I closed my hand around the door handle and pushed down. The gentle clack was all it took. Skele-kitty raised its head, sunken eyes looking right at me. It yowled, and the screech made my teeth ache. It raced toward me, faster than it had any right to move. I pushed against the door, went through, and shoved it closed again. The critter hit with a thump. Unless it knew how to open doors, it was trapped.
“Okay, let’s try door number two.”
With perfect silence in the stairwell and lobby above, I pushed through the second door and into another stairwell. The basement had a basement. Interesting. It also had no light of any kind. After a moment fiddling with the door and finding no way to prop it open, I gave up and let darkness envelop me.
The stairs were steeper, wood instead of cement, and still held a hint of pine fragrance. They were new enough that I doubted they were part of the original floor plans. I dragged my fingertips along the rough, packed-dirt walls, each step taking me farther into the gloom.
My foot finally landed on something harder than wood. I scraped the toe of my sneaker around. Cement floor. I’d hit bottom. I fumbled until my eyes adjusted enough to make out a thin line of light on the floor, roughly the width of a door. The metal frame was embedded in the dirt walls and within it was another steel fire door. Another handle. Another room.
I pressed my palm against the smooth metal. It hummed beneath me like a living thing. The short hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I was there, on the precipice of solving my entire three-day ordeal. Facing Tovin, and getting what few answers he might reveal before I cut his black heart out with my knife. But standing there, so close to what I wanted, I hesitated.
Wyatt was supposed to be by my side for this. We should have been facing Tovin together. A pang of loneliness loosed a flood of power through my body. I had to maintain control. The last thing I needed was to teleport out in the middle of killing the bad guy. I inhaled deeply, blew out through my mouth, and pushed down on the door handle.
Showtime.
Chapter 29
I felt like I’d stepped out on the other side of the world. The walls were dug roughly from the earth. Roots protruded from both walls and ceiling, and the air was heavy with the odor of fresh dirt and incense. Sage, maybe, or some similar herb. It was about thirty feet in diameter, a perfect half-circle with the door at the top of the arch. In front of me, all along the straight wall, were dozens and dozens of lit candles, perched in the notched earth.
Six metal crates, the type people carry large-breed dogs in, stood along the wall, beneath the candles. The crates were half covered in dark cloths and vibrated with movement—scratching, growling, living beasts wanting to get out. After what I’d seen upstairs, the possibilities of what were in those crates chilled me.
In the center of the dugout space was a brick-lined circle the size of a hula hoop. Still, black water filled it—the same as the pool at the base of First Break’s waterfall—dark and mysterious, and seeming infinitely deep. Energy crackled and snapped in the air, and standing a few feet inside, I felt as close to true power as I’d ever come.
I stepped closer to the pool, drawn by its convergence of energy and uncertain why. Was water somehow part of the equation? It made sense, given what I knew and what I’d seen both in the mountains and the city. The majority of the Dregs were concentrated in the downtown area—a peninsula of land with a river on two sides and the mountains directly north. Location was just as important an ingredient in magic as emotion, it seemed.
I gazed into the onyx pool, at my tangled hair and bloodstained face and wide, searching eyes. Searching for someone seemingly not in the room.
The door slammed shut, its report echoing loud enough to set my ears ringing. I pivoted on one ankle, hand immediately on the grip of Kismet’s gun, and my heart nearly stopped. Tovin stood inside the room, as unconcerned by events around him as he’d seemed earlier on the balcony. In front of me, three paces away, he seemed unimpressive. But physical stature meant little. I had seen his power at work.
“You don’t know what you’ve done,” he said, commanding and firm. I hadn’t expected a forceful voice from such a small, unassuming body.
I arched an eyebrow. “What I’ve done? Those aren’t my science projects upstairs, pal. Even I’m not that sick.”
“Unfortunate mistakes that I’ve grown rather fond of. I doubt you’ve ever had a pet in your short, meaningless life, but I can’t bring myself to destroy them.” He didn’t speak like I suspected an elf would. He had no practiced cadence or high-brow inflections. He spoke like any other person on the street.
“What are they for?”
“You were but one cog in this grandly designed wheel, Evangeline. You and Truman both, necessary parts to play, but not the only ones that mattered. I needed proper vessels.”
“Is that what’s in those cages? Vessels?” I wasn’t going to bother trying to puzzle that one out. Both my deductive reasoning skills and my patience had been left aboveground. Down here, I wanted fast and simple answers, so I could kill him and get it done.
Tovin nodded. “The perfect vessels for hosting the Tainted.”
Rather than walking, he seemed to float past me, along the curved line of the room, toward the nearest crate. He yanked off the black sheet. Inside, crouched on its haunches, was a man-sized version of the hound. Its snout was less pronounced, but its razor teeth just as plentiful. It looked able to stand and run on two legs, instead of four.
“We were missing the human element,” Tovin said, as if discussing a beloved child. “The vampire and goblin hybrids weren’t enough, even with the added canine traits. We had to mix in the right amount of human DNA. The result was startlingly perfect, as you can see.”
And startlingly ugly. “Perfect for demon possession?”
“You can’t possibly comprehend what will possess them.”
The final puzzle pieces came crashing into position. Our theory was correct: the freewill deal was meant to get Wyatt under his control. With a controlled mind, Tovin had the perfect vessel for his Tainted One, and a being of unbelievable power would be at his command. He had his hound-hybrids caged and ready to accept their own demons—probably lesser in power and controllable by the first. The only X-factor in this fucked-up situation was Tovin’s next move now that Wyatt was dead. And I had one last question to ask before we danced—a final confirmation.
“So this was all you?” I asked. “Every single moment, from the murders of my teammates to my kidnapping to Wyatt and the resurrection? You did this?”
“Yes. Humans are so malleable when it comes to their emotions. So many of my Fey brethren desire your range of emotional imbalances, but I’ve never seen the appeal. Love will always be your kind’s greatest flaw. It makes you do truly stupid things.”
“Like this?” I whipped out the gun and fired at his head. As before, time slowed and, after an eternity of anticipation, stopped completely. Just like on the balcony, he plucked the bullet out of the air.
With nothing to lose and no more tricks to try, I started squeezing the trigger a second time. An invisible hand yanked the gun from my fingers and pitched it across the room. My body was flung backward, and the sudden stop against the rough-hewn walls took my breath away. A thick root dug into the small of my back. I couldn’t move, held there by some invisible force, feet dangling two feet from the ground.
So not good.
Tovin stepped closer to the black pool, sparing me a pitying look before gazing down. The mirrored water began to ripple and, as I watched, came to a rolling boil. “These events have been in motion for some time, Evangeline,” he said, his voice difficult to hear over the roar of the pool. “I can no more stop it than I can change the color of the sky. This Tainted requires a vessel more controllable than the soldiers I’ve created. With my puppet Truman gone …”