“You’re going to experiment on yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re going to experiment on me too.”
“Linus, no.”
“Grier, yes.”
“You wrote the book on self-inflicted mad scientisting.”
“And you showed me the error of my ways.”
“I don’t want to scramble your brain.” I reached out, raking my fingers through his dark hair. “I like your brain.”
“I like your brain too.” He pressed a kiss to my wrist. “That’s why I wish you would apply the sigil to me first, in case there are any immediate side effects.”
“You wish, hmm?” I pretended to consider him. “Too bad I’m no genie.”
No, really. Just think of all the rub my lamp jokes going untold.
* * *
The flight was okay. I had no complaints about our accommodations. Linus had booked us first-class seats, and we received preferential treatment because he was the Grande Dame’s son and a regular customer of this particular necromancer-owned airline. No, it was the destination that kept me fidgety.
The drive to Atramentous was just as okay as the flight. Linus arranged for a van, same make and model as the one at home, and that gave us plenty of room and separation from the front to allow me time to mentally prepare for what awaited us.
No sooner had I settled my nerves than we slowed next to a guard shack. I couldn’t hear the exchange over the roaring in my ears, but Hood must have said the right thing. The red-and-white-striped gate arm rose, and we drove under it without a hitch. Except for the one in my chest.
Chain link fence gleamed in the van lights, the rows upon rows of razor wire glistening like wet teeth.
The final gate required us to exit the vehicle while it was searched, and then we were each patted down. They found my knife, as expected, and tossed it on the backseat. Everything in our pockets, down to the lint, they forced us to leave in the van.
I had never been more jealous of laundry fuzz in all my life.
“You will walk out of there again.” Hood clamped his wide palms on my shoulders. “Even if I have to tear this hellhole down brick by brick, or watch Lethe do it, you will return home. This place can’t hold you, and these people have no power over you.”
“Thanks.” I gave him a brief hug. “I needed to hear that.”
“Take care of her,” he ordered Linus. “You’re the next best thing to pack, and that means our oaths are yours.”
“This particular oath is no trouble to uphold at all,” Linus assured him. “Atramentous won’t keep her. It won’t touch her. If it tries, you won’t have to bother with Lethe or with bricks. I’ll level this accursed place myself.”
Three guards marched to the checkpoint from the other side, ready to escort us the rest of the way on foot.
I almost jumped out of my skin when the gate clanged shut behind us, and one of the guards chortled.
“Elite Pritchard has been cleared to act as your escort. Do not leave his sight. He is personally responsible for your safety and your conduct.” The guard flanking Linus droned on, clearly used to the drill but oblivious to our ultimate destination. “Do not speak to the prisoners unless you have the authorization to do so. Do not attempt to pass them contraband. You will be punished to the fullest extent of the law if you’re caught in collusion with an inmate.”
“Grier remembers the rules.” The chortler held the clipboard with our names. “You spent what? Four years here? Five? I read about it in the paper.”
“You must be new,” Boaz said, smiling brightly. “Why the hell else would you open your mouth in front of him?”
“Who?” The chortler checked his clipboard, frowned. “Linus…Lawson.”
The click in his head as the last name registered was as audible as his gulp.
Moonlight glinted off the blade of the scythe that appeared in Linus’s hand, made all the more terrifying by the fact his tattered cloak hadn’t manifested along with it. The expensive suit clashed with the weapon dangling casually at his side, and the guards scattered when they spotted the threat.
“I’m a potentate,” he informed them. “I have a right to carry a weapon on my person at all times and dispensation to use it whenever I feel threatened, even by a small-minded toad in uniform.”
“Understood,” the chortler croaked. “Sir.”
“Now that we’ve got that settled,” Boaz said, smoothly cutting in front of us, “we’ll be on our way.”
The guards didn’t protest, and Linus didn’t let go of his scythe, but they did follow at a respectful distance.
Their fear bolstered my resolve, and when Linus offered me his hand, I balled my fists to keep from taking it, from clinging to him, from letting him protect me from the past. “I can do this.”
“Yes, you can.” He brushed a lock of hair behind my shoulder, and his fingers tangled in the strands. “Just remember, you don’t have to do it alone.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
We took a short walk up a paved road lined with pines slowly being devoured by moss and rot. Each step brought us closer to Atramentous, and as it came into view, I was stunned by its ordinariness.
The exterior resembled any number of human prisons. There were guard towers, another fence, more razor wire. The facility itself was small, so small, considering how large it loomed in my nightmares.
“This is it?” The question tumbled out before I could catch it, and I hoped the guards tailing us hadn’t overheard.
“This is the surface.” Boaz cast me an unreadable look. “This is how they hide it from humans in plain sight. It’s registered as a private prison, and its official line is it incarcerates inmates based on contracts landed from some nebulous government agency.”
We were greeted at the door by a woman in uniform who smiled when she recognized Boaz. No surprise there.
“It’s been a while.” She raked hungry eyes over him. “How’ve you been, sugar?”
“Busy.” His aw-shucks routine deepened as they chatted. “You know how it is.”
“Heard a rumor you’re engaged.” She chuckled like it was the greatest joke of all time.
“It’s no rumor, Barfoot.” He eased past her to punch a code she handed him into a keypad. “I’m off the market.”
“Pity.” She trailed her fingers across his back as he held the door for us. “When you get bored playing house, you know where to find me.”
A hard glint darkened his eyes, surprising me, but he kept his voice playful, and she didn’t catch his temper igniting.
“Yeah.” He couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look at me. “I do.”
Determined to stay out of his relationship with Adelaide, for real this time, I kept my mouth shut.
The sterile space we entered reminded me of the waiting room in an ER, and I shuddered. Even here, the damp smell of mold permeated the air. Or maybe that was my imagination.
“Stairs to the left.” Boaz pointed to a corner. “Elevator to the right.”
“The elevator.” I wiped my palms on my jeans. “I want this done as fast as possible.”
Boaz inputted a second code in the access panel that had the doors sliding open.
What I would have given for those digits during my stay.
The slow creak and hard bumps of the car were the only sounds as it lowered us down the shaft.
We bottomed out with a soft thud that jarred my knees and made me grateful I had no memory of ever using it prior to now.
“We have to walk the length of Row A to reach the next elevator.” Boaz hesitated, but he didn’t ask me if I was sure I wanted this. We had come too far to go back. “Keep your head down, eyes forward, and put one foot in front of the other.”
Six feet past the elevator, I stepped onto a grate slicked with algae, and a sob lodged in my throat.
Here the sterile veneer had cracked and peeled away to reveal the true face of Atramentous.
Here the smooth walls gave
way to craggy rock and iron bars flecked with rust the color of dried blood.
Here the moans of the incarcerated beat against my ears like fists the inmates were too weak to raise.
Tendrils of midnight caressed me, but Linus kept his distance. Only his allowing me that tenuous moment to acclimate, without the sensory overload of physical contact, kept me from bolting back the way we’d come.
Make no apologies for surviving.
I had withstood Atramentous for five years.
I could endure it for less than five hours.
If I could just take another step. Just one more step.
There—
No.
Okay.
Try again.
The next time, I made it. And bit by bit, I conquered the long hall, blinding myself to the pitiful souls shoved into the small cubbies bored out on either side of us.
The Society sentenced the worst of their worst criminals to life down here. But I was living proof that the justice system didn’t always get it right. How many other innocents had the system failed to vindicate? How many humans had been caged and forgotten, along with the secrets they carried about our existence? How many of these people would make it out of here alive? The answer to that was easy at least. None. Atramentous was where the convicted were tossed to die.
Old Grier had, alone in her cell, with her mouth and her eyes dry.
Another elevator down, another walk through my past, another brick with which to build fresh nightmares.
We repeated the process three more times, for a total of five levels, the lower floors as quiet as tombs.
The air grew ranker as we descended, until my eyes watered, throat burned, and nose grew stuffy. The cells shrunk, and the lights dimmed until even my necromancer vision struggled against the endless blackness.
Filthy inmates lay in heaps on the floor, their eyes blank and their chapped lips slack.
That had been me. For years. A grungy, mindless heap of skin and bones waiting to rot.
The drip, drip, drip of water dried the spit from my mouth until I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears and hum over it.
The staircase leading up into my head loomed, pristine and warm, a safe place for me to hide. But I was done with taking the easy way out. I would stay present, I would do my job, and then I would go home.
“This is it.” Boaz plugged in his code then waited for the green light before pushing open a reinforced steel door. “Go on in.”
Golden light spilled across my face, blinding me, and the familiar smell of old books overrode the stench polluting the corridor. Boaz didn’t have to tell me twice. I couldn’t scurry through fast enough.
The jolt of stark white paint, untouched by the ugliness above and around it, and the gleaming tile hurt my eyes after having spent so long in the dark. As my vision adjusted, I distinguished the shape of a guard bent over the thick spine of a hardback thriller. Not exactly Athenaeum material.
“Pritchard,” he grunted.
“Marx,” Boaz grunted back.
Muscles tight enough to snap, I held my ground, expecting Marx to pat us down, quiz us, something.
“Civilians in the stacks.” Licking his thumb, Marx turned the page. “Guess there’s a first time for everything.”
“Guess so,” Boaz replied.
That was apparently that.
Whooshing out the breath I hadn’t realized I had been holding, I felt sensation returning to my limbs.
Without setting down his book, Marx rose and used an old-fashioned iron key to twist open a locked door behind him. “You know the rules. Make sure your friends here follow them. You know how pissy Baker gets when protocol is broken.”
The scraping of metal on metal left me shivering like the first chemical rush after a plunger depressed.
Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it.
Anyone looking to drug me and fling me into a cell would have to go through Linus first.
Boaz strode into an antechamber and entered a third code to access the Athenaeum.
Breathe in. Breathe out. In. Out. Innn. Ouuut.
I crossed that final threshold, heart knocking against my ribs, and gaped at the books filling floor-to-ceiling shelves.
“Gloves.” Boaz offered me a white cotton pair. “There are no guards in this chamber, but it is monitored remotely. They’ll kick you out in a heartbeat if you break the rules. They weren’t kidding about that.”
Given that the sum of all surviving necromantic knowledge resided here, I couldn’t blame them. A glance at Linus confirmed he was almost drooling over the vastness of the information here for him to absorb.
“Why store it here?” More books than I had ever seen in my life surrounded us, and given what a packrat Maud was, that was saying something. “The damp is bad for them, and I can’t imagine the location makes it easy on its keepers to conceal their comings and goings.”
“This area is climate controlled.” Boaz pointed out carvings on the shelves. “There are sigils to prevent moisture damage, tearing, flaking, spine cracking.” He crossed to a monitor and woke it with a touch. “As to the why, Atramentous is a fortress in the middle of nowhere. It’s the last place any sane person wants to go or would ever expect to find a library. As to the rest—” He shrugged. “Prisons require guards. Prisons like Atramentous require Elite guards. No one looks twice at an Elite reporting for duty here. Everyone is aware of Atramentous’s reputation, and they want the best-trained soldiers the Society has to police the worst criminals the Society has produced.”
“Enlightenment found in the dark,” Linus paraphrased the line from Severine’s forged last words to me. “The Society does enjoy its cruel irony.”
“This is an impressive setup,” I admitted. “What I don’t get is why you wanted to come here.”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Boaz made quick selections on a touchscreen, proving his familiarity with the indexing system.
“Yes, that’s why I asked. I already know, but I wanted to hear you say it.”
“I had to see it for myself.” He kept going, digging through the archive to locate what we sought. “I had to know if it was how I imagined.” He mashed a final button and collected a printout. “It was worse.” He passed it to me. “I wish I had never requested library detail. Whatever answers I hoped to find, they weren’t in this place.” He exhaled in a rush. “But I can’t help wondering if maybe it was all part of the goddess’s plan.”
The strained quality of his voice caught my attention. “What do you mean?”
“I might not have been telling the whole truth about receiving special dispensation.”
“What?”
“There was no time. It can take months for a book petition to be granted.” He looked to Linus for backup. “The Lyceum has fallen, Savannah is in chaos, and the Grande Dame is too busy playing general to hold the formal hearing required. The odds of her gathering enough dames and matrons to cast the votes required are nil. So, I had a friend on the inside give me her code.”
That explained the handsy greeting he received upon arrival and why the woman had taken liberties. Boaz only had one kind of female friend, and they tended to be very friendly toward him.
“Commander Roark had the right to override the Grande Dame. He was the ultimate authority when it came to the Athenaeum.” Boaz rubbed a hand over his buzzed hair. “So I forged the paperwork to give us immediate access and then backdated it. That got us down here. But without him to issue a password override, I had to borrow one.”
“You’re an idiot.” I gave him a quick hug before I changed my mind. “A total moron.”
And we were all going to get in so much trouble when this was over.
“Yeah.” His arms came up and held on for the briefest moment before releasing me. “That’s what the women in my life keep telling me.”
“Maybe you should listen to them once in a while?” Fresh urgency to get this done and get gone before Boaz’s deceit was d
iscovered kindled in me, and I led the way to the section where the Marchand collection was being stored. “Hard to believe everything known about the goddess-touched condition is right here at our fingertips.” I almost caressed the first spine before I caught myself. “Here goes nothing.”
As we rehearsed in the van, I reached for Linus’s hand, playing damsel overcome by memories for the cameras, and he removed his twist-tie ring and pressed it into my palm. Curling against his chest, I pricked my fingertip and drew the sigil first on myself and then, when I didn’t turn into a mindless zombie, I gave him a matching one.
The fit of smugness that had me glancing up at him died a swift death when I saw his eyes had bled black from corner to corner.
Thumb poised to smudge the sigil, for all the good it might do, I shook him. “Linus?”
Jaw tight, he blasted out a sigh. “That was harder to watch than I anticipated.”
“Remember this the next time you’re tempted to play guinea pig for yourself.”
“Time’s wasting.” Boaz tapped the face of his tactical watch. “You two need to get reading.”
“We’ll discuss the dangers of field-testing original sigils later,” Linus assured me, forever unfurling in his eyes.
“Sure thing.” I patted his cheek, which caused Boaz to tense on my periphery. “He would never hurt me, Boaz. Not in a million years.”
“Never,” Linus agreed, and blue sliced through the black. “That doesn’t mean I won’t lecture her on sigil theory until her ears bleed.”
The great thing about having sex with your former tutor is boobs are really distracting. I’ve gotten out of a lot of not-quite-homework by flashing them, and he never seems to catch on. Or if he does, he doesn’t seem to mind. They were my get out of lecture free cards, and I played them every chance I got.
“I’ll take the left.” I kissed his frosty lips. “You take the right.”
Power tingled in my palm when I lifted the first book. The thin barrier of the cotton glove I pulled on was no match for it. Like called to like, and its energies prickled over my skin. A glance over at Linus’s studious expression convinced me he wasn’t experiencing the same sensations. Otherwise, he would have been examining me out of the corner of his eye to see if it affected us both.
How to Wake an Undead City Page 17