Thornton turned to continue walking, but his legs suddenly gave out from under him and he fell. I heard the distinctive snap of bone, but I couldn’t tell what had fractured. His limbs looked all right, even the mangled arm he’d reset. A rib, maybe? Dead and decaying at an accelerated rate, he’d become as fragile as porcelain.
Thornton squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees. He punched the floor angrily. “Damn it, come on!”
I took him by the shoulders to help him up.
“Don’t,” he said. He didn’t look at me, just shrugged my hands off. With a groan, he sat back on his haunches, wrapping his arms around his stomach as if he were in pain. In the guttering torchlight I saw his hands were marbled with black necrotic tissue. The lights from the amulet on his chest pulsed even more weakly than before. “I was supposed to have twenty-four hours,” he said. “You told me I had twenty-four hours.”
Bethany moved toward him. “Thornton, what’s happening? Talk to me.”
He turned his face away from her. When he spoke his voice sounded hollow. “I can see myself rotting. I can feel it from the inside. It’s horrible. You should have left me dead, Bethany. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask you to bring me back.”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. She knelt down in front of him. “I’m sorry, Thornton. I know you’re worried, and I know you’re scared, but I won’t let anything happen before we get you back to Gabrielle. I promise.”
He turned to her, finally. His eyes were dry, but I thought he would have been crying if he could have. “You can’t promise that, Bethany. No one can.”
Silently, she stood, offered him her hands, and helped him back to his feet.
We continued down the tunnel. Ahead of us was another titanic doorway, this time filled with bright light pouring through from the other side. The air grew colder as we approached it. I closed my trench coat around me, my breath steaming in front of my face, and followed Bethany and Thornton through it into the light.
On the other side, I paused and blinked, certain what I was seeing couldn’t be real. I’d expected another chamber or tunnel, but what spread out before us now as far as the eye could see was a vista more suited to the Himalayas than a cavern beneath the streets of New York City. We were standing on a stone bridge, long and wide and rimmed with ice. In the distance a range of snow-capped mountains rose out of a shroud of white mist. I walked to the edge of the bridge and looked over, past the enormous icicles that dangled beneath us, but the mist hid the ground below. It was impossible to tell how far down it went. There was no visible light source in this place, and yet light permeated the landscape from all directions. It looked like sunlight, but it couldn’t be. We were still underground. How could there be sunlight beneath the city? How could any of this be here?
“Where are we?” I asked, my breath forming a cloud.
“Tsotha Zin, also known as the Nethercity,” Thornton said. “It’s a safe haven, a place where many of those who believe it’s become too dangerous on the surface choose to live, under Gregor’s protection. They don’t trust anyone who’s still on the surface—topsiders, they call them—but Gregor and I have an understanding.”
I stared out at the mountain peaks in awe, and noticed tiny shapes along the slopes that resembled houses. “You’re telling me someone built a city under New York?”
“No,” he said. “I’m telling you someone built New York over a city.” He cupped his hands by his mouth and shouted, “Gregor!” His voice echoed across the mountaintops. He called it again. I thought, skeptically, that Gregor was an odd name for a dragon.
As the echoes died away, the mist below the bridge roiled and broke. A massive shape reared up before us like a mountain in its own right, only it was alive and moving, an enormous, reptilian head at the end of a long, sinuous neck.
I gasped and took a nervous step back. Gregor bore only a passing resemblance to the dragon on the cover of The Ragana’s Revenge. His hide was shingled with thick, stone-gray scales, not green ones. Where his eyes should have been there burned two cold, white fires. His head was encircled with yellowing ivory horns that swept back like a crown from his serpentine face. There was something that seemed almost prehistoric about him, an air of such immense age that suddenly I had no trouble believing he was as old as Bethany claimed.
The nostrils at the end of his long snout flared as big as windows as he inhaled a deep breath. The massive suction nearly pulled me off my feet. Bethany held onto my arm to keep from falling over. Then the dragon opened his titanic jaws and let loose an angry, deafening roar. The heat of his breath blasted me like a furnace. I couldn’t help noticing that his teeth were bigger than I was. He could swallow me with a single bite.
“It’s okay, Gregor, they’re with me!” Thornton shouted.
The dragon closed his jaws, the echo of his roar bouncing across the mountains and dying away. He lifted his head high, exhaling plumes of steam from his nostrils, then lowered himself to the bridge again. Once more, the dragon inhaled mightily. I braced my legs to keep from being vacuumed into Gregor’s nostrils. Bethany clung to me again until it was over.
“The tiny female is unknown to me. You know strangers are not welcome here,” Gregor said. The long spiky bristles that dangled like a beard from his chin quivered as he spoke. His voice boomed across the mountain range like thunder.
If my jaw could have dropped any farther than it already had, it would have landed at my feet. Not only was the dragon talking, he could speak English. I turned to Bethany, but she put a finger to her lips before I could say anything. I turned back to the dragon. He was studying me with his burning eyes. Somewhere in that white fire I sensed a vast intelligence.
“This one, the male,” Gregor continued. “The stench of death clings to him. He is not what he seems.”
I stiffened. Just how much could Gregor tell about me with a sniff?
“Yeah, he’s all kinds of wrong,” Thornton agreed. “But even so, I can vouch for him. I can vouch for them both.”
“Very well.” Gregor swiveled on his long neck to face Thornton. “I see you have returned with the Breath of Itzamna upon your chest, old friend, and the scent of the dead. I regret that your fate has found you so soon. I will miss your companionship.”
Clearly uncomfortable, Thornton changed the subject quickly. “Please tell me you still have the box I left with you.”
“Of course,” the dragon said. A gigantic hand rose from beneath the bridge, its scaly claws balled in a fist. All three of us backed up to give the hand room as it came to rest before us. “I promised you I would keep it safe, and I have done no less. I would give it to none but you.”
Thornton nodded. “I know. Believe me, just this once I wish that weren’t the case.” He looked at the dragon’s massive fist. “Thank you, I’ll take it now.”
“However,” the dragon said, “it is such a pretty box.”
Thornton rolled his eyes. “Gregor…”
“I would hate to lose such a beautiful item from my collection,” the dragon continued. “It brings me such pleasure to look at.”
I glanced at Bethany. Once again she gestured for me not to say or do anything to interfere.
“Gregor, I’m running out of time,” Thornton said. “The Breath of Itzamna won’t last much longer. Please, I need the box.”
“I propose a barter, then. A fair trade,” Gregor said.
Thornton frowned and shook his head. “What do we have that you could possibly want?”