“How often do you see them?” he pointed out. “But they’re everywhere.”
“Fair enough. Are you set?”
He looked tired, but not as drained as he had been from the working that let me into the ghost cottage, and he still had the Glock. There was no question Booke would be the heavy hitter on this run while I provided backup as best I could with touch, Taser, and blade. That had to make him happy, as he’d spent so many years playing a support role. It was past time for this guy to be an action hero.
“Yes, let’s go for a drive, Corine.”
“We need to work on your heroic verbiage,” I told him.
“Not fierce enough? Shall I try again?”
Laughing, I shook my head and led the way out of the trailer. I’d remember this place, if I needed to lay low again. The Pinto blended right in, so none of the neighbors would pay any attention. Even Barachiel might lose track of me here.
Okay, probably not. He probably has a magickal LoJack on my soul.
The mood darkened as I drove out of the trailer park and cut toward the highway. Booke read the directions to me as a better-than-automated form of GPS, and bonus, his voice didn’t go all demonic in pronouncing street names. By this time, it was getting late, the sky heavy with sunset, and I clicked on the lights. Other cars passed while I searched for the turnoff.
“Here,” Booke said at last, but the road was so close by then that the car fishtailed when I slammed on the brakes.
I checked the rearview, found no traffic behind me, so I reversed twenty feet and hung right. This reminded me a little of the final battle between the Montoyas and me, but I wasn’t alone this time, and I wouldn’t solve my problems by calling Dumah to eat anybody’s soul. Expedience had driven that decision but I wouldn’t repeat it.
“How far do we have to go?”
“Five miles. We’re heading north, parallel to the border.”
Nodding, I drove on, my stomach tight with fear. Crazy as it seemed, I had a wizardly World War II veteran as my point man on this operation. Sometimes my life was just too weird for belief. Worried thoughts carried me to our destination; the gravel road had ended long before, making it tough going for the Pinto. This was 4WD territory, but the car had heart, and the suspension was already shot. Chuch wouldn’t care much. I hoped.
I parked, climbed out of the vehicle to survey what lay ahead. By this point, the moon was high, throwing a silver sheen over the remote landscape. The rock formation matched the one I’d glimpsed in the vision Kel shared—moreover, I recognized the honeycomb nature of the site. People had lived here, ages before; folks still lived in the quarries in France, tunneling into the soft limestone cliffs. Here, the rock had a forbidding, desolate air, as if blood had been spilled, and then soaked into the stones themselves.
His door slammed; then Booke joined me. “It’s quite dreadful, isn’t it?”
“We shouldn’t waste time. It’s taken too long already to get to Kel.”
He nodded. “I can imagine few things more horrible than being trapped, unless it’s being imprisoned and at someone else’s mercy.”
Yeah, you didn’t have that, at least. To my mind, loneliness was almost as bad. I put aside my fear and jerked my head toward the stairs cut into the side of the mesa. They were so old that they looked like they might only be safe for mountain goats, but I had to try. With every fiber of me, I wanted to call out to Kel, give him some warning we were close, but I was afraid that might tip off his captors. He’d said the host punished him for insolence, including a stint in prison, but this . . . well, the dead man’s hands running up and down my spine had little to do with the weather.
I strode forward, shoes crunching over loose gravel that created a makeshift parking lot, perfect for loading shipments. Nothing I saw here made me think the cartel was still using this place as a staging ground; it simply felt abandoned, not even a lingering hint of old gas or machinery. Instead, I could only smell sage and saguaro, the crisp nip of air sweeping down from the mountains.
Using my hands for purchase, I scrambled up the weathered stairs, as erosion had left them crumbling beneath my feet. Booke swore behind me, his hand on my shoulder to steady me when I slipped backward. My heart thudded in my ears. I hated heights, hated closed spaces. In saving Kel, I would face both.
This is too much, I thought. I never wanted this.
But maybe if I didn’t think about it, I could do it. Heroes never went around in capes; they just did what they had to. And so would I.
Above us, the first entrance loomed, dark and narrow, like a slit of a mouth in the rock. I clicked on my flashlight and slipped inside. Once, I wouldn’t have needed it, but my light spell didn’t work anymore. It was dark here, quiet, no hint of occupancy. This was just a shallow room with a shelf cut from the wall, and it reminded me of Greydusk’s home in Sheol.
He died for you. Like Chance. Like your father.
The wave of pain swamped me, crippling in its intensity. I hadn’t wanted that, never asked for it. Sometimes the worst fate was being left behind, being asked to deal with what other people had given up for you. In this case, everything. I wasn’t so special that I deserved any of this; and so I was a mess, crawling from one catastrophe to another.
“This was somebody’s home,” Booke said quietly. He was holding a shard of pottery in his hand, the paint faded but still perceptible.
“That makes it even worse, what the cartel did here . . . and what’s being done to Kel now. Let’s move.” I forced myself to sound fierce and determined when my knees wanted to buckle.
Fake it ’til you make it. One of these days that strategy would fail me in spectacular, horrifying ways. Until then, it was all I had.
Killing Ground
Booke and I explored a number of similar spaces before locating a natural room that had an opening at the back of the wall, a natural cavern connected to the man-made spaces. From deeper within, I heard movement. When I glanced at Booke, he wore an intent look.
“Thoughts?” I asked in a whisper.
“It’s time to break out the mouse.”
Incredibly, I knew what he meant. He retreated far enough that crushing the statuette shouldn’t alert anyone deeper within, and as he did so, the magick swept over us at once. It was subtler than witch workings, but the first step I took into the tunnel made no sound at all. I crept over loose stones, expecting to turn the corner at any moment and run into something horrible. As I went deeper, the smell increased: not the sulfur and brimstone stench that marked demonic presence, but something sharper and sweeter, like old blood mixed with burnt sugar.
A rasp in repetitive cadence echoed softly against the stone to the point that I couldn’t place where the sound was coming from. The tunnel sloped down, and I had the terrifying thought that Kel could be in Sheol. What if this led to a natural gate? Greydusk—the demon who helped me save Shannon and died in the attempt—had said that there were places where the barrier between the planes was thin, but to open the way, I would need a sacrifice in order to save Kel. My inchoate fear slid away when I realized I could see the back of the cave ahead. It was fairly deep in the mesa, but it didn’t look to be so far underground as to lead to hell. And the panting noises were punctuated by groans of pain.
Kel was here—and they were torturing him.
I crept forward, Booke at my side, to get a better view of the scene. In order to plan a strategy, we had to see what we were dealing with. Kel lay on a natural stone table, shimmering bonds of energy holding him in place. An unfamiliar male whom I took to be another member of the host stood over him with a shining silver knife, similar to the one Kel used. So I guessed the torturer was Nephilim as well; otherwise, he’d have a bigger blade, à la Barachiel. The huffing sounds came from the creatures pacing around his feet. They bore a rudimentary resemblance to Rottweilers yet they were so dark that their fur seemed to drink the light, with coils of plumed smoke swirling about their legs, and when they turned their massive heads to scan for intruders, their eyes glinted bloodred.