’t paralysed with terror. I stumbled after Claudia, feet catching on the uneven ground. A steady dripping came from somewhere up ahead, and apart from our echoing footsteps, no other sound penetrated the silence until we reached the foot of the slope, where the passageway branched off in several different directions.
    A bloodcurdling scream rent the silence. I jumped sideways into Claudia, my heart leaping into my throat.
    “What the hell?!” Claudia gasped. In the gloom, her face was deathly pale, a mirror of my own.
    “Don’t worry. We’re not going that way.”
    “I hope not,” she said. “The Venantium solicit torture now, do they?”
    “If it’s deserved.” The boy’s smirk grew more pronounced. I wanted to hit him.
    The passage we took was even narrower than the one we’d come down through, so we had to walk in single file. My breath fogged the air in front of me as I walked on and on, feeling as though we were travelling down into the depths of the earth. But finally the tunnel widened, and a bright light hit my eyes, making me cringe away into the shadows. Once my eyes adjusted, I saw it came from behind a door that stood ajar at the end of the room we were in.
    The room was more like an underground chamber than anything, except the walls and floor were a dark, shiny metal rather than stone. It had an odd, clinical smell, mixed with the scent of earth from the tunnels, and the faint, but unmistakeable aroma of burning.
    Someone was waiting for us, in front of the oblong of light. A tall, spindly man whose face was completely expressionless stepped forwards.
    “Are you Claudia Delaney and Ashlyn Temple?” His voice was as empty of life as his face. I couldn’t tell how old he was - he might have been any age between thirty and sixty.
    “Yes,” said Claudia. I merely nodded. I felt as though I’d left my voice behind in the tunnels.
    “Leave, Jude,” he said, and the boy departed. “Miss Delaney, go into that room.” He pointed to one of the identical metal doors inset in the walls. She nodded and turned away. She was shaking, too.
    “Miss Temple, come with me.”
    A shiver of dread danced across the back of my neck, as he led me into the room with that alien light. The glow turned out to come from a human-sized glass case that stood in the centre of the room. If it hadn’t been for the door which lay ajar, I wouldn’t have said a person could stand in there without suffocating.
    “Have you ever been here before, Miss Temple?” said the man.
    “N-no,” I said, my legs weakening.
    “Then you will be unfamiliar with the Angel Box. This is a device used as a magic scanner. I’ll need you to step inside it. You will not be harmed.”
    The last thing I wanted to do was step inside that box, but what choice did I have? It muted all sound the instant I entered, and I felt the mad urge to scream in terror. I clenched my fists instead, willing myself to stay calm. The eerie light was all around me, and if I was Leo, I might have made jokes about alien abduction. As it was, I shut my eyes and tried to pretend I was somewhere else. It didn’t work.
    I must have stood there for at least ten minutes whilst he walked around me, examining me from every angle. A gap above the door meant I could still breathe normally, but panic made my chest tight. I kept my eyes on my feet to avoid looking at my examiner’s blank