Blood Wyne (22 page)

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Authors: Yasmine Galenorn

Tags: #Romance, #General, #Paranormal, #Fiction

BOOK: Blood Wyne
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“Wade, I hardly ever give second chances. But . . . one more chance. Screw up again and we’re forever on the outs. You owe me big for saving your life. Normally I don’t keep score, but this time, I am. And I’m going to start calling in my markers now.”
“What do you need?”
“Erin needs a mentor. I am so bogged down with . . . well . . . you don’t want to know what, but it’s terribly dangerous. Erin needs a place to stay, she needs to learn how to interact with both other vampires and breathers. That’s what Vampires Anonymous is all about. You give me your word you’ll help me with her. I’ve given her a job that she likes, but she needs more than that in her life.”
I waited. Wade was silent for a moment, and then he laughed. “Is that it? I thought you were going to ask for one of my fingers or something. Yeah, I’d be glad to help, Menolly. You’re right, that’s what the VA is all about. I’ll drop in at the bar tonight and have a chat with her, if that’s okay.”
“Thanks, Wade. I’ll call and let them know you’re on the way. Now, I have to run. We have a serial killer to catch.” As I hung up the phone, it felt like two big weights had lifted off my shoulders. Being on the outs with Wade had bothered me, and I’d missed the VA more than I wanted to admit.
And now, Erin would meet others in the life and learn how to interact with the living without losing control. I thought for a moment about Roman and sent him a brief mental kiss. Without him, Wade and I would still be fighting, and Erin wouldn’t have much more of a life than she had with Sassy. Maybe this was all going to work out after all.
 
After dinner, Trillian, Shade, and Nerissa stayed with Delilah and Iris. Camille and Morio headed out in her car, Vanzir and I in mine. We met up with Chase down in the Greenbelt Park District, in a deserted street near a manhole cover. The snow had let up for the time being and the streets had been plowed, but there was a thin layer of black ice spotting the city, and twice on the way, I swerved and almost lost control of the car.
Vanzir coughed. “Babe, I know you’d survive a crash and I probably would, too, but damn it—I have no desire to get hurt.”
“Chill. We’ll make it in one piece.”
And we did. I parked without further incident and climbed out of the car into the night. Chase headed over in our direction as Camille parked a few spaces up the street. His breath came in little puffs of white, and he was wearing a parka over his suit. I looked up at the overhanging trees that lined the street. Their bare branches were whipping in the wind, and with the clear sky, the temperature was dropping rapidly.
He blew on his hands, rubbing them together, then pulled out a pair of gloves. “You sure you’re going to be warm enough?”
I stared at him and snorted. “Johnson, when will you learn that I don’t need a coat? I wear them for fashion or when I want to pass, but tonight it would just hold me up. Camille—
she
needs the coat.”
At that moment, my sister and Morio wandered over from her car. She had dressed in a heavy spidersilk skirt and top but wore no gloves. They interfered with her magic. Morio had cast a spell against possession on her, and we had to hope it worked, because we needed her with us.
“I really wish your unicorn horn were charged up,” I said.
“I wish it were, too. In a day or so it will be ready to go again, but I don’t like to touch it so soon after recharging.” She looked around. “Quiet here for this time of day.”
“Yeah.” It was barely six and the streets in the Greenbelt Park District were, for the most part, empty. Nobody on the sidewalks, nobody driving past. I nodded to the manhole cover in the center of the street. “That the one?”
Chase shrugged. “Apparently. I figure what’s the worst that can happen? We’ll get down there and find nothing.”
But as he led the way over to pry the cover up, a voice ran through my mind whispering that the worst that could happen would be that we
would
find something. Something big, something bad, something we couldn’t fight.
“Let me go first.” I pushed ahead of him. “If our vampire
is
down there, I’m the best one to take him on.”
Chase nodded. “Good point. Vanzir, how about if you go next, I’ll follow, then Camille and Morio to watch our backs?”
Vanzir clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re learning, dude. You’re learning.”
I sat down on the edge of the hole and attached a flashlight to my belt, then felt for the rung ladder with my foot. It was best if we saved any lights until we were down in the sewer. Within seconds, a metal rod met my foot, but when I swung down and grabbed hold, there was a hissing sound and pain registered through my palms. I yanked myself back up again. Quickly.
“Iron. The bars must be wrought iron. That makes no sense—wouldn’t it rust in the weather?”
Chase frowned. “This part of the town hasn’t been renovated in years. It could be one of the original sewers, back when they used iron for everything.”
“Well, I’ll need gloves, and Camille damned well will.”
Chase held up his hand, ran back to his car, and returned with several pairs of nylon gloves. “Always keep spares. I lose a lot of gloves due to this job. They get filthy when I’m rooting around crime scenes. I save my leather ones for business and keep a few of these in the car.”
The gloves were far too large for Camille and me, but they would work until we got down into the sewer tunnel. I pulled on a pale blue pair and swung back over the side. The gloves cushioned my skin from the iron. Since I’d become a vampire, wrought and cast iron bothered me a lot less, but it could still do major damage to Camille and Delilah. Iron blends and steel weren’t nearly as much of a problem, given our mother’s heritage, but sometimes a piece of metal would trigger the response when we least expected it.
The ladder led down a long ways, far longer than I expected it to, and by the time I found myself standing down below on a walkway, I had just about given up hope of it ever ending. I quickly stepped to the side and switched on my flashlight, scanning the area. Nothing in sight, though I did see a pile of rat droppings. The tunnel didn’t look like a sewer tunnel, though, and it occurred to me that we’d been off about our assessment of the area. For one thing, the floor was cobblestone in some areas, wood in another.
Once the others were down, I lowered my voice and said, “This is no sewer. No wonder it was an iron ladder. What is this place?”
Chase flashed his light around. The walkway ran both right and left, and there was an alcove right across from us. In the alcove were crumbling boxes, an old wooden chair, and a small table. A row of shelves lined one wall of the niche.
“Crap. I don’t believe this.” Chase stepped over the crumbling wall that exposed the cubbyhole. “I know where we are.”
“Where?”
“It’s part of the underground Seattle tunnel system that was abandoned when it began caving in.”
In the early days of Seattle, the city had originally been built a lot lower than now. After a horrendous fire in 1889, the city streets had been rebuilt one to two stories above the original streets. For a time, customers would climb up and down ladders between the original buildings and the newer sections of the city, but eventually, all of Seattle sprawled across the higher levels, and although the subterranean network remained hidden and unused, it was still a viable network of passages beneath the city.
“I thought the Underground Tour stopped a number of blocks away,” I said.
Chase shook his head. “It does. The tour only covers a small portion of what was the original underground city. There actually used to be a series of nightclubs down here—not in this area in particular, but running the length of the tunnels. But they closed up one after another as the structural integrity of this area weakened, and eventually most of the areas were abandoned, forgotten and hard to get to. I had no idea the tunnels ran all the way into the Greenbelt Park District, but that makes perfect sense.”
A chill ran up my spine. This city was getting spookier by the second. Memories of
The Night Stalker
flashed through my head. Delilah loved Darrin McGavin, and I’d had to break it to her that he was dead.
“So what’s that cubbyhole? That’s too small to be a nightclub.”
“Some of the shops had basements that became part of the whole underground scene. My guess is that it once belonged to a shop now buried. We’re on a lower level than the regular underground Seattle. We’re in the sub-basement area. I really had no clue the tunnels spread out this far, or this far belowground.”
I looked right and left. “Which way should we go?”
“Which way leads into the heart of the Greenbelt Park District?” Camille asked, pulling off her gloves and tucking them in a side pocket of her skirt. “Since we think the killer is nesting there, it only makes sense to go in that direction.”
“True. Let me see . . .” I glanced around. “If this tunnel runs north-south, then we want to go north, which would be . . .” Turning to the right, I nodded. “This way. Let’s go. Marching order same as when we descended the ladder. Camille and Morio, keep a good watch on our backs.”
As we headed down the walkway, Camille coughed. “The air’s dank here.”
“Is it breathable? Are you going to have trouble?” I wouldn’t have to worry, but the rest of them would.
“Yes, we can breathe, but there’s a lot of mold down here, I can tell that right away. Watch for viro-mortis slimes. This would be the prime place to find them.”
As if on cue, my light caught something clinging to the wall to my right. I jumped back as we saw an indigo patch of ooze sliding along parallel to us. The creature sparkled in a pretty, jellylike fashion, but that was as good as it got. The indigo viro-mortis slime was deadly.
“It can sense our body heat,” Camille said, wrinkling her nose. “Just don’t touch it or we’ll all be in trouble.”
Sometime back, Delilah had gotten a green viro-mortis slime attached to her hand and we had to have Smoky freeze it off. He wasn’t with us now, and the indigo varieties were far more poisonous. The creatures acted a lot like the Blob—growing as they enveloped and assimilated their victims. Being digested alive by a living pile of snot was not my idea of a good time.
“Just leave it be, and watch what you touch.”
As we headed along the tunnel, I kept my flashlight sweeping from side to side. The fact that there were viro-mortis slimes around meant that we probably had to watch out for other nasty creatures. All sorts of denizens hung around in the dark, waiting for the next unwary traveler to come along: ripe pickings for dinner.
More boxes and another cubbyhole to the right. I briefly shone my light in the niche, checking it out, but once again it looked like a long-abandoned basement. A thick layer of dust covered everything, and in some spots moisture had worked its way down the walls to leave trails of mold—the regular kind—and mildew.
“The city should come down here and clean this crap up,” I muttered.
“Who’s going to pay for it?” Chase said. “Seattle is having budget woes as it is. No, I have the feeling most of the city doesn’t even know this place exists. It isn’t common knowledge that the underground sections comprise more than just what’s shown to tourists on the little jaunt that’s offered.”
The soft cadence of water flowing caught my attention. “Sewer?” I asked after a moment. The others listened, and then Chase shook his head.
“No, sewer wouldn’t make that kind of noise. Underground stream, perhaps.” He paused. “What’s that? Over there?”
I turned my flashlight to the direction in which he pointed. Another cubby, but this one had something else in it. A cleft in the rocks that made up the sides of the tunnel beckoned.
“I don’t know. Let’s take a look.” As I crept over to the alcove, I motioned for everyone to be silent. The cleft wasn’t as wide as a passage, but definitely wide enough to go single file. I flashed my light down the blackened passage but couldn’t see a thing. “Shall we try it? Just be very careful not to brush against the sides, which means try not to trip or stumble.”
As I entered the narrow passage, I hoped it wouldn’t go on for too far. I didn’t want to get lost in a maze beneath the city streets. Camille hated close quarters, and I knew this wasn’t easy on her.
The darkness closed in around us as we continued on, and the only spots of light were the muted beams of our flashlights. I kicked the floor ahead of me as I stepped, scooting loose pebbles to the side so the others wouldn’t twist their ankles on them.
“The air here is thick,” Camille said from the back. “How much farther, can you tell?”
I squinted in the dim light, trying to gauge how far we had to go. “I don’t know, but—wait . . .” Up ahead, the cleft ended in a turn to the left. I peeked around the corner. The opening led to a large room. “You’re in luck.”
As I stepped into the brick chamber, I immediately began scoping out the area. The others filed in as I took in the man-made cavern. It was a good fifteen feet tall, and as wide as our house, it looked like. There were dark maws opening at regular intervals around the periphery of the walls, and I began to realize this was just a hub in a large tunnel system.

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