"Yes," Toot-toot translated. "Two lights for yes, and one light for no."
"Two for yes, one for no," I muttered.
Toot frowned. "Or is that one for yes and two for no? I can never keep it straight." And with that, the little faerie blurred and zipped past me and away to join the swarm of softly flashing lights demolishing the pizza.
Elidee, for her part, recovered from the miniature cyclone that Toot-toot left in his wake, whirled around dizzily for a few moments, then spiraled down to me and settled on the bridge of my nose. My eyes crossed trying to look at her. "Hey," I said, "do I look like a couch to you?"
Two flashes.
I sighed. "Okay, Elidee. Do you want any pizza before we go?"
Two flashes again, brighter. The tiny faerie leapt up into the air again and zoomed over to the cloud around the pizza.
Footsteps came down the alley, then Billy stepped out of the shadows, pulling his sweatshirt down over his muscular stomach. I felt a brief and irrational surge of jealousy. I don't have a muscular stomach. I'm not overlapping my belt or anything, but I don't have abs of steel. I don't even have abs of bronze. Maybe abs of plastic.
Billy blinked at the pizza for a moment and said, "Wow. That's sort of pretty. In a Jaws kind of way."
"Yeah," I said. "Don't look at it for too long. Faerie lights can be disorienting to mortals."
"Gotcha," Billy said. He glanced back at me. "How'd it go? You get what you needed?"
"Yeah," I said. "You?"
He shrugged. "Alley isn't the best place to pick up scents, but I should be able to recognize them again if I'm in my other suit. They didn't smell quite normal."
"Gee, what are the odds."
Billy's teeth showed in the dark. "Heh. So what are we waiting for?"
Elidee picked just then to glide back over to me and settle once more on the bridge of my nose. Billy blinked at her and said, "What the hell?"
"This is our guide," I said. "Elidee, this is Billy."
Elidee flashed twice.
Billy blinked again. "Uh, charmed." He shook his head. "So? What's the plan?"
"We go confront the Winter Lady in her underground lair. I do the talking. You stay alert and watch my back."
He nodded. "Okay. You got it."
I looked over to see the last piece of pizza lifted up into the air by greedy faerie hands. They clustered around it, tearing and ripping, and it was gone in seconds. With that, the faeries swarmed away like a squadron of potbellied comets and vanished from view.
Elidee fluttered off my nose and started drifting down the alley in the other direction. I followed her.
"Harry?" Billy asked, his voice a touch hopeful. "Are you expecting trouble?"
I sighed and rubbed at the space between my eyebrows.
Definitely getting a headache. It was going to be a long night.
Chapter Fourteen
Elidee led Billy and me through alleys, up a fire escape to the roof of a building and then down on the other side, and through a junk-cluttered abandoned lot on the way to the Pedway. It took us better than half an hour of scrambling after the tiny faerie through the muggy heat, and by the end of it I wished I'd told Toot-toot that we wanted someone who could read a street map and guide us there in a car.
Chicago's commuter tunnels are fairly recent construction, compared to much of the rest of the city. The tunnels are a maze if you don't know them—long stretches of identical overhead lights, drab, clean walls dotted with advertising posters, and intersections bearing plain and not always helpful directional signs. The tunnels closed after the workday and wouldn't open up again until around six the next morning, but Elidee led us to an unfinished building at Randolph and Wabash. She flitted around in front of a service access door that proved to be unlocked and that led down to a similar door that opened onto a darkened section of the Pedway that looked as though it had been under construction but was abandoned when the building had shut down.
It was completely dark, so I slipped the silver pentacle off my neck, lifting it in my hand and focusing a quiet effort of will upon it. The five-pointed star has been a symbol of magic for centuries, representing the four elements and the power of spirit bound within the circle of will—primal power under the control of human thought. I held the pentacle before me, and as I concentrated it began to glow with a gentle blue light, illuminating enough of our surroundings that we could navigate through the dark, silent tunnels. The little faerie drifted in front of us down the tunnel, and we followed her without speaking. She took us to the intersection with the main tunnels of the Pedway and on a brief walk down another tunnel, to a section shut behind a rusting metal gate with a sign that read, DANGER KEEP OUT. The gate proved to be unlocked, and we went down the tunnel, into a damper section of tunnels, rife with the smell of mold, that was clearly not a part of the Pedway proper.
After another fifty or sixty feet we reached a place where the walls became rough and uneven and shadows lay thick and heavy, despite the glow of my wizard's light.
Elidee drifted over to an especially dark section of wall and flew in a little circle in front of it.
"Okay," I said. "I guess this is where we get in."
"What is where we get in?" Billy asked, his voice skeptical. "Get into where?"
"Undertown," I said. I ran my hands over the wall. To the casual touch it appeared to be bare, unfinished concrete, but I felt a slight unsteadiness when I pressed against it. It couldn't have been solid stone. "Must be a panel here somewhere. Trigger of some kind."
"What do you mean, 'Undertown'? I've never heard of it before."
"I was probably working here for five or six years before I did," I said. "You have to understand the history of Chicago. How they did things here."
Billy folded his arms. "I'm listening."
"The city is a swamp," I said, still searching for a means of opening the door with my fingertips. "We're darn near level with Lake Michigan. When they first built the place, the town kept sinking into the muck. I mean, every year it sank lower. They used to build streets, then build a latticework of wood over them, and then another street on top of that, planning on them slowly sinking. They planned houses the same way. Built the front door on the second floor and called it a 'Chicago entry, so when the house sank, the front door would be at ground level."
"What about when the street sank?"
"Built another one on top of it. So you wound up with a whole city existing under the street level. They used to have a huge problem with rats and criminals holing up under the streets."
"But not anymore?" Billy asked.
"The rats and thugs mostly got crowded out by other things. Became a whole miniature civilization down here. And it was out of sight of the sun, which made it friendly space for all the night-crawling critters around."
"Hence, Undertown," Billy said.
I nodded. "Undertown. There are a lot of tunnels around Chicago. The Manhattan Project was housed in them for a while during World War Two. Did all that atomic bomb research."
"That's cheerful. You come down here a lot?"
I shook my head. "Hell, no. All kinds of nastiness lives down here."
Billy frowned at me. "Like what?"
"Lots of things. Stuff you don't often see on the surface. Things even wizards know almost nothing about. Goblins, spirits of the earth, wyrms, things that have no name. Plus the usual riffraff. Vampires sometimes find lairs down here during the day. Trolls can hide here too. Molds and fungi you don't get in most of the natural world. You name it."
Billy pursed his lips thoughtfully. "So you're taking us into a maze of lightless, rotting, precarious tunnels full of evil faeries and monsters."