City Of Souls (12 page)

“Don’t worry. Femininity has never felt normal to me.” It was a joke, but it was also true. I hadn’t been raised in a female-dominated culture. The honor and respect these two women took for granted was foreign to me. I’d always had to fight for my power.

Tekla shook her head. “Those are two different things. Normal is simply what you’re accustomed to. Natural is what is, in spite of what you’re used to.”

“So, you’re saying don’t go in swinging?”

“It’s a bit…obvious,” she said diplomatically.

I tilted my head. “I think I’m offended.”

“What Tekla is trying to say,” Vanessa interceded quickly, “is don’t be fooled into thinking you’re not at war just because you’re not blowing things up. Yet don’t be intimidated by it either. You have the ability to utilize the more indirect tactics too.”

I snorted. I had the ability to fake it until I made it. “So let me get this straight. You guys are worried I can’t hold my own against, what, some chicks?”

“Chicks powerful enough to rule an entire world.”

“With a glance alone,” Tekla added.

“Looks that can kill?” I asked.

“No.” She smiled. “Just stun. Or so that’s the myth.”

I didn’t roll my eyes because that would earn me a stunning look in return. Instead, I blew out a long breath. “Well, I don’t have to worry about it at all if I can’t actually find the place. And even then I don’t know how I’ll find Jaden Jacks. I don’t even know what he looks like.”

All I had to go on were cryptic orders from Warren, part of a silly song, and useless advice about fighting like a woman instead of a man.

“I do,” Tekla said. I looked at her sharply. Unsmiling, and suddenly too serious, she stepped forward and handed me a picture.

Whoa. Not a picture, I thought, studying the man on it. A ripped out page from a Shadow manual. “Damn, he’s
huge
.”

“You’ll be fine,” Vanessa said reassuringly. “You’re the Kairos.”

And I was getting tired of
that
being the one thing I had going for me. I sighed again as I tucked the folded page in my back pocket.

“By the way,” Vanessa said, changing the subject, “Felix told us about Xavier’s housekeeper, Lindy. Helen. Whatever. Thanks for stopping him. I’d hate for all that work to be undone just because of me.”

Hiding my own disappointment at not having Helen out of the way for good, it was my turn to shrug. “We’ll get another shot at Lindy. Plenty of them. In fact…maybe you’d like to do the honors?”

“Still fighting,” Tekla muttered, returning to her chair in the corner, but Vanessa laughed, truly laughed for the first time since I’d seen her. It drew Felix into the room like a siren’s call. Her smile remained as she caught his gaze. “I think maybe I would.”

“Good. Then
when
I return from Midheaven,” I said, smiling, “I’ll hand you the keys to Archer castle myself.”

My parting words to Vanessa sounded a lot more hopeful than I felt, both because I didn’t want her worrying and because the question still remained: How was I to find Midheaven? All I had was a mishmashing of cryptic advice that, even together, still didn’t form a complete picture. Yet with nothing else to go on, with no certain means of finding Skamar, and my troop leader’s directive still weighing on my shoulders, I had no choice but to leave the security of the warehouse and keep searching. So after a shower and a quick bite to eat, I did what I’d always done when feeling restless and lost. I put on my steel-toed boots and began walking.

Okay, so first I drove. Right out to the military base, where chicken wire and sensors and cameras would serve as backup to my wanderings. Sure, none of it could actually stop a Shadow attack—Nellis’s best hotshot flyboys couldn’t do that, not in their biggest plane—but even the Light normally avoided attracting attention of this sort. We didn’t like our body heat showing up on anyone’s electrical charts, and we certainly didn’t like to be caught on camera. Tonight, however, it was the lesser of two evils. The Shadows wouldn’t be expecting it, and the only thing the Air Force would pick up on was a lone girl, hands shoved in the pockets of her own bomber jacket, hunched against the wind as she walked down the street.

What the hell did “walk the line” mean? I wondered, boots clanging across a metal grate. Stay in line like a good little girl? Surely not. Warren wouldn’t waste his breath telling me that. Restless, I tapped on a metal lamppost and kept thinking. Okay, so what about Zane’s ballad, then?

“Beneath the neon glowing bright here…lies a land of starry skies…” How could there be stars underneath Vegas? That didn’t make any sense. I kicked a rock from the road as I crossed the street, watching it sail over the street until it disappeared down a sharp embankment. Oops. I glanced over my shoulder, wondering if the base’s camera had caught that. Lone girl or not, I shouldn’t be able to kick something with that density as easily as a soccer ball. Switching direction, I followed its trajectory to what looked like a bike path next to the nearest housing development. The homes had to be a good fifteen years old, but they clearly had a home association, because the common greens were pristine.

Look below, dear, not in the middle…

“The middle of what?” I muttered, lowering my eyes to the ground, following the gravel path as I slipped into the darkness. It was safer near the base, but the darkness of the bike path soothed me. I shook my head and sucked in a crisp breath of early winter and smog and mildew from the nearby drainage ditch.

And froze.

Then I leaned over the railing that lined the walkway and gazed twenty feet below where a scrubby and poorly landscaped embankment gave way to an underground tunnel. No, I thought, correcting myself. Not a tunnel. A pipeline that fed runoff away from the city.

I didn’t know about a land of starry skies—maybe that was Midheaven itself—but if the city, and where I was standing, was considered the middle, then the storm drain leading underground could be considered below.

I ducked under the railing and half slid, half sidestepped down the embankment. I knew about the drainage system, of course. Fifty miles of serpentine concrete running water out of the city to the Las Vegas Wash. Las Vegas actually sat in a bowl rimmed in mountain ranges, and received a good deal of runoff from those jagged peaks. Unfortunately, we usually received it all on the same day. We had an annual monsoon season that could effectively flood the baked desert floor within minutes, so the underground system had been designed to rush these floodwaters from the surface streets into the scattered inlets dotting the valley.

The water department was constantly improving the drains, and though it was certainly better than when I was a kid—when the Charleston underpass regularly claimed the lives of the brave, unwary, and the just plain idiotic—every once in a while things that were washed away never turned up at all. Sometimes
people
were never seen again. And here was an inlet. Beneath the neon. A
line
, I thought, smiling to myself.

I began to walk it.

Twenty feet below the surface streets, I stood cradled in the curve of a tunnel that was eight feet in diameter and held a darkness so complete I’d have been blinded if I only possessed a mortal’s sight. As it was, I could barely make out the shape of the slick, slanted walls, and unwilling to touch them for guidance—and even more unwilling to stand in a complete vacuum—I willed the glyph on my chest into a steady but muted glow. Cobwebs larger than my entire body hung in elegant tatters from mildewed concrete walls, and smells I’d already identified as algae and waste lay in a barely moving stream at my feet.

I walked a few feet toward the tunnel’s heart, then looked back over my shoulder. I was supposed to wait for Skamar. Warren had said she would tell me how to “walk the line.” Then again, the troop was weakening, and a little girl was dying. I couldn’t exactly wait around for some diva thought-form to make an appearance. Besides, I wasn’t even sure this was the entrance I sought. If it was, then I’d gotten lucky. If not, I’d lose nothing by searching it. Right?

It was eerily still the farther I ventured in, the concrete corridor frigid as the city winked out behind me and the familiar dropped away. Unable to see even an inch in front of my face, I sent an extra pulse to strengthen the glyph on my chest. Seventy-five feet beyond that, the tunnel shrunk so that, hunching down, I felt buried alive. Sound was dampened, air thinned, vision blocked, and it was with a start that I realized I was the one doing the burying.

A hundred feet in, though, I began a steep vertical rise, like those winding staircases found in European castles. “Dammit,” I muttered, and began to climb. Apparently I’d just gotten lucky.

I climbed so long I had to be well above street level by the time the tunnel sloped and swirled again. This time it angled deeper than seemingly possible, as if the concrete had accidentally been spilled there. Though there was no water this deep in, the surface was slick with algae, and it was uncomfortably warm, even humid. A sourceless gust rustled my hair, like the heat coming on in an old house, and I glanced straight up to find a passage narrow enough to admit only one body at a time.

“And for my next great feat…” I leapt to the opening just as I’d done at Master Comics earlier that day. Yet the distance lengthened while I was in flight, and I yelped in surprise, barely catching the edge’s lip with my elbows. Shoulders straining under my weight, I grunted and pushed myself straight, glyph fully powered. I then found myself eye level with another concrete wall. It was studded with only one feature: a safe’s dial.

Looking closer, I breathed a sigh of relief. The signs of the Zodiac fanned around its center, and I flipped it so the Archer glyph lined up with the raised arrow, then yanked hard. There was a tumble of internal locks, and something growled deep inside the tunnel. Then a jagged seam began working its way down the wall, altering direction before moving vertically again to flip on itself with a depthless creak, ending where it began. I pulled on the dial, the seam took on hinges, and a tiny doorway swung open.

A rough-hewn shelf held a wrought-iron stand pinching a primitive, and burning, candle.

“What the hell?” Whatever I’d been expecting, it wasn’t this.

Lifting the iron base to move the simple candle aside, I looked for a spring underneath. Maybe its removal would cause the wall to shift and open. Nothing happened. Thinking then that the wooden backing was false, I pushed, but it too remained intact. I wiped at my brow. Man, there was a lot of heat coming from one sole candle.

So no spring catch, I thought, and no lever. No other obvious purpose to the box. I blew out a hard breath, and the candle wavered…which made me wonder how it’d been lit in the first place. There were no matches or lighter, no person to perform the action, and no wax running down the long taper. So
When?
joined the question as to
How?
“Think, Jo,” I said under my breath.

Well, obviously I had to take some sort of action. Something definitive that would ferry me from this world into Midheaven. Was I supposed to sing Zane’s stupid song? Feeling like an idiot, I cleared my throat and gave it a try.

Beneath the neon glowing bright here

Lies a land of starry skies

Look below, dear, not in the middle

And kill the rushlight in two tries.

“Oh.”

Rushlight. That was an old-fashioned word for a candle made of a plant, and grease or wax. One like the taper I was currently holding. Gingerly, like it was a snake writhing in my hand, I returned it to the rough-hewn shadow box. Gazing at the bright flame, I took a deep breath and felt my heartbeat thrum irregularly. Deciding it was probably best not to tempt the second try, I leaned forward and blew with all my might. Nothing happened.

Oh, God. Did that mean I only had one try left to me?

I blew again. Same results, but nothing else happened either. A third time…and no fucking charm. What was going on?

Finally, I was so annoyed and antsy about the whole situation that I grabbed hold of the candle’s iron stick and with the taper only an inch from my mouth blew again.

Darkness attacked. My released breath was yanked from my chest, burning nausea rising with it. Blindly, I grabbed at my throat, but my mouth wouldn’t close, and the outline of my glyph began tingling madly, like something with lots of legs was eating away at it. Oxygen bled from my mouth and pores, sucked from white and red blood cells so that I felt like a withering husk, dehydrated and dizzy.

Then the process flipped so suddenly I was encased like a brick in a kiln while unseen tendrils of smoke arrowed back into my mouth, prying my throat wide. Individual needles of pain splintered along that soft passageway, shredding my larynx and voice box, murdering my ability to scream. I didn’t know what was worse, the literal breath-taking or the invasion of something foreign soaking into my bloodstream, muscle, tissue, and bone. Whatever it was, it was miasmic. The sulfuric stench of rotten eggs forced an inhalation, injecting me with a noxious, polluting drug. My nausea rose.

Then the air I was straining for pumped back into me, burning cold against the coppery tears like tiny icicles of blood were embedded in my throat. I staggered backward to hit my head against something hard. The sense of all physical matter being voided out lessened, my dizziness abated, but I still couldn’t see. If not for the solid stamp of earth beneath me, I would have thought I’d passed out. Then the air gradually took on layers, and the smoke walling me in lessened.

I ran my tongue over my teeth, gritty, my mouth filled with a sandpaper scratch. I couldn’t smell the festering poison anymore, but it was pumping in my veins, and that scared me more than the sightlessness or the stolen air.

As the haze lessened degree by degree, a light formed directly across from me. Please not another candle, I thought as it sharpened into a bright yellow eye. It acted as a hypnotist’s pendulum, controlling my focus until the rest of the room—and I
was
now standing in a room—came into view. When it did, despite the breath having just been stolen from my body, my mouth fell open again.