I slumped to the ground and stared at the spot where my son had been lying.

An illusion. It had been a goddamned illusion the whole time.

Nausea spread from my gut. My friends had been right, Mace had been right, and I hadn’t listened.

Now they were being hunted by the other goblins because of me. They had spent precious seconds trying to restrain me and convince me not to take the bait. But I hadn’t listened to them or Mace. I had assumed that once I could control Mace, I would be the cool-headed one to make wise decisions.

What if I was also supposed to listen to Mace? He wasn’t just good in a fight; he also had the wisdom I needed to survive this place and go home.

I was such a fool. Everyone tried telling me it was a trap, but I wouldn’t listen. I didn’t trust them. A small part of me clung to the defense that any father would’ve run out to save his only child.

Maybe.

But would my best friends in the world run the other way if they thought Jack had really been captured? If I knew Melony’s kids or Alec’s kids or Barney’s daughter had been captured, I would fight alongside them to rescue their kids. And I knew they’d do the same for me.

So I should’ve trusted their experience when they told me not to leap into Trox’s obvious trap.

I felt Mace growing antsy with my self-loathing. He wanted to find my friends, or at the very least, find a place to hide before Trox came back. There was no question that Mace wanted his Ancestral Longsword back—almost as much as I had wanted to rescue Jack—but at least he had the battle sense not to sit there and wait for the goblin mage without a weapon. I still had my leather armor, but that wouldn’t do squat against a mage that could cut me in half with a swing of his hand.

I jogged over to the outcropping where my friends had tried to stop me from being an idiot. They were gone, as I’d hoped, but a landslide of huge boulders now blocked the mystical door to Level Two. There was no way I could get through that. If they had gone to Level Two before the goblins blocked the door, then they had left me behind.

And I was okay with that. I had left them, and they had no choice but to keep going.

I looked down where we’d been hiding and saw the butt end of one of the eternal torches poking from between two rocks. My eyes moistened. My friends had left a torch behind in the unlikely event I somehow got away from Trox. Even though I had possibly gotten them captured by refusing to listen to them, they were still looking out for me.

I could almost hear Mace growl in my mind, Cry when you see them again. No time for it now. I didn’t hear those words in my head, but the feeling was unmistakable.

I grabbed the torch and then noticed something else beneath it. I felt Mace’s frown when I saw what it was, but I grinned despite him. It was one of Stephen’s throwing daggers. It had a bronze hilt and crossguard with a gleaming steel blade, and tiny runes etched into it. Mace’s instincts warned me to leave behind the weapon of assassins and thieves and take our chances with our fists, but I overruled his stubborn bravado and took it.

I promise we’ll only use it as a last resort, I thought. Deal?

I sensed his grudging acceptance, so I put the dagger into a pocket within my cloak.

I then made my way toward the blocked entrance. I scanned the new boulders, desperately hoping there was a way through them to the Level Two entrance. There was nothing.

I opened the hood of my torch just a little to see more of the landslide. The dim orange glow from the semi-hooded torch confirmed what I needed to know. Unless I found a bulldozer spell, the way through was impassible. I closed the torch.

So either my friends went through before the goblins blocked it, or they ran off up the river. We hadn’t discussed the rules of going from one dungeon level to another. Could they come back to Level One if they had entered Level Two? My instincts—and Mace’s—didn’t think so. For me, getting to Level Three and through Angelus was a one-way ticket. I didn’t know Mace’s plans after defeating Angelus, but I sensed he didn’t expect to come this way again either.

I looked past the landslide and down the cavern as far as I could see, which wasn’t far in the darkness. I started walking that way, staring hard until I noticed an opening in the wall darker than the rock around it.

My only option was to assume my friends had not gone to Level Two. They had retrieved me from the Spawn Room the first time I died and had left behind one of their valuable eternal torches. They hadn’t abandoned me before, and I didn’t think they would do so now despite Stephen's complaining.

I stepped toward the opening carefully, poking my feet forward one at a time to avoid tripping over a large rock or falling into an unexpected pit. I rammed my toes into a few rocks and almost twisted my left ankle on some loose gravel around an old fire pit, but I got to the opening without killing myself.

Standing before it, I realized I had to open the torch’s hood. The meager light from the dung fire was non-existent here, and there was no difference between me closing my eyes and keeping them open. This was a darkness that I’d never experienced in my life. A cold, damp breeze came from the opening, but at least it didn’t smell like rot or anything else ominous.

I focused my hearing down the corridor but didn’t hear any rustling or breathing. I glanced behind me toward the goblin camp. I hadn’t heard a thunderclap, so I didn’t think Trox had returned, nor did I hear any goblin wings or snorting.

I took a deep breath and removed the hood of my torch.

I stood before the entrance of a long cave corridor that sloped upward. Its floor was part gravel, part smooth stone, with a few boulders scattered around. It looked like a flood tunnel from another river above this area. It looked dry, so I wasn’t worried about a sudden wave of frigid water carrying back down.

I did worry about the goblin footprints in the loose gravel near the entrance. It made sense that they’d set out on foot since the corridor was way too small for their wingspans. Mace must’ve had some basic tracking skills, for I never would’ve distinguished them from simple pits in the gravel. But they were as obvious to him as the difference between real and fake IDs were once to me.

And not only did he note the goblin tracks, but he also found a chalk mark in the right wall just inside the corridor. I brought the torch over to it and saw an upside-down triangle with its tip sitting on a horizontal line.

I’d noticed the same symbol tattooed on Sonja’s perfect, muscular thigh when we were drying our clothes.

My friends had fled this way, and goblins were chasing them. I tried listening again, holding my breath to avoid even that tiny sound, but I couldn’t hear anything up ahead. They had about an hour's head start on me, so it didn’t surprise me.

I took off into the corridor, going as fast as possible without running. It wouldn’t do to break an ankle before I could rescue my friends from my stupidity.