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Stringbean detached from the top of Luz’s staff, floating over to curl around her neck with a happy trill. Luz patted her head absently as she peeked over Hunter’s arm at the papers he was holding. “Is this the place?”
“Looks like it,” he replied. “Who knew there were so many abandoned mansions a few miles outside of Bonesborough?”
“It’s the perfect place for a zombie infestation,” she said.
“What?”
“Nothing! Come on, let’s see if it has one of those thingies.” Luz leaned her staff against one of the mansion’s outer pillars. “Amity said they’re usually in the basement, and even if it’s not working we might be able to salvage the parts.”
“Uh, I know?” Hunter followed her, quickly outpacing her due to his taller height. He easily scaled the broken front stairs and help Luz scramble up after him. “I was there too?”
“I figured you were too busy making eyes at Willow,” she teased. He blustered at her, and she grinned up at him before shouldering past him. “Oh, come on, Hunter. Everyone can see it.”
“No they can’t!” His voice broke on the protest, and he hurried ahead to plant himself in front of her with his arms outstretched. “There’s nothing going on! We’re just friends!” The tips of his ears had gone pink, and the blush spread to his cheeks when Luz held his gaze for a few seconds.
“Just friends?” She snickered and punched him in the arm. “Looks more like Advanced Friendship to me.”
“It does not!” Hunter stalked after her. “I don’t even—what’s Advanced Friendship?”
Luz spun around, making finger guns at Hunter as she walked backward through the derelict hall. “It means you wanna kiss her,” she replied in a sing-song voice. Stringbean trilled in agreement, and Hunter’s blush darkened and spread to his forehead. He was so easy to read.
“I...argh.” He covered his face with one hand, like he could wipe his blush away. “That’s got nothing to do with why we’re here today, okay? However any of us feel about Willow isn’t something we need to focus on right now.”
Well, that was technically true. Besides, he still didn’t have a new palisman, so there’d be plenty of time to tease him on their flight back. Luz gave him a lopsided salute and spun around, picking her way through the front hall to a decaying parlor.
“Do you see the entrance to the basement anywhere?” Luz asked, after a fruitless search around the parlor.
Hunter had a set of blueprints in his hands, which he was studying under a shaft of sunlight. “Lilith said most of the mansions on the outskirts were designed by an architect named Ser Pence. They’re all different, but he had a few signatures to his designs. The main basement entrance should be in the kitchen, but there will be two secret passages in other rooms in the house.”
Luz sighed. “Guess we’d better keep searching, then.”
“They should be fairly obvious,” Hunter replied. He rolled up the blueprints and shoved them into the inner pocket of his jacket before crossing the room to study the ornate fireplace.
“As obvious as your crush on Willow?”
“S-shut up!”
Luz grinned, patting him on the shoulder as she scooted past to check the next room. When she’d first met him, she’d never expected to find herself on such friendly terms with the Golden Guard. He’d been so infuriating, so blindly loyal to his uncle...but all of that had changed. He was still infuriating sometimes, of course, but now it felt more like bickering with a sibling than anything else. Maybe this was what it felt like to have a big brother.
The next room turned out to be a sad little library. Well, it was probably a grand library once upon a time, but damp and decay had rotted most of the books and furnishings away. One of the bookcases had fallen forward, revealing a dark passageway behind it. “Hunter! I found it!”
She carefully climbed through the bookcase to peer down in the darkness, as he came up behind her to look over her shoulder. Luz dug her flashlight out of her pocket, shining it on the mossy steps that led down into darkness. “Ready, partner?”
“I’ll go first,” he announced, taking the flashlight out of her hand. Luz rolled her eyes, but followed him without complaining. It didn’t really matter which of them went first, anyway. “Watch your step,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s slippery.”
“Yeah, yeah—whoa!” Luz’s foot slipped out from under her, her arms pinwheeled through the air for a moment, and she slid forward to collide with Hunter.
He managed to keep his feet, reaching back to steady her with a heavy sigh.
“Sorry!”
“Just...try to stay on your feet?”
Luz nodded meekly. “Sorry.” She braced one hand on the mossy wall and carefully stepped down another step, keeping up with Hunter’s slow pace. They reached the mansion’s basement without further incident, and Luz stuck close to his side as they searched the massive room for any sign of machinery.
“Looks like someone already got to it,” Hunter remarked as the beam of the flashlight landed on some broken cogs and piping.
“Yeah.” Luz crouched down to exam the pieces that were left. She hadn’t really expected to fly back out of here with a fully-functioning Abomination-powered generator, but it kind of sucked to be leaving with nothing. “Guess we can cross this one off the list.”
She slowly stood to her feet to make her way back to Hunter, when the ground suddenly lurched. Luz gave a sharp cry as she fell forward, skinning her hands against the mossy stones.
“Titanquake!” Hunter was already by her side, hauling her up by her arm. “We need to get out of here before this whole place collapses!”
Luz nodded in agreement. She grabbed his hand and let him pull her along, headed for the stairs, when the ground suddenly lurched and rolled beneath them. A chunk of rock hit her in the face and she went down, cradling her aching head as the world shook around her.
“Luz? Luz!”
The worried voice snapped her out of her daze. “Hunter?”
“Yeah, can you...hey, you’re bleeding.”
She felt at her face, sucking in a hiss when her fingers touched a painful spot on her forehead. “How bad is it?”
“Probably not too bad.” Hunter was digging in his jacket pockets and finally produced a roll of gauze. “Head wounds always bleed severely, even when the damage isn’t that bad. I’ll wrap it up to keep it clean, then we need to keep moving.”
“How do you know that?” Luz asked, ducking her head as he secured a length of gauze around it. She grabbed a loose end he’d torn off to wipe her face, grimacing at the bloody streaks left in the fabric.
“Oh, you know...training. Come on.”
She let him take her hand again and pull her up, keeping hold of her hand as he led the way toward the staircase. The mansion creaked ominously above them and the ground was littered with debris, but Luz was focused on the shoulders in front of her.
Training? Did he mean first aid training, or….
His scars were no secret. He couldn’t really hide the ones on his face and hands, unless he covered himself up completely. Most of them were from Belos’ possession, but he’d had scars before that. Had they been from combat? From Belos? Training with the guard?
“Luz?”
“Sorry!”
Hunter sighed. “Quit saying that; it’s creeping me out.”
Luz grinned. “Sorry!” She stepped forward to slap him on the back, but he lurched away from her with a hiss of pain. “Hunter?”
“It’s nothing,” he ground out through clenched teeth.
She stared at her hand for a few long seconds. There wasn’t any blood on it, but that didn’t mean anything. Lots of injuries didn’t leave blood behind. “Hunter? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” he shot back shortly. “Let’s go; we’re almost at the stairs.”
“Hunter!”
He sighed, turning back to face her. There was dirt smeared across his face. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”
Luz released his hands to plant her fists on her hips. “That’s not exactly comforting coming from you.”
“Well, I can’t help it if I have a high pain tolerance!”
“That’s exactly why I’m worried! You could have broken bones, but you’re too ‘I used to be the Golden Guard’ to let anybody take care of you!”
He ran both hands through his hair, hissing out a breath between his teeth. “Let’s argue about this when we get outside, where it’s safer. For now—”
The floor shook beneath their feet. Luz let out a squawk of alarm and started to fall backward, but Hunter was suddenly there. He wrapped himself around her as she fell, cushioning her head with one hand. She hung onto him, eyes squeezed shut, as the aftershock rattled through.
“Hunter?” Luz called weakly, once the ground had stilled again. “What’s going on?”
He was heavy. Too heavy. His head rested against hers, his breathing labored. Luz peeled her eyes open, squinting through the darkness. “Bean? Can we get some light?”
Stringbean made a concerned sound and floated up, shifting into a large glow beetle. The bluish light was faint, but it was bright enough that Luz could see the ceiling beam lying across Hunter’s back.
“Okay...okay, we can do this. Stringbean? We need to move this beam off Hunter.”
The palisman trilled. The light vanished as she shifted into something else, and Luz reached around Hunter’s skinny body to brace both hands on the fallen beam. She pushed up as Stringbean pulled, and they finally managed to shift it away enough that Luz could wiggle herself and Hunter free.
Stringbean floated back then, turning into a glow beetle again. She hovered at Luz’s shoulder as she checked on Hunter’ injuries. His arms and legs looked like they were the right shapes, and his breathing was a lot better now that they’d gotten the ceiling beam off him. What worried Luz the most was the blood on the back of his jacket.
“A little closer, Stringbean,” Luz called. “I can just...hang on a second.” She dug through Hunter’s pockets until she found the roll of gauze he’d used on her...and an old, creased photo of him in his Emerald Entrails jersey with Flapjack on his shoulder.
Hunter groaned, and Luz quickly stuffed the picture back into his jacket pocket. “Don’t move too fast. You’re hurt.”
“I’m okay,” he mumbled.
“You’re bleeding!”
He pushed himself up, sitting back on his knees to regard with a slightly unfocused stare. “I’ll be fine. Let’s go.” Hunter struggled up to his feet, and Luz shot up to catch him when he stumbled.
“Fine. But I’m telling Mom.”
Hunter groaned. “Which one?”
“All of them. And then I’m telling Willow.”
He sighed at that. Luz grinned, opening her mouth to tease him some more, but the ground started to tremble again.
Hunter grunted, wrapped an arm around Luz, then pulled her forward in a flash of red. They stumbled into the library, and he was pulling her along again. To the parlor. The hall. Out the front door and down the steps to collapse in the grass under the open sky.
“Why didn’t you do that in the first place?” Luz demanded.
“Need...need line...line-of-sight,” he gasped. “Couldn’t see door...in basement.”
She swore, scrambling to kneel at his side. “Hunter?”
He was curled up on the ground, arms wrapped around himself. She forced him out of his jacket and shoved the back of his shirt up, wincing at what she saw.
There were a couple of scrapes, which accounted for the blood, but for the most part Hunter’s back was a mess of darkening bruises. He’d taken the brunt of that falling ceiling beam, plus whatever injuries he’d sustained before.
“Can you move?” she asked quietly.
Hunter nodded. “Gimme a minute.”
Stringbean was already bringing Luz’s staff over, and she vowed to never leave it behind again. They could have flown out at the first tremor if she’d had her staff.
He finally sat up, and Luz steadied him as he clumsily climbed onto the staff behind her. Hunter leaned against her, arms wrapped around her waist, and Luz patted one of his hands as they rose up into the air.
She cleared her throat, searching for a way to distract Hunter from his pain. “So...about you and Willow….”