Embers (36 page)

Anya was certain that they’d be arrested on first glance. Do not pass Go, do not collect

$200. Go directly to jail.

“What’s with the camera?” Max slapped Brian’s sleeve.

Brian sighed. “Yeah. Need I remind you that this has the potential to be the largest paranormal event in history caught on tape?” He tapped the red light taped to the side of his helmet. “This is our retirement fund, ladies and gents.”

Anya stared down at her hands on the steering wheel. Even in the darkness, they felt numb, swollen. Monstrous. In the back of her head, she heard Mimi humming Sting’s “I Burn for You.” When Brian gave her a sidelong glance, she realized that Mimi had been singing aloud, and that the sound buzzed through her lips.

Katie flipped some holy water on her from the backseat. “Down, Mimi.”

That pissed Mimi off. The steering wheel swerved in Anya’s hands, out of her control. The Dart plunged straight toward a mailbox. Brian wrested the wheel back, and the Dart slewed back on the street.

“No more driving for you.”

“I’ve got it,” she said through gritted teeth.

Brian slammed the parking brake back, and the Dart lurched forward with a jerk and a hiccup. Anya’s head snapped forward, barely missing the steering wheel. As a stream of invectives filled her mouth, Brian popped the car into neutral and tried to climb over her into the driver’s seat.

Anya felt her mouth curl back over her teeth in Mimi’s lascivious smile.
“Not in front of
the children, lover.”
She wrapped Anya’s arms around Brian’s neck and purred,

“Though, I suppose if the kids don’t mind, I don’t, either.”

Brian hauled her over to the passenger seat and disentangled himself while Katie and Max grabbed her arms from the backseat. In the flailing mass of arms, Anya found herself wrapped in a seatbelt with a salamander pinning her in place.

“Settle down, Mimi.” Jules’s voice growled from the backseat. His hand snaked into view, holding a glass bottle of holy water. He flipped the cap off with his thumb, held it over Anya’s chest. “You can sit quietly or take a shower. Your choice.”

Anya could feel her lungs contracting around Mimi’s hiss.
“Go fuck yourself.”

Jules made good on his threat. He threw the bottle in Anya’s face. The water sizzled against her skin, stinging like ammonia on a wound. Where the water slapped her chest, she howled, as the water seared into the raw wounds on her chest. She wrapped her hands around her arms, bent double, and screamed. She called Jules every filthy name known to man, some in languages she didn’t recognize. Spittle rattled against the window glass under the force of her invectives.

“Are you through? Or do you need a second application?” Jules’s hand appeared again, with another full bottle.

Anya felt Mimi shrink back, and she regained control of her voice. “I’m okay, Jules.”

With a shaking hand, she pushed the bottle away. Sparky licked the fizzling water off her face, making sympathetic little mewls.

Jules watched her with a wary eye as Brian restarted the ignition and put the Dart into gear. Like a big green tank, it tooled through the streets of the industrial area south of Fort Street until it pulled up before the entrance to the Detroit Salt Company. Railroad tracks spidered in and out of the site, overgrown with weeds behind a chain-link fence. Behind it, an industrial elevator hulked against the sky.

Anya climbed out of the Dart and walked to the fence. The Dart’s headlights cast her shadow long over the rusted links. The chain had already been severed, and the fence swung open with a rasp that scraped the cracked macadam beneath. She fingered the melted edges of the chain.

“Drake’s been here,” she announced. The metal still felt lukewarm to the touch.

“Goody.”
Mimi giggled in the back of her head.

She climbed back into the car. The Dart nosed through the overgrown weeds to the mouth of the tallest building on the site, a black tower overlooking the ruins of industrial buildings that held the rusting carapaces of trucks. Saplings split the pavement with their roots and weeds filled the gutters of the elevator building.

DAGR’s flashlights seemed like puny pinpricks of light within the hulk of the elevator building. The sheet-metal walls blotted out nearly all the light from without, except where rust had burned through, opening pieces of the roof to the night. The industrial elevator was suspended by a series of massive, rusted pulleys, cables, and counterweights that angled far overhead. The structure had been open to the sky for some time. Doves warbled from their nests overhead, disturbed by the flashlights of the trespassers.

“How long did you say it’s been since anyone’s been down here?” Max asked.

“At least twenty years,” Katie confirmed. “That’s the only way in or out.”

“I don’t suppose we could just wait for Ferrer to come out on his own?” Max scratched the back of his cap.

“If there’s no electricity, we might just have to do that.” Jules shined his flashlight on the control panel for the elevator. “Let’s hope that there’s juice.” He punched the button to recall the car.

The machine drives and sheaves overhead squealed and rumbled. The cables drew taut, and the counterweights descended into the mine shaft. Anya could hear a sloughing, ticking sound from below, as the car was laboriously hauled up the mine shaft.

“How far is it down there?” Max asked.

“About twelve hundred feet,” Brian answered.

“Shit.”

Jules cuffed the back of his head. “Language, young man.”

The elevator car reeled to the top, and the doors creaked open. The cavernous car, caged in perforated metal, was large enough to trap a large truck. Jules took the first step on the car, which seemed solid enough. The rest of DAGR crept in behind him, craned their necks as he punched the grimy buttons inside the elevator. Dim red hazard lights lit up the panel and cast warped shadows on the ceiling of the cage.

“Here goes,” he said.

The car lurched and clanged.

“Oh, shit!” Max squealed.

Jules gave the kid a murderous look, but let it slide.

The car steadied under their feet then began to glide downward like a stone on the end of a string. The car plummeted, faster and faster, and the counterweights flashed past them. Anya laced one of her hands in Sparky’s tail, and squeezed her other around Brian’s hand. Her heart lifted into her throat, and she heard Katie shriek.

The elevator car screeched to a halt at the bottom of the shaft, stopping a foot above the floor of the mine. The car creaked slowly, swaying back and forth, as its occupants clambered to the door.

All false bravado, Max lifted his hands, as if he was on a roller coaster. “Whoo! Let’s do it again.”

Jules slapped the back of his head, but too late. The whoop echoed above and below them, bleeding out in a milky-white glittering cavern. Salt crunched underfoot. Like the surface of snow in winter, tire tracks could be seen crisscrossing the surface, scattered with debris. Anya’s flashlight picked out a boot, broken pieces of wood, discarded bent steel tubing. But it smelled pure, clean. Somewhere water dripped, tapping a slow, steady rhythm like a leaky faucet.

“Where do we go now?” Max whispered, mindful of Jules’s hand hovering near his head.

“There are more than fifty miles of road,” Brian said. He pointed toward a heap of rusted out vehicles and carts. “We’d better find one of those that runs.”

It took several tries, but the engine on a Jeep finally turned over. A broken trailer hitch behind it hauled half of a shattered cart, and the rear wheel on the driver’s side was flat. But it ran. DAGR piled in with its guns and holy water, and the Jeep thumped down the tracks of its predecessors, piercing the dark with its dim yellow headlights. Salt spewed like gravel under its tires.

Anya clutched the bottom of her seat, Sparky wound around her knee. In the shotgun seat, Brian juggled a compass, flashlight, and the map, trying to navigate the tunnels to the oldest part of the mine. Striations of dirt and salt gleamed on the walls, suggesting the waves of what had been a vast inland sea.

“Stop.” She clamped her hand down on Jules’s shoulder. He stomped on the brakes, sending the flat tire flopping and skidding against the road. She pointed ahead of her.

“Look.”

She didn’t know if they could see what she did, but she saw her: the little girl from the pop machine. She stood at a split in the road, her shoelace loose over her sneaker. She stared at the truck for a moment, then disappeared into the darkness after the Jeep’s headlights washed over her.

“Do you see her?” Anya demanded. “Go that way. . . left.”

Brian and Jules traded glances, but Jules wrestled the Jeep left over the loose ground. This far into the mine, the fine sea-salt fragments of rock had given way to large chunks, pieces broken from the ceiling, left behind from the dynamite of eras past. The ceilings of the vast chambers they drove through were supported by salt pillars every twenty-five feet. The further they went in, the rougher-hewn they appeared, like chiseled sentinels standing guard in the dark.

“Lot’s wife,” Katie muttered. She shuddered, and Anya could well imagine human shapes in the bounce of light and glistening shadow.

Deep within the belly of the mine, something rumbled. At first, Anya thought it was the whine of the overstressed Jeep’s engine, but the sound grew in intensity until it lifted the hair on her arms. Sparky sat up between her knees, craning his neck into the dark. It growled and yawned through the chamber, rumbling like thunder that rattled the crystals on the ground. Fragments of rock shook loose from the high ceiling, pelting the Jeep like hail.

“Sirrush,” Anya whispered, feeling his call deep in her bones. “Sirrush is awake.”

The Jeep skidded to avoid a piece of boulder crashing to the road. Jules wrenched the wheel, but the Jeep rocked back too far on the flat tire, catching the rim on a rut in the road. Anya lunged forward to catch Katie, to keep her from falling out the Jeep’s shallow backseat, as Jules struggled to regain control. The Jeep sawed to a stop against a salt pillar with enough impact to spill Anya from the back of the Jeep.

She tumbled to the ground, salt scraping her hands and knees. She picked herself up and turned back to the Jeep.

Sirrush’s roar rose, filling the cavern. As she had in her dreams, she clapped her hands over her ears. Her heart trembled, shifting in response to the bass of that terrible sound. That single note reached up into the salt overhead, and wrenched it down with the deafening sound of millions of years of crystal fracturing and raining down into the dead, dry sea of the mine.

Fire followed behind the roar. The blistering heat of Sirrush’s breath yawned through the mine, simmering the air like heat mirages on pavement. Anya pressed her hands to the floor of the cave, felt her sweat mixing stickily with the salt as it dripped from her brow. Sparky scrambled beside her, his tail scraping the damp salt on the ground.

Her attention was transfixed on a tiny figure far in the distance, barely visible in the farthest reach of the Jeep’s shattered headlight: the figure of the girl from the pop machine. She stood silent as a sentinel, waiting for Anya.

Mimi’s voice rattled in her skull:
“Don’t let her get away.”

Behind her, she could hear shouting from the Jeep, glimpse the wash of flashlights in her periphery. But she turned her attention back to the little girl. She climbed to her feet and followed the girl’s ghost into the dark.

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE GHOST OF THE LITTLE girl led Anya through a side passage, away from the wrecked Jeep and the flashlights. Like a will-o’-the-wisp, the girl bobbed and weaved around broken boulders, around cracked and shattered columns. Anya followed slowly, the amber light of her aura burning sickly above her skin. Strings of darkness permeated it, churning within the light: Mimi’s influence. Sparky struck out ahead, his clear golden light illuminating his intentional tracks in the sand-fine salt: the curving sidewinder trail, punctuated by the scrape of his toes. In the ghost-light, his tracks looked very much like the mark of the Horned Viper, marching toward Sirrush’s lair. Sparky rarely left tracks, but now he was blazing a trail for Anya.

The further she walked, the more the heat increased. Anya’s clothes stuck to her body, and she stripped off her jacket and cast it aside. The sweat and condensing salt of the mine ran down the burns on her chest, stinging her wounds. Her damp feet squished in her socks and boots. Her breath grew fast and shallow, and she felt Mimi twisting in her gut, clawing at her lungs.

Finally, she could see light ahead, the surreal orange light of Drake’s paintings. She clomped toward it, feeling the sweat sizzle on her skin. Her copper collar scalded her throat like a bruise. On some level, she understood that the heat was growing beyond human tolerances, but she was past human tolerance.

She had to stop Sirrush from rising. Nothing else mattered. Not pain, not her friends left back in the mine. Not Brian. Not Mimi. Not Drake. Only Sirrush.

The pathway spilled down into a chamber as smooth and round as an egg, polished glistening white by centuries of heat and light. Nearly blinded, she shaded her eyes with her hand. Her breath caught in her throat as she beheld him.