City of Ghosts (24 page)

“Aye, Chessie … fuck, aye …” This was too much; his voice in her ears and his body inside hers and his anger and lust, the raging desire, the energy of the room around them increasing with every second. His rhythm changed, grew even more frantic; the slight twist of his hips disappeared and he swelled inside her.

She grabbed his head, pulled his mouth down to hers, taking control as much as she could with her trembling hands. His breath came in short, rough gasps, his fingers called bruises from her skin, he was damp with sweat and so was she.

He shuddered, shaking even harder than he had before. His muscles tightened under her hands. She held him closer, pulling him deeper into her, onto her, relishing his weight above her for one last second before his fingers convulsed, his entire body convulsed; she felt him throb inside her, heard her name on his lips as one long, low moan before he fell still.

Chapter Twenty-four

A Church employee does not get distracted. Does not lose sight of the goal. Does not waver in his or her objective, which is to defend the Church and to protect humanity, whatever the cost.

—
The Example Is You
, the guidebook for Church employees

She didn’t know how long they stayed there, didn’t know how much time passed before cold fear crept into her heart. He hadn’t spoken. Hadn’t kissed her again. His body was slack above hers.

Finally he rolled away. She’d thought before that it was warm in the little underground space. Now she realized it wasn’t at all, and shivered. Her jeans were still across the room by the hatch, along with her jacket. Her panties were a torn heap of pale blue cotton in the middle of the little stream.

Great. So she got to walk bare-assed over to get her jeans? She had a spare pair of panties in her bag, but … Something in the quality of his silence told her he wasn’t going to make flirty little jokes as she retrieved them.

She adjusted her bra cup, tugged down the hem of her top. Something landed beside her with a soft, muffled sound; Terrible’s bowling shirt.

“Thanks.” It was short-sleeved, but wide enough that she could wrap it around her waist at least; hell, if she slipped it over her shoulders it would hit her knees, given how it reached the top of his thighs. Nice of him. But further proof of her fears. Nothing had changed. She’d riled him into it, practically forced him, and now … now nothing had changed.

His lighter clicked; the warm glow of the high flame brightened the room for a second. He waved a cigarette at her and she took it.

“Thanks,” she said again. Her lips didn’t want to work properly. They felt swollen and bruised, like she’d been smacked in the mouth.

Well. This was uncomfortable. She had no idea what to say, and she guessed he didn’t either. She knew what she wanted to say, what she wanted to do. She wanted to close the three-foot gap between them and tuck herself under his arm. Wanted to invite him back to her place and climb into bed with him—the bed she’d never let anyone else into—and do that again, slowly. Properly—not that it hadn’t been just fine the way it was. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d—No. No, she never had. She’d never felt like that before.

And she wanted to say it was worth it, but fuck, as the silence stretched between them like a crack in her heart growing longer and longer …

He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

He might as well have stabbed her.

“You didn’t do anything I didn’t want you to do,” she said wearily. She needed her bag, her pills were in there. Lex hadn’t brought her just the two Oozers the night before, he’d dropped a couple more in there, and she’d brought one along, thinking it might come in handy. She didn’t care about the case just then, about the fucking Lamaru or their fucking psychopomp games or Maguinness. Didn’t give a fuck about any of it. She just wanted to go home, get high, and hide, and try to forget the whole thing. She didn’t think that last item, at least, would be possible.

“Aye, well. Maybe I ain’t want—”

“Yeah. You didn’t want to do that. I get it.” For a second she waited for him to disagree, to say that what he hadn’t wanted was to do that
there
, or that
way
, or whatever, but he didn’t. What a shock. She glanced at his shirt, tried to decide whether she wanted to use it or not; decided she didn’t. Let him look. Whatever.

It hadn’t seemed like such a great distance when she’d gone after him, from the hatch they’d dropped through to the space where they’d—where they’d ended up. Now it seemed to be miles, to take hours, crossing the chilly floor with her feet bare and her trembling thighs sticky. The faint ache between them would have been incredibly pleasant if the one in her chest wasn’t so much worse.

She could smell him everywhere on her.

The panties were in a side pocket; she slipped them on, dug out all of her first-aid stuff, and set to work on her leg. Funny, she hadn’t felt the injury at all in those fevered minutes. Clearly she should have, because bits of dirt clung to the edges of the cut, visible even in the very dim light.

She needed the flashlight. But asking him to bring it over … Yeah, not really what she wanted to do. So she got it herself, her legs jerky beneath her.

Of course, there was also the problem of holding the damned thing. She tried to stick the end in her mouth but it was too big, too heavy. It didn’t work tucked under her arm either. Finally she set it on the floor, started to sit down—

Metal clinked across the room; she glanced up and saw his back, heard his belt buckle clink again before he turned around, his gaze somewhere on the floor. “Lemme give you the help, aye?”

“No, thank you.”

“C’mon, Chess. I ain’t—Just lemme do this.”

Guilt covered his face like five o’clock shadow. Well, good. Maybe it was mean—hell, no maybe about it—but good. About time he got to feel guilty for something. Why should she always be the one?

But she let him hold the flashlight while she used her baby wipes to dab away the little specks of grit and rubbed some antibiotic ointment on the wounds. The burn still didn’t look too bad, mostly just red, with a few insignificant blisters. Nothing that would scar, thankfully. She’d hit the pavement fast enough to put it out before it caused any real damage.

But she was acutely aware of his eyes on her, watching her hands. Acutely aware that his breathing was still a bit louder than she was used to; and if she took exaggerated care in gliding her fingers up her thigh, in lifting the entire leg and pointing her toe while pretending to do nothing more than examine herself, she supposed she couldn’t be blamed for that, could she? All’s fair in love and war; and at that moment she figured one or both of those definitely applied.

She took out a fresh package of gauze and folded it to make a pad big enough to cover the burn. Trouble was she couldn’t quite figure out how to hold it in place while taping it—Oh, okay. If she laid the tape sticky side up across her lap she could set the gauze over it.

Would it have killed him to help her? Wasn’t it enough that he hated her, did he have to watch her struggle like that—

His hands took the tape from hers. “Hold yon bandage there, aye?”

Had she thought she wanted him to help her? She’d been wrong; it was much worse that way, with his nimble fingers skipping up her thigh, pressing into her. Too soon, it was too soon. Maybe later she would have been able to handle it, but as it was, when she could still feel him inside her, still feel those same fingers digging into her skin, sliding over her ribcage …

She gritted her teeth and looked away. His touch was light, almost impersonal, but as the minutes ticked by she realized the tape was on, the bandage fixed in place. He was just stroking her under the pretense of adjusting the tape and smoothing it out, his palm gliding over the top of her thigh, his fingers coming to rest on the inside dangerously close to where she was starting to throb again.

She jerked away, stood up. “Thanks. I think I’m—I think it’s fine now.”

“Aye.” His head was down; his hair still stood up in tufty spikes.

Slipping her jeans on felt like saying goodbye to the entire episode; fully dressed again, as if it had never happened. Only the awkwardness remained, lingering like indigestion.

Speaking of which … Time for her pills. Well, technically it wasn’t—it had only been forty minutes or so—but she couldn’t have given less of a shit. She took four of them. What the hell. Wasn’t like they were going to be doing anything she needed to be alert for. She wasn’t sure they were going to be doing anything at all, in fact. Now that her eyes had fully adjusted to the meager light, she saw her initial impression had indeed been correct. The room was empty, totally and completely. Bare walls. Bare floor. Only the energy remained to tell anyone that something had occurred there; energy, the faint smell of herbs, and the beeping of the tracking device.

“Right,” she said, shoving her feet back into her boots. “Um, I guess we should—”

“Tunnel keep going on, aye?” He swung the flashlight to the side and she saw, just past her ruined underwear—she’d have to grab those and put them in her bag; the last thing she wanted to do was leave a clothing item that personal and therefore powerful in the hands of the Lamaru—an arched opening leading into a regular tunnel, with another battered steel door guarding it.

It wasn’t lit the way Lex’s were, and she had a sinking feeling that it wouldn’t share any other similarities either. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Guessin we oughta check it. Us bein down here anyroad, an yon machine still makin them beeps.”

The words should have comforted her. At least he wasn’t running out of the room and speeding home to shower with lye and disinfectant or something. Or spitting at her, or even being particularly rude.

But she knew him. Knew him far too well to think the absence of insults meant all was forgiven, or that he’d changed his mind about not wanting anything to do with her. The words encouraged, but the tone, so flat, as if he were talking to a stranger … that didn’t.

He was there to do a job, and he was going to do it, and that was that. He could stroke her thigh all he wanted but it meant absolutely nothing.

Her eyes stung as she shouldered her bag and scooped up her torn underwear, tucking it into a pocket. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

The door was locked, but she had her lube syringe and her set of picks, so it only took a few minutes to get it open. It felt like longer. Trying to concentrate with his body next to hers was like trying to save the best drugs for later; she could pretend it wasn’t there, but every cell in her body knew it was and would not allow her to forget.

The tracker’s beeps sped up almost immediately after they stepped through the low doorway into the cool damp darkness. She pulled it from her bag, held it in front of her, watching the red light flash and cast eerie shadows on the crumbling walls. Her and Terrible’s outlines stark against the red, creeping along like gangly insects.

The tracker’s beeps sped faster, turned into a continuous high-pitched wail; the sensor lay at her feet, half-buried in a pile of dirt. Damn. She picked it up, pressed the button on the tracker so silence fell just as loud and harsh in her ears as the beeps had been.

His voice startled her. “What we on the look for, aye?”

“Yeah. Shit.” She took the flashlight from him—their fingers touched and he jerked his away—and focused it on the little black chip in her hand. It didn’t look damaged; there was no sign that it had been attached to Vanhelm at all. Dirt clung to the sticky bit on the back. Was this from his shirt or his car? The tracker told her it was sensor three, but which one was which? “This doesn’t tell me anything.”

“You expecting it to?”

“Maybe.”

He might have made a joke, or said something reassuring. Certainly he would have before. Now he just remained silent, dark eyes examining the tunnel around them as if she wasn’t even there.

She sighed. “Okay, let’s keep going, huh? If they came this way maybe there’s a reason.”

Twenty silent minutes later they hit a fork. By Chess’s reckoning—her sense of direction was usually pretty good—they’d been heading northeast, but she had no idea how far they’d actually gone.

Time seemed to move differently there; she felt she’d been plodding along beside Terrible for hours. Or maybe it wasn’t the tunnels, maybe it was the ache getting stronger with every passing minute, the discomfort growing more intense. The desire to speak, the desire to—She didn’t know what. But it was possible they’d only managed to go a half mile or so. Of course it was also possible they’d more than doubled that.

Her mood and the gloomy, scratchy silence weren’t the only problems. She’d been right to suspect these tunnels weren’t like the ones Lex and the rest of Slobag’s men used fairly regularly. Those weren’t just lit, they were well kept—as well kept as a tunnel could be, anyway—and clear.

What they were attempting to traverse now was anything but. The walls crumbled on either side of them, thick dirt tumbling down into their path, scented of mold and age. Lichen and moss sprouted from cracks in the cement, stretched like alien fingers over their heads. Stones and chunks of cement littered the path; every step had to be carefully taken, every foot of forward movement hard-fought.

Sweat had collected between her breasts and beaded on her forehead when they hit a fork and the tunnel opened into two. The air stank, like dead things and rotting things and things that only grow in the darkness. Things that would slither along the floor and up her legs, things that would crawl inside her and attack—

She yelped; a rat. An actual scuttling thing, not whatever she was creating in her fevered, overstressed, and overactive imagination. She needed to calm the fuck down. Her pills should have kicked in; they had kicked in, she felt it, but they weren’t soothing her the way they should have.

Weren’t soothing her, because the pressure and discomfort and fear didn’t come from inside her. It came from the air around them. She stopped short, glanced at Terrible; his eyes were narrowed, like he was staring into a strong wind.

“You feeling okay?” She didn’t really expect an answer.

She didn’t get one. He shrugged.

“The energy in here’s getting stronger,” she went on, keeping her voice low. “Like we’re getting closer to something.”

“Which way you figure we take?”

Neither route appealed; they were identical holes in the ground filled with emptiness. She closed her eyes.

“The one on the right feels more powerful.”

“So that the one we should—”

“I don’t know. Their magic is so masked that it almost seems like it would be wrong to go that way, you know? Because maybe I shouldn’t be able to feel it.”

She opened her eyes in time to see his gaze leap away from her face. What was—No. The thought of trying to analyze his movements or behavior, trying to read his mind and heart based on the way he stood or talked or grabbed her arm to help her across the rocks or whatever, just exhausted her. She couldn’t do it anymore.