Fallen Angel of Mine (37 page)

"Close sesame," Curtis said, a slight
tremble in his baritone. The barrier and illusion sprang back into
place, cutting off the angry roars and braying reverberating from
below. He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. "Well, I
certainly hope the normal passage doesn't intersect with that
one."

"Heaven help us if it does," Fausta
said, her usual mask of bravado cracking at the edges.

We walked around the corner from the
passage of death and Curtis opened what probably passed as the
front door of the structure by waving his staff and calling out
another phrase. Beck insisted on throwing in a few pebbles to make
sure the floor really existed before we chanced our hides down a
steeply sloped dark tunnel. Bella lit the way with a globe of light
drifting several feet above our heads. From the outside, the
pyramid looked absolutely monstrous. Each stone slab underpinning
the structure stood about a story tall and probably took a team of
mutant elephants to pull it into its assigned slot. Or maybe they'd
done it with magic. From the inside, the place felt cramped even
though the tunnel was easily wide enough for two semi-trucks to
drive side-by-side.

Our steps echoed down the long sloping
corridor, accompanied by the occasional clatter of pebbles as Beck
picked them up and tossed them ahead.

"You really don't need to do that,"
Curtis said. "Pokito is a master of illusion. He's using a reveal
spell to make sure we don't blunder into anything."

Beck took a long look at the small,
thin sorcerer who, to this point, hadn't uttered a word. "Fine with
me, dude. But if I fall into a pit of acid, I'm gonna be
pissed."

I almost smiled at the
thought.

A creepy, dreadful sound interrupted my
amusement. The sound I'd heard my first night in the dead city
above. The sound of whispers, as if a crowd of invisible people
waited ahead down the corridor and were speaking in hushed tones.
Elyssa shuddered. I felt every individual hair on my neck stand up
straight in an attempt to pluck itself from my skin and run for the
hills. Beck took some pebbles and threw them into the pitch black
ahead. Their scattered flight made no difference. If anything, the
susurrus seemed to gain volume. Or maybe we were just getting
closer to the source.

The walls of the tunnel ended with
hardly a warning and Bella's light was just a bright stain in what
felt like a yawning void all around us. I looked back to the tunnel
mouth. Ahead, I could see nothing but tight-set stone slabs on the
floor. A thin layer of dust and debris lay on them, disturbed only
by a few scuffs here and there. Elyssa knelt next to one of the
scuffs and motioned Beck over. I approached uninvited to see what
was so marvelous.

"Hard-soled shoes." Elyssa traced a
black mark. "Maybe dress shoes."

"Who'd be lurking down here in nice
shoes?" Fausta said.

I thought back to the shadow people and
wondered if one of them had left the mark. "The shadow people who
attacked me in the city had on clothes and shoes. I assume they'd
leave marks like anyone else." But thinking back on my close
encounter, I remembered only the tattered remains of rotted clothes
hanging from their sallow frames. I hadn't exactly focused on their
footwear.

"There are other marks," Fausta said,
looking to the sides and pointing at very slight scuffs in the
dust. "Whatever made those marks wasn't putting a lot of weight on
the ground."

"I suggest we follow this trail,"
Curtis said, kneeling down and examining the marks.

"If this is anything like those muddy
footprints up top, they'll probably lead us into a death trap," I
said. "Maybe we're better off not following them."

Curtis pursed his lips and nodded, as
if deliberating internally. "You could be right. I'm going to send
up a flare to give us a better idea what to expect. Then we can
make a decision."

The whispers continued around us,
unabated. I shuddered, almost certain what lurked in the pitch
beyond. I gave Curtis a nod. He whirled his staff above his head in
a couple of tight circles before slamming it down and shouting a
word. A dim pellet of light streaked upward, hardly bright enough
to see, much less illuminate our surroundings. I'd just lost sight
of it when a loud boom echoed and brilliant white light blossomed
into fiery display about a hundred feet over our heads.

This dude totally thought he was
Gandalf.

Whispers turned to screeches as the
light caught darkly shimmering figures unaware. Dozens of shadow
people blurred away into the edge of darkness, black smoke roiling
from their skin where the light hit it. Their sounds of inhuman
agony scraped my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. One of
the creatures must have been hiding right at the edge of Bella's
light. It had the form and shape of a woman with long, distended
fingers, blackened and clawed, only inches away from where Elyssa
had squatted to peer at the scuff marks. If she'd moved a hair
more, that thing might have gotten her.

The intense onslaught of light froze
the shadow woman in place like a current of electricity. The light
burned away the shadow in a brilliant light show, sucking smoky
tendrils from her body while her mouth remained locked in a rictus
of agony. The scream was unbearable. I pressed both hands to my
ears in a desperate attempt to block off the wall of sound. Her
ragged cry cut off. The black wisps of shadow were gone, leaving
only pale skin and rotted clothing behind. The woman's eyes locked
onto mine. Her gaze seemed to soften. Maybe because her pain was
gone. Maybe her humanity returned. I didn't have time to figure it
out before her eyes glazed over, as if a gray mist had infected
them from the inside, and she slumped to the floor in a lifeless
heap.

I was the first one to approach her. My
fingers probed for a pulse, but her skin felt ice cold and hard.
When I pressed beneath the curve of her chin, the flesh cracked
like sunbaked leather and flaked away. I jerked my hand
back.

"She's dead." Nobody else said a word,
not even Beck, as Curtis's flare began to dwindle and flicker to
nothing overhead. I suddenly knew what I'd seen in that woman's
eyes. I'd seen it before when I'd saved Stacey from hellhounds. I'd
seen it when Elyssa had woken from her near death experience at the
hands of vamplings. She hadn't been relieved because the pain was
gone. She hadn't been afraid. This woman had been grateful.
Thankful. For her, the long nightmare was over.

For us, it was just
beginning.

"It—what—she?" Beck's mouth stopped
moving. His eyes never left the corpse. Other fissures joined the
first along the dead woman's pale skin, like cracks and veins in a
marble statue.

"Fascinating," Curtis whispered in a
low voice. "I didn't realize they could be killed."

"Killed?" Bella said in an incredulous
voice. "I wasn't even sure they were real."

"You didn't believe me?" I said, a hard
edge to my voice.

"It isn't that, dear. I simply thought
they were ghosts or shades, not corporeal."

"I don't suppose anyone took a look
around while the flare was going, did they?" Elyssa asked, her eyes
meeting mine and lingering with a questioning gaze that had nothing
to do with the question she'd just asked.

Headshakes all around met her query. I
couldn't blame anyone. The death of the shadow woman had been
pretty hard to ignore. On the upside, we knew it was possible to
kill the things, but you obviously had to catch them in enough
bright light to freeze them. Those at the edges could still
escape.

Curtis sighed and checked his staff.
"That's not an easy spell. Give me a minute to
recharge."

"I might be able to do it," Alejandro
said.

"Yours isn't quite as good," Curtis
replied. "Better let me do it."

Alejandro's eyes hardened, but he
didn't argue the point.

Curtis's minute turned to five before
he gave it another go. This time, the light was noticeably weaker
and didn't last as long. It also didn't catch a single specter.
Those things were smart. Or maybe they just had an acute animal
instinct. In any case, I had a feeling they'd attack at some point
and it wouldn't be pretty. But as long as Bella kept the lights on
we had nothing to worry about, right?

I didn't feel reassured.

"At least the whispers stopped," Beck
said.

It was true. I hadn't heard another
whisper since the first flare.

Everyone gazed into the vast space
Curtis's flare had lit. Massive square columns vanished into the
darkness above. Somewhere up there, they probably supported the
base of the pyramid. The sloped tunnel had brought us further
underground than I'd realized, and I couldn't help but think about
the Gothic school Maximus's vampires had converted into a barracks
back in Atlanta. I remembered the crypt where they'd kept my father
locked away and the horde of rotting vamplings. I wasn't sure which
was worse—vamplings or these shadow people. At least I didn't have
to put up with the awful stench here.

Despite our concerted scans, nobody
spotted the other side of the room or another door for that matter.
We talked in nervous, hushed tones for a moment before arriving at
a consensus to simply move straight ahead.

"Maybe we should get a few more able
bodies," I said before we embarked into the unknown. "It probably
wouldn't take more than thirty minutes to run back up the ramp and
snag a few from the picnic."

Curtis gave me a look involving pursed
lips and a crinkled brow, clearly conveying his opinion on the
matter. "I think we have things covered," he said. "Anyone else
would just get in the way."

I mustered a confident look of my own
and said, "I don't think the entire population of the town would
get in the way in this massive place."

"We're good," Beck said, pshawing and
shouldering past me.

I looked at Bella. She shrugged. "I am
fine with what everyone else decides."

Alejandro, who'd been a bit sulky since
Curtis's dismissal of his flare abilities shook his head. "Too
long. We want to be finished while it's still daylight."

Elyssa gazed back at the tunnel mouth,
now barely visible at the edge of the light from Bella's wand, but
said nothing.

Fausta merely shrugged.

Pokito, who until this
point
still
hadn't
said a thing, opened his mouth, apparently thought better of
imparting any mind-blowing wisdom, and closed his mouth
again.

"Fine, just a thought," I said. I
really didn't know what else to say. These people were older and
more experienced than I was so maybe it'd be better just to let
them lead away.

Curtis pointed to Bella. "We've got
light." He pointed to Pokito. "He'll warn us of any illusory
traps." He jabbed a thumb against his chest. "And I've had training
as a battle mage."

"I'll beat the crap out of anything
else," Beck said, pacing impatiently at the edge of shadow and
light.

And so we headed onward with the
Gandalf wannabe and Beck's endless supply of testosterone. With
that combination, how could anything possibly go wrong?

The place was quiet as a tomb without
the whispers to accompany us. The occasional groaning of stone or
the echo of falling bits of debris were the only noises penetrating
the pressing silence. Some fifteen minutes later, we finally drew
within sight of a tunnel on the opposite wall. The path inside
spiraled downward.

"This thing goes deeper?" Elyssa
said.

Beck shrugged. "Looks that way." He
tossed a handful of pebbles down the tunnel where they skittered
and slid. He obviously didn't trust Pokito.

We walked down the winding ramp for
what seemed like an eternity, finally reaching the end only after
I'd made myself dizzy and a bit nauseated from going round and
round and down and down. The tunnel widened into a chamber. I
strode across the room, still keeping well within Bella's light
when a fluctuation in the smooth floor caught my eye.

Jerking to a stop, I held out a hand,
motioning the others to halt, and examined the floor. Intricate
etchings ran along the stone floor from one side of the room to the
other. The four sorcerers knelt to examine it as well.

Curtis shook his head and grunted. "You
know what it is Pokito?"

The untalkative sorcerer didn't break
his silent streak with an answer at first, apparently thought
better of it, and decided to speak. "I sense no illusion." His
voice was deep and rich despite his petite frame. "Perhaps it is
decoration."

"In this place?" Fausta said with a
laugh. "I haven't seen any decoration or carvings down here until
now."

"It looks really suspicious," Elyssa
said, examining the length of it. "Almost like a line drawn to keep
this side barricaded from the other."

"I will probe it," Pokito said, going
for broke and uttering a whole sentence without being
prompted.

He pulled out his wand. Did a swirly
move with it. Muttered something. A spark of blue energy drifted
from his wand and toward the etchings.