Her voice carried. Too loud. Tad and Mike were looking down the tunnel again.
“Did you hear what it said that time?” Tad asked.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “Sounded like ‘dead down here.’”
I was already herding Artemis in the opposite direction when Tad said, “They’re trying to tell us there is something down here? Do you think they’re trying to lead us to it? Salem Hillcroft—”
Artemis and I made it to the other end of the cross tunnel.
“We should leave,” Artemis whispered. “They’re going to find us.”
“Not yet. We only gave them good evidence. We need to make it obvious the evidence is teenagers messing with them; otherwise we did the exact opposite of what we meant to do. And we can’t let them wander when there might be a firestarter around.”
Artemis was already shaking her head and heading the other way. “No, nope—”
“Are you seriously ditching your duty right now?”
As Artemis turned the corner, a flashlight swept up the tunnel, followed by a new set of voices. “. . . it isn’t as cold in here, anyway; that’s nice!”
“Maybe you could strip and show some skin. The miners would like that.”
“You’re disgusting, Eric. Shine a light down these other tunnels. I feel like we’re missing things.”
“Oh, eff,” Artemis whispered.
I grabbed her and pulled her deeper into the mine. The air got wetter and warmer, and the tunnel began to slope downward. Deeper into the hills. This was officially farther than I’d gone before, farther than I’d ever wanted to go. I had no idea if it was safe here. There might’ve been dangerous gasses or holes in the floor. The dead lined up so we had to charge through them, more of them than I’d expected. Adults and children. I wished I could stop, ask them what was down here, what could cause them turmoil, but they wouldn’t answer. My ankle burned with every limping step, and we moved too fast to stay completely quiet. We escaped Leila’s and Eric’s lights, but their footsteps continued to follow us.
“Find a place,” I whispered to Artemis as she overtook me, even with the heavy backpack on her shoulders, and I thanked god she couldn’t see all the dead she sidestepped. “Find a place for us to hide.”
My foot landed on a rock. My ankle bent hard. I yelped in pain, clapped a hand over my mouth, and grabbed the back of Artemis’s bag as I fell. She fell with me; we collapsed on the floor with a heavy thud and scraping, a rush of air and identical groans. Artemis’s camera clattered against the rock.
“Wait,” someone said behind us. “Did that sound like . . . ?”
I scrambled to my feet and yanked Artemis up by her arms. I’d ripped the backpack from her shoulders. She bent to grab it.
“No!” I pulled her jacket. She got her hands on her camera, the viewfinder still open. We started running before we realized we’d left the flashlights behind and were navigating by the camera’s night vision. No ghosts appeared in it, though they loomed all around us.
“There’s a backpack and flashlights. These aren’t Tad’s or Mike’s.”
Artemis ran with me holding her jacket, limping as fast as I could. The tunnel dove down and down and began to snake around, and footsteps followed us. Lights flashed. The dead pressed in. We turned down one passageway to the right, then another to the left. Anything to lose them. Voices echoed, and I couldn’t tell whose they were or which direction they came from, though it seemed like they couldn’t still be following us.
Artemis took another turn. The ghosts disappeared, and the floor dropped sharply out from under our feet. We landed with a huff several inches down, tumbling over each other.
“Are you okay?” Artemis whispered. Her breath stirred my hair. The air was warm all around here, muggy with humidity, and my hair stuck to my forehead.
“Fine, besides my ankle.” I picked myself up. “Hey! This might have worked. They knew someone was down here, but they didn’t find us. Now we just have to wait for them to leave.”
Artemis was slowly panning around the room with her camera. It looked like a room, and not another tunnel. It was a large open space with a ceiling supported by six old beams. The mine tracks continued until they met a wooden bridge that spanned a deep crevice. I glanced up and around, shoulders prickling. The dead had left us.
“This is one of the caves, I think,” Artemis said. “Look to the right—the crack in the floor goes farther that way, and it gets wider. Ten or fifteen feet. And how deep . . . ?” She moved toward it. I grabbed her arm.
“Uh-uh,” I said. “Rule number one in old abandoned mines: do not step near the giant hole in the floor.”
“Have you been here before?”
“No, which is why I’m saying don’t touch anything. Let’s wait for a while until they’re gone, then we can get out of here and go home. Mission accomplished.” As long as the DMW crew didn’t come any deeper, we were probably safe. I could come back tomorrow night and investigate, but for now I needed to get Artemis out before she got herself killed.
“No, mission not accomplished,” she said. “There is so much more to explore here.”
“What happened to ‘let’s leave’ Artemis?”
Artemis pointed the camera at her own face so I could see her look of annoyance. “We’re here, and they didn’t follow us. While we’re in the clear, we should keep investigating—”
“What is it?” Tad’s voice rattled down the tunnel. We both froze. The temperature ratcheted up several degrees.
A second later, Eric called back, “Some teenagers running around, we think. We found a bag and flashlights.”
“These damn KII meters are still going off.”
“Ignore them. We have to start over; this is useless.”
“Start over? It’s cold and late, why not play it as it is?”
“As locals fucking with us? I don’t care if you’re dying of Sudafed poisoning, Lei, I’m not putting that on TV.”
“Tad, please.”
“Zora.” That was Artemis.
“Stay. Quiet,” I hissed.
“No—Zora—Zora, look.”
Artemis’s hand found my shoulder and pushed me around. The room was quiet, yawning. On the opposite side of the wooden bridge was an impenetrable, gaping blackness, a hole in the world I knew well.
An entrance.
A hunched shape sat on the bridge. Even the night vision couldn’t make out the details, but it hadn’t been there before because before I’d been able to see where the bridge connected with the rock. The shape moved. A limb slid out, a set of talons that scratched on the wood. It rose, unfurling, and lifted its head.
I looked up from the camera. A dark shape stood on the bridge, silhouetted by a soft red glow, like the corrupted ghosts. The dark shape had eyes. The eyes were red pinpricks.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
A blast of hot air whipped my hair back. The shape darted forward. Artemis grabbed me at the same time I grabbed her. A blaze of fire lit the room. Fire. Every fiber of my body jolted. I choked down a scream and yanked Artemis forward.
The tunnel entrance reappeared. I took Artemis by her collar and her belt and threw her up the short ledge before I scrambled up after her. A hot touch grazed my calf. The scream came out.
Then we were up and running, back the way we’d come, and the ghosts had fled, and my twisted ankle felt like a spike had been driven through it, and our flashlights and the backpack were gone but there were lights up ahead. We stumbled into a cross tunnel. Another blast of heat from behind. I looked back only once. There were the two red pricks of light, unblinking, chasing us. Burning, real, one hundred percent godforsaken evil eyes.
We turned another corner and hit something solid, tumbling again to the tunnel floor. Someone cursed. Limbs tangled. A flashlight blinked on and off. A hand grabbed my wrist, then my hair, then my neck. Artemis squeaked.
“Stop moving! Who the hell are you?”
A light burned into my eyes. “Get of
f! Get—off—”
“Mike, get over here! It’s the two who were screwing with us!”
Tad Thompson had pinned me to the ground with his knees on my arms and his hand on my sternum. Artemis was rolling beside me, wheezing. Her camera was still on, several feet away. Mike scooped it up.
“They’ve been recording,” he said.
“Take the memory card. I don’t want them putting it up online.”
“No!” Artemis struggled to her knees. Tad grabbed her ponytail and yanked her back down.
Tad grinned at her, at me. “Hey, it’s ice cream goth and boring history girl. Thought you’d have some fun ruining our shoot?” The heel of his hand dug into my chest. “I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you. Let’s call the police and keep the party going.”
I twisted my head to look past Tad, down the tunnel. There were no red eyes, no hot air. The firestarter was gone, as if it had never been. Sweat began to cool on my forehead. Someone was calling the police, the sound echoing back to us. Even with the alarms going off in my head—how royally screwed we were, especially me—I felt a rush of relief that the dark shape and its fire had disappeared.
“Hey, Tad,” I grunted.
He looked down at me. “What?”
“I’m not goth, moron,” I spat at him. “I’m grunge at best.”
Then I jabbed my prosthetics into his eyes.
11
I didn’t poke Tad’s eyes out. Unfortunately.
The Dead Men Walking crew pulled us out of the mine and dropped us by their van while we waited for Chief Rivera to arrive. They had Artemis’s backpack, our flashlights, and the SD card from Artemis’s camera, which Tad quickly stuffed into an equipment bag filled with other SD cards and tossed into their SUV. Eric guarded us while Tad, Mike, and Leila stood on the other side of the clearing, arguing.
The entrance to the mine sat silent and dark. Every time I glanced away from it, I expected to look back and find red eyes peering out, followed by a lick of fire.
Headlights swerved around the clearing. The cruiser came to a halt inside the chain-link fence. Chief Rivera climbed out.
“They took our memory card!” was the first thing I yelled to her.
She spared me a single look before finding Tad and the others. I twisted my arms together so hard my neck began to hurt. The DMW producer spoke to Rivera first; he’d been the one to put in the call. She got statements from him and every member of the crew, then went to look at their equipment. She searched through the bags in the SUV. Tad said something to her once she got to the bag with the memory cards in it. When she came to us, she wasn’t carrying anything but her notebook.
“They stole the SD card out of Artemis’s camera,” I said.
“It’s in with their other stuff,” Artemis said, “with the other memory cards. We’ll have to go through every one to find it.”
“Mr. Thompson insists they took nothing from you,” Rivera said, tight-lipped. “And I didn’t see anything out of place, so we’ll deal with that later. You girls are coming to the station with me. You can explain what you were doing when we get there.”
She shepherded us into the backseat of her cruiser and closed the door. Tad watched. He was pale in the cruiser’s headlights, everything except his eyes. I flipped him off.
Chief Rivera slammed the door and reversed out of the clearing. My heart thumped painfully; before we’d come here, I’d gone over the scenario of being caught, what I’d do, what I’d say, but my plan was gone now. Mom had gotten in her fair share of trouble, running around trying to solve the mysteries of Addamsville and the firestarters, but Aunt Greta had always gotten her out of the worst of it. And this wasn’t good for more reasons than just that memory card: the DMW crew could still go back into the mine tonight, and now we knew the firestarter was in there.
Small crowds had gathered outside the fence. All living. A lot of them wore Dead Men Walking T-shirts or carried cameras, standing in grass up to their knees. Here to get a glimpse of the cast or a glimpse of the ghosts. They watched silently, faces obscured by the darkness, their red camera lights following us like eyes.
The Chief waited until we were well down the road before she glanced into the rearview mirror and said, “What the hell did you think you were doing? Zora, I expect something like this out of you—I don’t want to expect it, but I do—but Artemis? I thought your mother raised you better than that. Much better. I cannot believe you two. And in the mine? Do you know how dangerous that place is? Do you know how easy it is to get lost or hurt in there?”
“No one was stopping the DMW crew from going in,” I said.
“Because the DMW crew had trained professionals with them, and someone had gone to check the mine earlier today to make sure they were safe.”
And that person could have been killed, too. Was there no end to the list of people I was supposed to save?
“So we weren’t in any danger.”
“You had no way of knowing you weren’t in danger.”
“Chief Rivera,” Artemis said, leaning forward. “It’s really, really important we get that footage back. If they keep it, they’ll use it on their show.”
Chief Rivera was quiet. She kept her stony, white-knuckled hold on the steering wheel. Of course she wasn’t going to entertain this nonsense. “I’ll look into it,” she said finally. “But don’t expect anything.”
“Thank you!” Artemis almost bounced in her seat. “Oh, thank you, Chief Rivera, thank you so much.”
The Chief wasn’t looking at her. She was looking at me. We both knew why.
The police station sat on Handack Street a little north of where it intersected with Valleywine. It was a squat brown building with only one cruiser parked outside, a lone lamppost illuminating the parking lot, and an air of cleanliness and order. Inside, a front desk barred the way to another pair of desks and the chief’s office.
Rivera took us down a hallway to the holding cells. There were only three. The chief ushered us both into one.
“Is this necessary?” I asked.
“For her?” The chief pointed to Artemis. “Probably not. For you? I’m not taking chances. I told you to stay out of trouble and you do this. You’re not a minor anymore, Zora. You were trespassing. If you’d damaged any of their equipment, you’d be charged with criminal mischief. You were lucky Mr. Thompson grabbed you before you stabbed him—if you’d hit him first, they could’ve gotten you for assault, too. These are all things that send you to prison. You understand that, don’t you?”
I pretended to rub something out of the corner of my eye.
“Zora,” she said again, stepping closer to the bars. “I know you want to prove you didn’t set the fire at Masrell’s house, but I can guarantee you this incident has already gotten out, and in the morning, your reputation will be far past saving. All you had to do was sit still, let me do my job, and wait for the storm to blow over. Now I’m not sure there’s anything I can do to help you.” She shook her head, then looked at Artemis. “I’m calling your mother.”
Artemis’s face drained of color. “Do you have to tell her what we did?”
Chief Rivera gave her a very pointed look.
“Don’t worry,” I said, dropping onto the cot. “She won’t blame you for it. She’ll think I poisoned you.”
“As for you, Zora,” the chief said, “I’m calling your sister.”
“She won’t be awake. Her alarm goes off at five in the morning. Try her then.”
“You’re going to stay here overnight?” Artemis said.
“No one else is going to pick me up.”
“I have to decide what I’m going to do with you first, anyway,” the chief said. “A ticket, at the very least. Trespassing. I imagine it’s not the first time you’ve been there, either, so count yourself lucky that this is the first time I know about, and don’t let me catch you doing anything like it ever again.”
And she disappeared.
Artemis sank against the wall, boneless. I
rested my elbows on my knees and bent over until my hair shielded my face, then took several long, deep breaths. I wasn’t going to jail. It was a possibility, but I’d avoided it this time.
“Do you think this is going to go on my record?” Artemis asked.
“I dunno. Why?”
“I’ve never had anything on my record. I don’t have a record.”
“Congratulations, cherry popped.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“I’m not surprised to hear you say that.”
“Why, because I have a decent sense of humor?”
“No, because you look like you got thrown up by a teen Christianity magazine.”
“At least I don’t look like a raccoon that crawled out of Joey Ramone’s garbage can.”
“I do love ‘Blitzkrieg Bop.’”
Artemis let out an irritated scream and threw her hands up. “How can you be so flippant about this? If that footage gets out, Addamsville will be flooded with tourists. And it’ll be worse than them just tearing up our buildings and our stories—they’ll go to the mine. The DMW crew might be going back in there right now. We’re supposed to be protecting them!”
“No,” I snarled, “I’m supposed to be protecting them. Don’t talk to me like I don’t know my own job. When was the last time you ran someone over with a car or chopped off their head? You can’t even see ghosts. Your mom made you think you’re so damn important. You’re not. If the DMW crew or anyone else dies, it’s my fault, and you’ll get off free, like you always do.”
“That’s not true. I’m here to help. I want to help—”
“Shut up.” I flopped over and rolled away from her. “Why do you think I fought that firestarter alone last time? You’re a liability; you’ve never fought them before. You’ll just get in the way and get yourself killed. Go play with your EMF meter and leave me alone.”
There was a beat of silence that stretched, and stretched, and stretched, until I realized Artemis didn’t plan to reply.
Greta arrived half an hour later in a contemptuous fury. Her hair was up in a curled Hallmark-movie ponytail, her makeup perfect even at this time of night, and her shoes made ringing clacks on the floor. Most of that anger was for me. Something about delinquency, poisoning her daughter, and not doing the memory of my mother justice.
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