Volition (15 page)

I don’t have much time to dwell on the compliment because we’re apparently at our destination.

“Where are we?”

“Shh…” he says, putting a hand up to my lips.

He leads me over to a man guarding a manhole cover and flashes something from inside his pocket. The guard says something into a lapel microphone and lifts up the cover.

“In.”

“Oh no, we are
not
going down there.”

“Oh, but we are,” Colin whispers. He makes me go first.

I shove the flashlight into the back of my jeans, and an unknown hand reaches out to me as I descend into the underworld.

Colin follows suit, and we’re in complete darkness until someone lights a candle and hands it to me. It’s hot on my hands, but it’s not unbearable because the air is much cooler down here than I expected.

My eyes adjust, and I take in my surroundings. We’re in a small room with five or six other people. Colin moves me to the side as more people descend through the opening in what is now our ceiling. Another person with a lapel microphone leads us down a narrow passageway covered in graffiti where we come to a small opening with several ladders.

“Down,” he says, motioning that direction.

Oh, what the hell? If that’s where I’m going, I might as well start now.

I hand Colin my candle and start climbing down the ladder. He and the others quickly follow. Then, we’re walking down a tunnel for what seems like an eternity. I can hear whispers echoing off the graffiti-laden concrete walls, and suddenly, we’re surrounded by fifty of our closest new friends when our tunnel connects with another. Everyone is holding a candle, and this seems like some kind of zombie vigil.

I see a ladder coming up on my right, and a girl is climbing down. Her blonde hair is sticking to her face from the humidity, and I can almost feel how fast her heart is pounding just by looking at her. She doesn’t want to jump down the three feet to the ground from where the ladder ends, and I can tell one of the wired men is about to get impatient with her because she’s making too much noise and ruining the atmosphere.

I think he’s about to shove her down the ladder when a man swoops up to grab her in his arms, and I’m pretty sure I’ve just witnessed the beginning of a love story or Stockholm syndrome based on the way she looks at him as he carries her off into the darkness.

We walk until I see a metal track off to the side that connects to a platform at the end. When I shine my flashlight on the track and follow it, I see that it goes off endlessly in the other direction.

“The subway,” I whisper in Colin’s ear as I make him lean down to hear me. “We’re in an abandoned subway tunnel.”

“Bingo,” he says. He puts out my flame with his hand before relighting it with his candle.

The crowd stops moving, and a man steps out onto the platform.

“Welcome, Spirits of Hades. Enjoy.”

I’m immediately startled by the sound of drums from behind us, but they aren’t coming from that direction at all. The echo against the walls only makes it seem that way. Performers step out from behind the platform and begin playing strange rhythmic songs, followed by dancers. None of them are wearing a lot of clothing, and I vaguely wonder if any of them go to Juilliard with my friend Hollie.

I look around at our fellow Spirits of Hades. Everyone is holding a candle, and some are staring straightforward, standing as still as the Queen’s guards, while some are swaying lightly to the beat. The air is thick with sweat and mildew and the scent of lost time.

I know we aren’t allowed to be down here.

This is illegal.

But I love it. It’s a city underneath a city, filled with brave souls who don’t mind living on the fringes—or in this case, below.

This is why it’s a Colin and Tate activity, not a Colin, Tate, and Catherine activity. Hayden could never come here.

If I were with Hayden, I couldn’t do things like this anymore.

I’d become too high profile, and instead of opening doors, it might close them.

Suddenly, I’m afraid of Hayden and everything he represents.

Colin senses a change in the air as if he can read the vibration of my mood, and he puts an arm around my shoulder.

We’re there for another two hours before we’re allowed to leave. I witness several panic attacks on the way out from people who can’t stand the claustrophobia of walking down a narrow tunnel with hundreds of other people.

“There’s only one rule,” a wired man whispers in my ear as we clear the last ladder up.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Run. You just run as far away from here as you can.”

We wait our turn to run, and Colin explains softly, “In New York City, you can’t have a gathering of more than fifty people without a permit.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “We don’t exactly have a permit.”

“Not
exactly.
”

It’s our turn.

Colin and I are expelled from Hades, and we run. He takes my hand, and we run into the night.

I’m laughing.

And I’m running. I’m running for my life.

And I never want to stop.

Now

CATHERINE IS GOING to smother me with a pillow.

Or so she says.

“I swear, if your phone beeps again, I’m doing it.” Her muffled voice comes from the other side of her tiny bed, but it sounds far away to my sleep-drugged brain. “It’s the middle of the night.”

What she doesn’t know is that I’ve just gone to sleep.

I reach over to her windowsill and pull out my phone.

Hayden:
I hear if you get down to Barnes & Noble right now, they have one copy of Evanna Wyatt’s new novel.

That’s not out until next week.

Hayden:
Better hurry.

Hayden fell off the face of the planet after I canceled our non-date three days ago. He hasn’t returned the message I left at the bell desk, and he hasn’t called or texted me.

Not until just now—at three in the morning.

Bookstores aren’t even open at this time.

Hayden:
Look for Jane.

I don’t really want to rip myself out of Catherine’s bed as tiny and uncomfortable as it may be. She tried to make it better with an egg-crate mattress pad, but she always shoves all the blankets on me. Half the time, I wake up tangled on the floor in between her bed and her windowsill, so it’s not like I’m getting a great night’s sleep to begin with.

What the hell?

I throw the covers back without regard for Catherine, and immediately, I feel her wrath as a pillow hits me in the back of the head.

I whisper my apologies. I pull a sweatshirt on over my T-shirt and shorts and shove my feet into my favorite mint-green Vans. It’s not cold outside, but it’s a lot breezier than it is during the disgustingly hot daytime.

I put the key to Catherine’s apartment and my MetroCard into my pocket and trudge the five flights down the stairs to the main floor. It’s not really an apartment. It’s a dorm for underclassmen at New York University. Her floor is the only one with graduate students who have been assigned there due to overflow in the allotted apartment buildings. I’m signed in as Catherine’s guest for a month, and then I have to be out.

The lobby is cool, and I revel in it for a moment. Catherine’s floor isn’t air-conditioned, and the inside of the building doesn’t look like it’s been updated much since it was built in 1925.

I wave to Majumdar, Catherine’s favorite night security guard. I’ve heard countless stories about him trying to fix Catherine up with his youngest son.

“Where are you going, Miss Tate?”

I sigh. “Everywhere.”

I walk out the revolving door, knowing full well he thinks I’m crazy. I’m always disoriented the second I leave the building, so I take a couple of deep breaths before I decide which direction to walk in.

I love New York nights. It’s when the city comes alive. It’s cool and beautiful and as serene as it can be with millions of people trying to survive in such close quarters from hour to hour. I wish it could be night all the time instead of the sweltering heat that plagues the city during the daytime.

I want to be a vampire and live for the night.

I already do. I just want an excuse to make it official.

After considering my route for a moment, I realize that the closest Barnes & Noble that isn’t under construction is near Rockefeller Center.

Of course.

I quickly walk to West 4
th
Street and take the orange line uptown to Rockefeller Center. I have a love-hate relationship with this stop because it comes out under the building. It once saved Catherine and me from being drenched in a thunderstorm, but I also have to walk through the entire Rockefeller underground shopping center and terminal to get outside.

There’s no one in the terminal tonight, but I glance inside all the store windows anyway as I walk past.

My stomach grumbles, but I can’t do anything about it right now. Even if there were street vendors open topside, I wouldn’t risk it. Catherine once told me she saw one drop a hot dog on the ground, pick it back up, and put it in with the others.

I guess they have to make their annual $250,000 permit payments somehow.

Once I’m out of the building, I make quick time to the bookstore. It’s apparent as I’m walking up that there aren’t any lights on, but I peer in the window anyway.

Someone scares the living daylights out of me as she taps me on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry!” A girl in her late teens stands before me, looking even more shaken than I am.

I don’t know how I didn’t see her when I approached the windows.

“You could kill someone, you know,” I spit out at her, angry that she snuck up on me like that.

She casts her gaze downward, and she’s admiring my shoes.

Mint—it’s so hot right now
, I think to myself in a Zoolander accent.

“Are you Tate?” Her voice is shaking now.

I feel the slightest bit bad that I’m the one who made her feel this way when she wasn’t trying to startle me.

“Depends on who’s looking.”

She reaches into the bag on her shoulder and pulls out a book.

I can’t help but gasp as she holds it out to me, but as I reach for it, she pulls it back against her chest lightning fast as if she’s a chipmunk and I’m trying to steal her food.

“Only if you’re Tate.”

Suddenly, the book becomes less important.

“Why are you out here at three in the morning?”

“I’m an intern,” she says as if that explains everything.

I cross my arms and wait to hear more.

“I’m Addison Rockefeller’s intern. She’s a good friend of Evanna Wyatt. Ms. Wyatt gave Ms. Rockefeller an advance copy, and I was told to give it to Tate McKenna.”

I’m less concerned with what this has to do with Addison Rockefeller than how it connects with Hayden, and how he got it for me. He probably could have had it delivered, but somehow he knows I like things better when they’re mysterious.

“At three in the morning?”

The girl nods. “It had to be a secret.”

I decide that I really want to read Evanna Wyatt’s new novel more than I want to hear all of this, so I hold out my hands. “I’m Tate McKenna.”

She still doesn’t give it to me. “Do you know who sent me?”

I nod. “You just told me. Addison Rockefeller.”

She shakes her head. “No. Who sent me after that?”

“Hayden Rockefeller.”

His name must be the magic password because she holds the book out to me, and I’m able to grasp it with my own two hands. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book in print and not on my Kindle, but I welcome it home into my arms like that’s what it was made for.

“Thank you,” I tell her because I’m trying to be a good person and not myself. “Make sure you get home safely.”

“I will, Ms. McKenna,” she says. She looks both ways on the street before she scurries across and into the darkness. She’s not a native New Yorker.

Then, it dawns on me.

I’m holding Evanna Wyatt’s new novel before it’s released to the public. I nearly skip all the way back home. I refuse to let myself read it on the train because I wouldn’t get off, and then I’d end up in Brooklyn. Then, Catherine would have to come get me because I’d be infernally lost.

I make an effort to stare out of the train windows, so I won’t look at the book. There’s only one other girl in my car, and she’s crying, shrouded in her jacket with her knees up to her forehead. She gets off a stop before mine, and something flies out of her pocket. The rush of air as the doors close shoves it within arm’s reach, so I pick it up off the floor.

It’s one of those photos that looks like a negative, but it has a baby as the subject instead of a flower or a person outside of the womb.

Ugh. Children.

Pregnancy makes me want to throw up. Nevertheless, I can’t take my eyes off the photo. It fascinates me in a morbid way.

I guess I’m going to need a bookmark.

I stick it inside a random page of Evanna’s novel.

Once I’m at Catherine’s building, I wave at Majumdar and walk into the elevator before he can grill me on where I’ve been. Rule number one: Don’t talk to Majumdar unless you have to because he talks for a minimum of thirty minutes.