“This place is a hodge-podge,” she observed. A blender sat next to an old-fashioned wooden mortar and pestle. Each looked as used as the other. A gas range any chef would love to own, next to a massive, medieval hearth.
“That is an apt observation,” Lyon answered. He sat across from Lydia at the counter and fixed his cup of tea. “And serves true for more than just this kitchen. We collect from Earth that which interests us. But as we do not age and die as you do, we tend to keep a fondness for the antiquated.” He gestured to the place around them. “Much as you observed, this room is a collection of times and influences of others, so is our world as a whole. We progress and evolve in our own right, but we also collect from your world when we are able.”
In some weird and twisted way, that was all starting to make sense. How all the prisoners seemed precious and exciting to them. Why they were very concerned about the injury on her arm becoming infected, or why that graspling creature had wanted to see what she was.
If nothing new ever happened here and nobody here ever aged or died, it must be like being trapped in purgatory. Wait. “Am I…is this…” she stammered and clasped the tea in her hands a little harder. “Is this hell?”
Lyon laughed at that, a low but mirthful sound, and shook his head. His laugh was pleasant and felt like a warm fire in a small room. When his laughter stilled, he had a genuine smile on his face. He may be a monster, but it was hard to be afraid of him. “No, my dear,” he said. “This place far predates that name. While those you meet here have inspired many of the myths and legends your people tell of a dark place that lives below, fear not. You are not in some burning afterlife.”
Lydia let out a breath and sipped her tea again. It was helping her feel better, honestly. It took some of the shaking out of her hands. And she hadn’t eaten since…well, she didn’t know.
“Every culture of yours has tales of demons, of monsters and outlandish creatures. When your world and Under touch, we may pass in between them. While the stories may not match the truth, the inspiration comes from us,” Lyon added.
They sat in silence for a long moment as she processed everything he had said. She wouldn’t believe him if it weren’t for the fact that she had seen proof to the contrary with her own eyes. The monster in the hallway, the fact she had blown out Edu’s brains and he was still up and about. The gaping black hole in space. A vampiric corpse. The freak haunting her dreams. All of it was real. And because of that, she had no reason to doubt him, even if it would be a lot easier to live in denial.
“And you’re positive Nick is okay?”
“I promise you,” Lyon replied with a gentle bare smile in her direction. He seemed to find her worry over her friend far more endearing than Maverick, at least.
“What happens to us now? We’re going to ‘join’ you, fine, but how, exactly?” Lydia asked.
“We will take you to the Pool of the Ancients.”
“The Ancients?”
“The original creatures who ruled this world, the source of all that we are. Our primordial gods, for lack of a better word,” Lyon answered.
“Then what happens?”
“The Ceremony of the Fall, where you will be shown what path you may take. Think of it as induction into our world. A homecoming. While its outcome may take many forms, it is not to be feared. You will emerge reborn and anew.” Lyon smiled at her gently.
The Fall. The man in Lydia’s nightmare—Aon—had used that word. Fall. He had said she had not yet Fallen.
Lydia felt the color drain out of her face as she looked at Lyon, wide-eyed. Aon had claimed to be real. But she had written it off as a particularly self-aware dream. But there was no way in hell she could have invented the Fall.
He was real.
The dream was real.
Shit.
“What is wrong?” Lyon asked. “I assure you, it is a metaphorical fall from your world into Under. It is not meant literally.”
Aon had warned her. If she told anyone about him, they’d kill her. But how did she know that was true? How could Lydia be sure the freak in her dreams didn’t simply want to kill her personally instead? In a world of monsters, who did you trust?
A metaphorical fall. Lydia wasn’t exactly up on her biblical mythology, but everyone knew that one. But as troubling as that was, it wasn’t why she had gone wide-eyed. Should she tell him about the man she had seen? Who had stalked her then rammed his metal hand into her ribcage?
“Are you quite all right?” Lyon asked.
“Y-yeah.” She looked down and sipped her tea again. “Sorry. It’s just a lot to take in.” It was a roll of the dice, taking a shadowy nightmare’s word over trusting the morose tea-making vampire across the table from her, but she didn’t exactly want to volunteer to put her head on a chopping block.
Lydia tried to change the subject back to the topic at hand. The Fall. “So, you…throw us into a Pool of Ancients—”
Lyon chuckled. “You walk in, I assure you. And it is the Pool of the Ancients.”
“Sure.” It was all the same to her. “Do we all come out looking the same? I mean, mostly, you look human…give or take.”
“Some, yes. Some…no,” he admitted.
The graspling. It had understood English and heard what Lydia had said. Fear yanked at her again. “That thing in the hallway.”
“Yes.”
Lydia was starting to put it all together, and she wasn’t happy over the picture the puzzle was beginning to form. She put her head in her hands and took a moment. They were going to pitch them into a pool, and they were going to come out as…as monsters. Human or inhuman. Oh, god, don’t let her turn into a graspling like that thing!
“No. Please, just let me go home…”
“I cannot. You were chosen by the Ancients. The mark upon your arm—which appears upon all of those we now claim—shows you are destined for this. Not even Master Edu can go against the wishes of the Ancients.”
He pulled her hands away from her face and held them gently in his cold grasp. Lyon was trying his best to console her, and somehow, in some weird way, it was working.
“What…what’ll I turn into?” she asked.
“I do not know. None of us know the path the Ancients have chosen for you.”
Myths and monsters. Demons and ancient gods. The fact that everything here ate people—and if they didn’t die when they were consumed? Oh. Oh, that was no good. “Are you all food for those creatures? Is that what we’re supposed to become?”
“This is a matter you will find upsetting,” Lyon advised—trying to pull her back from the brink of terror once more. “It is complex. Wait and see what you will become before you judge how you may feel.”
“How complex can it get, you damn pansy?” a male voice said from behind her. “They hunt, they eat, we die, we come back. We hunt them, we eat, they die, they come back. And so on. Done. Simple.”
Lydia turned a little too quickly on the stool to face the source of the voice and nearly wound up on the ground. It teetered up onto two legs before she could grab the edge of the counter and steady herself.
The man who stood there had dark hair swept up and back, carefully gelled into place. He was wearing a red t-shirt under a black leather coat with loud silver zippers. His shirt was shoved into jeans. If anything, the guy looked like he walked off a stage production of Grease.
“Hey, toots,” he said to her. The man grinned, a lopsided, not altogether friendly expression. Smack in the middle of his left cheek was a red ink mark. It looked like the same writing as, well, everything else.
“Tim,” Lyon said with a heavy sigh, “leave her be.”
“I ain’t here for her, Priest,” Tim said and walked up to the counter next to her and leaned on it heavily with both arms. He was unimpressed by Lyon, if not unimpressed by everything around him. He scooted closer to her and winked and pointedly went from looking at her, down her shirt, then back to her. “Or maybe I’ll change my mind.”
Lydia
put her hand on his arm and pushed him the other direction. “Back off, douchebag.”
Tim let out a bah of laughter and did as he was told, moving back without an argument. “Spunky. Maybe you’ll end up in our house.”
“House?” she asked. Aon had mentioned the House of Words in her dream, but Lydia still had no idea what that meant.
Tim ignored her. “Anyway, Priest, Edu sent me here to tell you to get on with it already.”
Lyon stood from the counter. “There are only a few gathered yet. When last he ruled over the Ceremonies, he was quick to denounce our methods over the number of them he was required to attend.”
“I don’t ask questions.” Tim shrugged and reached over the counter to grab a handful of the not-grapes and started popping them into his mouth, not hesitating to speak while chewing. “He said, ‘Tell him to begin now,’ and so, here I am, telling you to begin now.”
Lyon sighed heavily, clearly irritated but attempting to take it all in stride. He pulled on the bottom of his long white coat. “Very well. Then, Tim, since I now have much to do in short order, I ask you to return the young lady to the chamber with the others.”
“Gladly,” Tim said with another grin at her.
Lyon’s voice was quiet and stern as he spoke. “I will remind you, they are not to be touched until after the Fall. Desecrating the collected before they are cast is—”
“Punishable by true death,” Tim finished for him. “I get it. I get it. Ruin my fun. C’mon, toots.”
With that, Lydia was ushered out. There wasn’t any point in running—or complaining—as she walked beside Tim down the hallway back the way she had come earlier with the Priest. “He said you couldn’t die. So what good is punishment by death?” she asked, finally breaking the silence.
Tim slowed to walk next to her and was smirking. He was far more expressive than Lyon. Everything about Tim screamed that he was from the forties, so she didn’t even need to ask Tim from when or where he hailed. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather coat. He reminded her way too much out of something from West Side Story. “Oh, we can die for real. Nobody’s ever born here, so if you can manage real murder, it’s a huge crime.”
Lydia was silent for a moment, watching him—wondering. Nobody was ever born here, and real death was complicated. One more thing was bugging her, though. One more thing she didn’t understand. “What’s with the facial tattoos and the masks?”
“Class system,” Tim answered bluntly. Lyon was all flowery, philosophical expoundings. Tim was not so complicated. “Everybody’s got these marks.” He pulled the collar of his shirt away from his neck so that she could see the symbols and etchings that were written on his skin in red ink.
“Okay, I’ll need more than that. What’s a mark for?” she asked with a roll of her eyes.
“Marks are power. The more marks, the more powerful the person. This,” he pointed at his face, “is called a soulmark. Everyone has at least one. Doesn’t matter. If you’re super special, you get to cover it with a mask.”
“The more soulmarks you have,” she said and hovered over the words, not honestly believing what she was saying. It sounded so stupid in her head, and saying it aloud made it worse. “The bigger the mask to cover them?”
“Not bad, toots!” Tim said with a grin. “And they say the cute ones are dumb.”
“Shut up.”
“Eh. Nah, don’t think I will,” Tim said with the same cheeky expression. “So, you know if you see somebody with a mask, they’re somebody important. Those of us without them, they call us servants.”
“Why cover the soulmarks, though?” she asked. Tim was far more direct than Lyon, and she appreciated how casual he was, if nothing else.
“A couple reasons. First, it’s how you really kill us. Take these off, then we’re as good as human again. Second…” Tim trailed off, trying to figure out how to explain it. “Second, it’s like seeing someone’s soul. Which’s why they call it that. If you could read it, you could read everything you’d ever need to know about the person.”
“What’re the different colors for?” she asked.
“Different houses. There are six houses. Blue, black, purple, white, green, and red, like mine. Just designates where your power comes from and how it manifests. We all tend toward different things,” Tim answered as if it were no big deal.
Sure, why not? White belonged to priests who were actually vampires, and as far as she could tell, red made you kind of a dick. Lydia decided not to voice that last part. “Can you read them?”
“Nah. Nobody can.” Tim shrugged. “But besides as a kind of armor, it’s a tradition. There’re a lot of stupid traditions here. You’ll get used to it. But people’d rather be naked around here than take off their masks. Trust me. People love to be naked around here,” he said leadingly and grinned with the sudden innuendo.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” She cringed and walked a step farther away from him, which made him laugh again.
“It means nobody here can ever get sick or die. That nobody here can get pregnant. That people here don’t age, are basically immortal, and get really bored. Maybe it’s ’cuz I’m in the House of Flames, but we spend a lot of time amusing each other, if you get my drift.”
Lydia tried not to make a face but failed and shook her head. “So you’re a bunch of perverts.”
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “Yeah, we are.”
“That wasn’t a compliment.”
“I know.”
Lydia put her hand over her eyes and sighed. This man was impossible. But she was having a healthy, human conversation with him, and something about it was disarming. It made her not so terrified of the shadows that clung to them as they walked.
The candles were still doing that creepy only-lit-when-they-were-near thing, and the hallway, although less foreign than the first time she saw it, was no less unnerving. “Red is the House of Flames? What’re the other colors called?”
“Aren’t you just brim full of questions?” Tim said with another grin.
“I’m a prisoner in a world of monsters, so sue me if I have questions.”
“Right, fine, but what’ll you give me in return?” There was that innuendo again. “Pay up, or I shut up, toots.”
“Literally nothing,” she said, pointedly shooting him down.
He let out another loud laugh and shrugged and called her bluff. It seemed like the explanations were going to stop there unless she paid up, and she wasn’t, under any circumstances, going to do anything of the sort.
Polished marble hallways turned to rough-hewn stone. Before long, Tim was pushing open the large wooden door to the chamber they were all kept within. “See ya later, babe,” he said with another wink as she walked past him.
“Yeah, bye, dickwad,” she muttered under her breath as she walked into the cavern. All conversation had ceased as the door had opened, and all eyes were turned on her. She felt like she was just thrust out onto a stage without knowing any of her lines.
She cleared her throat and tucked her hands into her pockets. Ducking her head, she walked toward the wall where Nick, Gary, and the Asian girl had been—Kaori, that was her name—before she had struck off on an adventure.
“Oh, goodness!” the British man greeted her as he shot to his feet and stepped toward her. His hands fell on her shoulders. “We were so worried.”
“I wasn’t,” Nick complained from the floor.
“Oh, god, Nick, are you okay?” Lydia said, pushing away from Gary to face her friend. Nick was sitting against a rock. One of his pant legs was rolled up with a cloth tied around his calf. Kaori was seated next to him, still curled into a ball. She wondered if Kaori had even moved while she was gone.
“I’m fine. Cut up. But fine. There were demon-dogs. They fucking chased me, Lyd.”
“I’m sorry?” Why did she feel guilty? Why the hell was Nick glaring at her like this was her fault? She hadn’t done anything wrong.
; “I’m not going out there again,” he grumped as he folded his arms across his chest. Oh. Lydia got it now. He was pissy because he’d been roughed up. Nick got like this when he felt like he was being dealt a lousy hand. He’d get over it.
“So what happened to you?” Gary asked, prying desperately for any news. And, oh boy, did she have a story to tell him. Too bad everything she’d learned turned out to be too little, too late.
“Well—” she began before she was interrupted by the sound of ringing in the background. It sounded like large church bells, muffled and far away. It was more of a vibration in the stone walls than anything else.
Lydia was the only one in the room who knew what it meant. For as little as she understood, about what this place meant or about who these people were, the Ceremony of the Fall was starting.
Chapter Nine
Everything was a flurry of motion.
As it turned out, groups of people didn’t like to be abducted, herded into a room, left in the dark about what was happening, and then rounded up like cattle. They kinda took offense to that and didn’t react too politely about the whole scenario.
Figures in white filed into the room, led by a painfully thin old woman in a birdlike white half mask. Behind them came a small horde of…oh. Those would be the Hounds, then. Lydia had yet to see any of them herself, but judging by Gary’s and Nick’s reactions, that was what they were. The monsters walked on all fours, backs hunched and covered in damp, scraggly fur. They had odd, bone-like faces with teeth that were far too long for their jaws. On one side of their faces, they had four eyes, and on the other, only two.
They were snapping their massive jaws in excitement, almost chittering them together in rapid succession. It made a horrible clicking noise as they chattered.
The monsters of Under had come prepared for a reluctant bunch of prisoners. The Hounds were moving around the edges of the rooms, climbing over the rocks and up onto the walls, clinging to the stone surfaces as though they had every business in the world defying gravity as they were currently doing.
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