Damnation Marked (7 page)

An instant later, Malcolm reentered. “Sorry about that. Listen, Jim, there’s lots of work to be done. I’m going to have to have someone take you home. Do you mind?”

“Not at all.” He sounded surprisingly calm, considering how fast his heart was beating.

“Fantastic.” He stepped aside to let James into the hall. “You don’t have to make any decisions yet. Promise to give it a good think?”

“I think I can manage that,” James said.

IV

E
lise waited until
night had fallen and most of the police had cleared out before returning to Rick’s Drugstore. They had cordoned off the entire block, surrounding the shop with yellow warning tape and police cars, so she had to approach from the roof.

She had spent most of the day watching the police work the scene. Or at least, she had watched the police
pretend
to work the scene. In fact, she hadn’t seen a single officer approach the gaping chasm that used to be Rick’s Drugstore.

That had to mean one of two things: they really were worried about structural integrity, or someone with authority had told them to stay out.

She wondered if the influence was federal. There were unmarked black vehicles among the police cars, as well as bulky pickup trucks with camper shells and tinted windows. Yet nobody moved to investigate the collapsed tunnel. It made her curious.
Very
curious.

Several hours and three half-smoked cigarettes later, her boyfriend joined her on the roof of the parking garage, carrying thick ropes over his shoulder.

“I’ve got everything you asked for.” Anthony dropped the equipment on the roof. At her instruction, he had worn a thick jacket and leather gloves.

Elise ground the last cigarette into the cement before sifting through the pile. In addition to ropes, there were a couple of waist harnesses and other rock climbing equipment.

“Perfect. Time to go spelunking.”

She threw everything over her shoulder and approached the edge. Elise stayed close to the building, but the police were all outside of the yellow tape. Nobody was close enough to see her anyway.

“So what’s the situation?” Anthony asked.

Elise swapped out her weightlifting gloves for a thicker pair that were made of leather. “That hole opens straight into the Warrens.” She tied one end of the rope around an air conditioner cage and secured it with a karabiner.

“You mean, the mines where the demons live? Isn’t that about a mile down?”

“Yes.” She wiggled into the hip harness. “Flashlight?”

He tossed one to her. “What made it collapse?”

“That’s what I’m hoping to find out.” She hooked up her Grigri and backed up to the edge of the roof. “You coming?”

She jumped off the edge before he could answer.

Elise let herself drop rapidly in order to keep from being spotted. The roof rose over her head, followed by the shattered remnants of a linoleum floor, and then the wooden boards that had supported the basement.

Darkness swallowed her.

She tightened the Grigri to slow her descent. The glow from the street was already no bigger than a pin.

By the time she stopped her downward motion, she couldn’t see anything at all. It was like having velvet draped over her eyes.

Elise turned on her flashlight and gripped it in her teeth. She was spinning slowly in a long stone shaft. One wall was close enough for her to make it out in the LED glow. The rocks looked chiseled, as though by teeth.

Rick’s hadn’t just collapsed. Something had tunneled through the earth.

“Anthony?” she called. Her voice was muffled and didn’t echo.

No reply.

She loosened her grip on the Grigri and began sliding again.

Elise spiraled lower and lower. After a few minutes, a level surface appeared beneath her feet, and she set down on crumbling rock. She was surrounded by debris—some of it linoleum, some of it wood, but most of it stone.

It was late autumn and cool enough for a jacket at street level; deep underground, it was as warm as a Louisiana summer. It was hard to breathe in the heat. She shucked her coat and tied it around her waist. The wound Zohak had left on her bicep stung in the open air.

A whirring noise told her that Anthony was approaching a few seconds before his light appeared. It hung around his neck, illuminating his jaw from underneath.

He landed. “Are these the Warrens?”

“I don’t know.”

Elise unhooked herself from the ropes and stepped away. They were in a vast cavern. Her light didn’t hit any walls. “We must be pretty deep,” Anthony said, still clutching his ropes.

The back of Elise’s skull tickled, and she scratched her neck. “Hello?” Her call fell flat in the cavern.

Shock jolted through her when a voice responded. “Oh, thank the fires. I thought someone would
never
come.”

A girl emerged from the shadows. She was stringy and thin, like a teenager, but her sallow skin belonged to someone much older. Her hooked nose matched her pointed chin, and her eyes were black puddles.

Elise drew her sword. “Who are you?”

The girl held up both of her hands in the universal gesture of
please don’t kill me
.

“My name is Jerica.” Despite her cautious gesture, she didn’t seem impressed by the sword. Piercings sparkled on her nostril and in two places on her bottom lip. “I worked for Rick?”

“How did you get down here?”

She lowered her hands. “I phased.” At Anthony’s blank expression, she elaborated. “You know… the thing where we pop between shadows. What are you guys? Cops don’t carry swords.”

Elise sheathed the falchion. “It’s not safe down here.”

“You’re telling me. I can’t phase out again.”

“Why not?” Anthony asked.

“I don’t know. I feel sick as a sunny day—like there’s no shadows to phase into. But…” Jerica glanced around at the looming shadows and shrugged.

A chill rolled down Elise’s spine. She lifted her flashlight over her head and spun again, trying to catch a glimpse of the cavern walls she knew had to surround them. But the darkness only grew heavier the harder she tried to see through it.

She tried to take a deep breath, but it felt like her lungs wouldn’t expand. It wasn’t from the powerful heat and humidity.

“Last night, Rick helped me track down a demon,” Elise said, keeping her tone measured. “That must have been about two in the morning. Did you see him at all after that?” Jerica shook her head, and the wooden jewelry in her ears clacked. “How long have you been down here?”

“Since the collapse.”

“How did you survive?” Anthony asked.

Jerica planted her hands on her waist. “You kidding me? Do you even know what a nightmare is?”

“So you were here when it fell,” Elise interrupted.

“Yeah. I was worried about Rick. He had picked up a shipment of—are you sure you’re not the cops?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Okay. Just checking. He picked up a shipment of drugs. He was selling it to a customer we’d been dealing with for a few weeks. Rick seems like a grump, but he’s really a nice guy, so I was worried about him. Flipping drugs—that’s not the kind of shit he should be doing.”

Elise quelled a burst of annoyance. So that was how Zohak had been getting his supply. Rick must have been good as his job; she had been following shipments for weeks trying to track the flow of lethe. “But he wasn’t at the shop.”

“He
had
to be there. I didn’t see him, but Rick never leaves. Hasn’t in a hundred years. He must have been in the basement. But I didn’t get that far.” She glanced at Anthony and Elise’s ropes. “Can we finish talking on the surface?”

“What’s down here?”

“Nothing, aside from tunnels that go nowhere. I thought I might find a way into the Warrens if I wandered long enough. But this… this is endless.” A quaver of fear finally entered her voice. “I’d really like to finish talking on the surface.”

Anthony was quick to reattach himself to the rope, but Elise only glared into the cavern.

The shop had been destroyed before she could return to get answers from Rick—probably by the same thing that had killed Zohak before she could question him. Elise was sick of having her answers ripped out from under her.

She helped Anthony double-check his rigging and waved Jerica over. “He’ll carry you up.”

Anthony caught the suggestion in her tone. “You can’t stay down here, Elise.”

She didn’t feel like arguing with him, so she cut him off with a hard jerk on his rope. “Nightmares weigh nothing, so all you have to do is hang on to each other. Don’t drop her.”

Jerica obediently looped her arms around his neck. Anthony gagged at her spongy touch, but she didn’t seem to mind. Nightmares naturally repelled humans—she was probably used to having everyone give her a wide berth.

“Shit,” Jerica said as Elise wrapped the end of the rope around her legs for extra security. “If Rick’s gone… It took
months
to get that job. I could lose my amnesty on Earth.”

“You need a job?” Elise fished through her pockets and found a crumpled flier for one of Eloquent Blood’s events. “Go here. Ask for Neuma, and tell her that I sent you.”

“And who are you?”

“Elise,” she said simply. The demon’s skeptical expression didn’t change. Jerica would have been a lot more impressed if Elise had said “Godslayer,” but she preferred to spread it around as little as possible.

The fact that she was ever called that title was meant to be a secret, but it had somehow been leaked to the local demons, and it spread quickly. They all whispered that the woman plaguing their nights was called Godslayer. Not kopis, not overlord—Godslayer. She couldn’t escape it.

Anthony seemed torn between his urge to escape and his urge to keep an eye on Elise. Self-preservation won out. He caught her hand for an instant before she stepped away. “Be careful.”

She gave him a thin smile. Anthony began scaling the wall with Jerica hanging effortlessly from his back. Elise watched until his light vanished.

She was alone.

At least, that was what she tried to tell herself. If Anthony and Jerica were gone, and the cavern beneath Rick’s Drugstore was empty, then she had to be alone. Really.

Zohak’s words flitted through the back of her mind:
It came from the earth… A shadow with inertia…

Elise closed her eyes and counted to ten.

The air was hot, but she could breathe. The shadows were not living. And she was
definitely
alone.

She picked a direction and started walking.

The sound of her footsteps was strangely flat as she picked her way over the rubble, pausing occasionally to stack one rock atop another to guide her back to the place where her rope dangled. After a few minutes, the cavern wall curved, and she walked along it until she came upon a tunnel. It sloped deeper into the earth.

Elise began to descend.

Breathing became a challenge. Water puddled in several places in the tunnel, and it was hot enough that it scalded her legs when it splashed onto her jeans.

The tunnel was narrow enough that she could reach out and touch both sides, but she couldn’t see both rock walls at the same time. Either her light was fading, or the shadows were deepening.

The path twisted, turned, and split. Elise followed the right wall, trailing her fingers along the dry stone.

And then the wall disappeared. Her hand fell into empty air.

A whisper rose behind her.

Exorcist…

She spun, raising her light.

There was nothing to see beyond falling dust.

The hair on the back of her neck stood on end. Elise drew her sword again and flexed her fingers on the leather-wrapped hilt.

“Show yourself,” she said.

Every other sound fell flat, but her words were carried into the gloom, echoing a dozen times over.

Show yourself. Show yourself…

For a moment, only her own voice filled the tunnel. And again, she heard that velvety, feminine voice call to her.

Exorcist…

Elise clamped her mouth shut.

She stepped back until she found the wall, and gripped a jutting stone. Her racing heart gradually slowed.

There had to be an end to the tunnels. There
had
to be.

She followed the wall back the way she had come, but it took her to an unfamiliar place in the tunnels. Elise didn’t see any of her signposts at the junction.

No way back.

She hung to the left and kept going. Elise didn’t locate her starting cavern, but she finally found the end of the tunnel, more by mistake than by design.

Her toe caught on a rock, she stumbled, and her hands met a wall of fallen rock.

The tunnel roof had collapsed. The debris sparkled with some kind of mineral in the faint light—probably pyrite, which miners used to call “fool’s gold.”

Water trickled out of the ceiling, making a steaming waterfall down the collapsed rocks that puddled at her feet. She traced her gloves over the dry rocks, feeling for gaps, and found nothing.

Was that wall the place that the shadows were moving toward? Had they caused it to fall?

Her flashlight flickered.

“No…” She banged it against her knee. It flickered again. “No, no, no…”

The bulb went out.

Everything disappeared—the tiny waterfall, the sparkling rocks, her hands in front of her eyes.

She stopped breathing.

A slithering noise echoed from the deep.

It sounded like… dragging.

The weight built in her chest, crushing her like a giant fist. Elise gasped in the heat.

You are a lovely thing, exorcist
, murmured the voice.

It was right behind her.

She whirled—or at least, she thought she whirled. But she no longer had any sense of direction. One hand clutched the dead flashlight, the other clutched the sword, and both were equally useless.

Lovely, yes… but not so terribly lovely. I can’t see why he’s so enamored with you.

From her right side.

Elise swung, and her sword met with nothing. The velvety voice gave a throaty chuckle.