Wrong Side of Hell (The DeathSpeaker Codex Book 1)

by Sonya Bateman

  The pendant still glowed. I actually felt the light inside me, warming my blood. And I thought my leg hurt a little less, which was kind of weird. Losing adrenaline usually made things hurt more.

  When I ducked beneath the branches, I found the wolf tearing up the ground with her claws. She’d already managed a good two feet of depth.

  Seemed to work a lot faster than a shovel, anyway.

  I moved to help, but she warned me off with a low growl. So I stepped back to let her work. Gray earth flew between her hind legs, gradually turning to rich brown, and then black as she dug deeper. Four feet, five—and still nothing but dirt.

  Finally, she stopped and sat back on her haunches with a frustrated snort. “Turn.”

  “Um. You want me to take a turn?”

  “No. Turn away.”

  “Oh.”

  I faced the branches. Quick movement caught my attention, and I glanced down in time to see a human hand snatch the clothes from where I’d dropped them. A moment later, Sadie said, “Damn. He wasn’t lying.”

  “Does that mean you’re presentable now?”

  She didn’t answer. I turned back to see her dressed and frowning over the hole. “There was a body buried here. I smelled traces of it,” she said. “But it’s been removed, and I can’t tell when. Could’ve been yesterday, or years ago.”

  “Great.” I sighed and rubbed the back of my neck. “Now what?”

  Her mouth flattened. “We go back to Taeral,” she said. “He can heal your leg, and he might be able to find out what that Redcap did here, if he’s the one who took the body. Give us something to go on.”

  Going back to Taeral empty-handed seemed like a bad idea to me, but I didn’t have a good one. I did, however, have an even worse idea—one that Abe was going to hate me for. This was Central Park, after all. If there was a body here, and it’d been buried years ago, the NYPD could’ve found it and processed it. That would present a whole new set of problems, but I’d worry about that after I convinced Abe to look into it.

  This corpse had better be damned important.

  CHAPTER 15

  We got back to the van, and I made the call that officially turned me into Abe’s least favorite person. But he eventually agreed to look into the body. He could access the NYPD database from home, and it gave him something to do besides fend off the chief. I’d also called Rufus and told him I was taking the night off from corpse hauling.

  Not exactly true. I still planned on moving a body tonight—I just had to find it first. And I didn’t look forward to being paid for this one.

  “Well, this sucks,” Sadie said.

  I looked over. She was glaring at the silver ring in the palm of her hand. “Spell’s worn off,” she said, and slipped it on her finger. Nothing happened. “I hate relying on enchanted objects. They never last long.”

  “Yeah. I always know it’s going to be a bad day when my magic coffee pot won’t start in the morning,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, ever!” I started the engine with an angry twist and backed away from the bridge, planning to head for the York Avenue station where we’d gone down into the subway before. “In the past two days I’ve operated on a werewolf, been threatened at knifepoint by a fairy, and bashed a leprechaun with a shovel. A bunch of cult assholes are hunting me, I don’t know any of the goddamned rules—and you’re making small talk about a ring that won’t turn you into somebody else anymore. I’m losing my mind, is what it means.”

  She sighed. “Taeral can explain things.”

  “Right. As soon as I locate a missing dead body,” I snapped. “I don’t have time to go on a treasure hunt for him every time I have a different question. So how about you tell me?”

  She made a frustrated sound. “What do you want to know?”

  “Let’s start with the veil, the Unseelie Queen, and Milus Dei.”

  “Is that all?” She smirked. “Okay, I’ll try. The veil is a barrier between here and Arcadia, the Fae realm. I have no idea how it works. It’s a different world, kind of behind ours or next to it or something. That’s all I know.”

  Arcadia. There was that word again—I could feel the shape of it, a locked door waiting to be opened. “And the Unseelie Queen?”

  “You can’t figure that out yourself?” she said. “Pretty safe to assume she’s the queen of the Unseelie.”

  “Yeah, but why would she want me? How the hell am I a bargaining chip for the fairy queen?”

  Sadie shook her head. “I don’t know, Gideon. Like I said, Fae and weres don’t get along. There’s not a lot of inter-species communication. Maybe Taeral can tell you something, but he won’t tell me.”

  “Fine. But you know about Milus Dei.”

  “Unfortunately.” She closed her eyes. “They have a warehouse in Hell’s Kitchen. Forty-Sixth and Tenth. It’s where they take us, and…” Her breath shuddered from her. “They’re monsters,” she whispered. “They’ll keep you alive as long as they can, and every day there’s a new kind of torture. They hurt you, starve you. Make you do things…awful things.”

  I could practically feel the pain in her voice. “What did they make you do?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Her expression hardened abruptly. “All you really need to know is that they’re evil, and you do not want them getting their hands on you. That goes for you in particular, more than anyone else.”

  I grimaced. “Why me?”

  “Because they said you’re the key,” she said. “They really want you. I don’t know exactly what the DeathSpeaker deal is, but I know if they get you, it’s going to be terrible for the rest of us. So don’t let them.”

  “Yeah, right. Except I don’t know how to stop them.”

  “That’s the problem,” she said softly. “None of us do.”

  I figured I should stop asking questions for a while. It was all too much to process, and I really didn’t want to think about hiding from these assholes for the rest of my life. There had to be a way to get things back to normal. However this DeathSpeaker thing worked, I didn’t want it. Maybe I could just give the stone to Taeral and walk away from all this. Apparently it was his father’s, anyway. So he should have it.

  The thought made my chest burn, the way it had when I’d promised the old man to keep the stone safe. It might have been guilt. I’d never broken a promise in my life—not that I had much occasion to make them.

  But hell, there was a first time for everything. Especially if it meant leaving the crazy behind for a world that made sense again.

  We finally got to the parking garage I’d used when we went to the market before. I drove straight to the fourth floor, knowing there wouldn’t be any open spaces on the lower levels, and parked at the back by the elevator. Once we took it down to the ground floor, we’d have to cross the garage and take the stairs the rest of the way.

  I remembered how to get to the sub-subway, but that was about it.

  Before we got out of the van, I grabbed one of the flashlights and shoved it in my jacket. Sadie raised an eyebrow at that. “I don’t have heightened senses, remember?” I said. “Except idiocy. That doesn’t help me see any better, and it’s kind of dark down there.”

  She laughed a little, and it made me smile. I’d felt pretty bad making her relive the whole Milus Dei thing. At least now she didn’t look like she was headed to a funeral.

  The elevator took forever to come up, but it was empty when it arrived. For some reason that made me uneasy. The feeling grew stronger as we rode down, and by the time we stepped out on the first level, I was practically sweating. “Something’s wrong,” I said under my breath.

  “Your leg?”

  “No, that’s actually better. Which is wrong by itself, but this is something else.” I’d given a little thought to the idea that the stone had somehow healed my leg, but that was just freaky. So I’d stopped thinking about it. “I think we sho
uld be careful.”

  She frowned. “About what?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Let’s just go, fast.”

  The elevator in this garage was tucked into a portico behind a concrete divider that edged the ramps and blocked a view of the main parking area. When we rounded the divider, I saw what my gut had somehow already sensed—half a dozen black SWAT vans, clustered around the entrance to the stairs.

  Someone shouted. Guns went off.

  And Sadie dropped like a stone.

  “No!” Without letting myself think, I scooped her up and ran back around the divider. Gunshots exploded in my wake. I was sure at least one of them would hit me any second, but it didn’t happen.

  Once I was out of sight, I heard more shouting. And running.

  “Sadie,” I said breathlessly, trying to place her on her feet. Her legs kept buckling. “How bad? I’ll get us back to the van, and—”

  “No,” she gasped. “Leave me. Run.”

  “Not happening.”

  “Go!” She broke away from me, stumbled and fell. When I tried to grab her again, she whacked my arm away with surprising strength. “Get to Taeral. They can’t take you.”

  The shouting grew louder, but the approach seemed slowed. Maybe they figured Sadie would go wolf again, and they were being cautious. Maybe we still had a few minutes. But she’d been hit five, maybe six times, and she was barely breathing. “They can’t take you either,” I said. “I won’t let them.”

  “They don’t kill you,” she rasped. “They take you, but they don’t…” Her eyes squeezed shut, and tears slipped from them. “I’ll…escape. Did it before.”

  “No. I won’t leave—”

  “Goddamn it, go, or I’ll kill you myself!”

  This time I knew she meant it.

  Everything in me understood she was right. If I stayed, tried to get her to safety, we’d both be caught. There wasn’t any safety close enough.

  The idea of leaving her ripped me apart. But if they had both of us, I couldn’t do a damned thing to help her.

  “Fine,” I said. “But I’m coming for you. I’ll get you out of there—I promise.”

  She glared at me. “Run. Now.”

  I shuddered once, then turned and ran.

  CHAPTER 16

  Just as I rounded the curve of the ramp heading up to the second level, a fresh volley of shots exploded behind me. The drawn-out, gurgling rattle of a breath that followed knifed my gut. Christ, how many times were they going to shoot her?

  It didn’t matter. She’d survive, and I’d get her back…somehow.

  I had to believe that.

  But I couldn’t keep my promise if I was captured, or dead. So I kept running. I stayed close to the wall, headed straight for the stairs, and wondered why I couldn’t hear any of them chasing me.

  Until I flung the stairwell door open and came face to face with a pair of cops.

  They’d been running up the stairs, and they were still a few steps away. The one in the lead had his gun out. He looked startled for an instant, but he recovered and took aim while the second one grabbed the radio from his belt.

  Somehow I had to stop them both. So I ran the short distance across the landing and jumped, aiming my feet at the first cop.

  I probably should’ve thought about how much it was going to hurt when I came down.

  The lead cop fired—and missed. My feet landed squarely in the center of his chest, driving him back into his partner. His head collided with the other man’s jaw. They both kept falling, and I managed to keep my balance long enough to grab the railing and steady myself for impact. When the cop on the bottom hit the cement stairs with a wet crunch, I jumped again and landed hard on a lower stair, almost falling before my hand found the rail.

  Damn. I had no idea I could do that—but I’d never been chased by cops through a parking garage, either.

  I didn’t have time to contemplate my sweet moves. One of the cops was moaning…the one whose partner had cushioned his fall, so he probably hadn’t broken all his bones. I had to make sure they stayed down. I turned back and grabbed the gun from the first cop’s hand, then whacked him in the head with it.

  He stopped moaning.

  I kept the gun and ran down the stairs, pausing at every corner to peek around in case there was more company coming. I’d never fired a gun in my life and probably couldn’t hit a damned thing, but I knew how they worked in theory—take the safety off, pull the trigger. I figured just shooting it would get them out of the way for a few seconds, at least.

  No one else came into the stairwell from the ground floor. One more flight would get me to the subway. Just as I reached the landing, the door handle turned and it started opening.

  I pressed against the wall on the hinged side of the door and waited.

  Three officers in full SWAT gear rushed through and hit the stairs. They didn’t even look in my direction.

  When I heard a door above me open and shut, I let out the breath I’d been holding. Part of me wanted to stand here until I was sure they’d cleared out, but I didn’t think they’d stop looking anytime soon. I had to go…now or never.

  I shoved the gun in my waistband like a second-rate thug, and bolted for the subway.

  Half an hour later, I was hopelessly lost.

  I’d gotten down to the sublevel and walked a tunnel that I thought led to a three-way branch. At that point I would have taken the right turn and hoped the rest came back. But I never found the three-way split—just a couple of bends I didn’t remember, and some tunnels leading left or right from this one at alternating points.

  Now it looked like I was approaching the end of the proverbial road. Ahead of me, the corridor narrowed and vanished into darkness.

  At least I still had the flashlight. I turned it on and directed the beam forward, only to find that the darkness was the tunnel sloping up. Definitely didn’t remember anything like that from the last time.

  I’d see how far it went. If it kept going up, I’d turn around and go back the way I came. And probably waste another half an hour just to get lost in a new direction.

  The slope was gradual. It only rose at a slight incline for about ten feet, and then the tunnel opened into a jagged hole and a vast, dimly lit space. I moved to the end.

  And I looked out over a graveyard.

  Time-worn wooden stairs led from the mouth of the tunnel down to a large, flat patch of earth, which formed the floor of a cavern that was probably half the size of a football field. Graves dotted the ground in a random scatter, with markers ranging from simple wooden posts and crosses to large, polished stones. The light came from a handful of torches and lanterns placed around the cavern and reflecting off the low mist that swirled around and among the gravesites.

  The whole place seemed to whisper, an ocean of white sound that almost had meaning.

  “What the hell…?” I murmured. I definitely hadn’t been looking for a creepy underground cemetery. But maybe, if this buried and forgotten part of the city belonged to the Others, there’d be some hint about where I should go.

  I tested the top step carefully. When it didn’t bend or break, I made my way down to ground level and stopped at the first marker, a flat stone that read William Langstrom – Mentor, Friend, Human.

  Definitely an Other place. People didn’t specify “human” on their gravestones.

  I moved around, looking at markers that seemed sign-like. Most of them were simply names and a few words of description. Kara Vee, Beloved Packmate. Stefan – My Love Eternal. Percival Q. Whitmore II – A Son of the Light.

  Then I came to a stone pedestal that displayed a small brass urn. There was a much longer inscription on this one: Lady Valera, Mistress of the Ages and Shadows, Beloved Ruler 1621 – 1945 Requiescat In Pace.

  Those numbers couldn’t be dates. The lady in question would’ve been more than three hundred years old when she died. Almost absently, I picked up the brass urn and turned it over, looking at the designs e
tched into the metal.

  Put me down at once!

  The voice—very female and definitely not mine—thundered in my head, and I almost dropped the thing. There was no way I’d imagined that.

  The urn was talking to me.

  I said, PUT ME DOWN, commoner.

  I winced. Every word felt like a fishhook in my brain. “Um,” I said. “Are you Lady Valera, Mistress of…a bunch of stuff?”

  Yes! Now unhand me.

  Jesus Christ. I really was talking to a dead person. Er, lady. Probably not, in fact, a person. And I wanted nothing more than to put her down, because her voice hurt like hell. Not to mention I was having a conversation with someone who’d been dead since World War II.

  But if she was Other, or had been, maybe she could at least give me directions.

  “Listen, I’m lost,” I said, feeling more than a little crazy for actually doing this. “I need to get to the market, the place called the Hive. Do you know where it is?”

  I felt that same tugging sensation I had with the dead cop when I asked about the DeathSpeaker. Yes, the voice finally said—and I could just about hear gritted teeth in the word.

  “That’s great. Can you tell me?”

  I can. More fishhooks.

  When she didn’t elaborate, I got a little cranky. “Let’s make this clear, lady,” I said. “How do I get to the Hive from here?”

  There was a long pause, a lot of tugging. There is a tunnel to your right. Take it to the fork, veer right. Turn left at the second branch. Follow until you come to the gate.

  Damn. All those barbed words left my brain feeling like a pincushion. “Okay. Right, then right, then the second left,” I said—and then I remembered Sadie at the park. And you believe him? He’s Fae. “Hold on,” I said. “Are you…I mean, were you Fae?”

  No!

  “Good. I guess.” That didn’t mean she wasn’t lying, but at least it was a start. “All right, I’ll put you down now. Thanks for the directions.”