by Tricia Owens
"But I thought it was dead!" Melanie cried. "How did it spit anything?"
"That's the mystery, isn't it?"
Police sirens whined in the distance.
"Just perfect." I turned to Lev. "Better get your pack out of here."
He nodded, though he obviously didn't want to leave what remained of Raker behind. Still, what could he do? Raker was a bit beyond CPR at this point.
With a last, sad look at the blackness, Lev trotted outside.
"Now does everyone believe me that magick is involved?" I asked my friends.
"Black magick, definitely," Christian agreed. He skirted the edges of the room and peered out the front door. "The pack is leaving."
He opened the door for Vale, who was naked and pissed. "I felt it. What happ—"
He fell silent when he spied the remains of Raker and the dead shifter. With a shake of the head, he looked to me. "I suppose you want to go to Orlaton's now."
"Actually, I had another thought. One I should have had the moment we brought that shifter back here." I mentally kicked myself. "We need to talk to a specialist."
chapter 3
There were several magickally-inclined businesses within my neighborhood besides Celestina's fortune telling shop and my pawnshop. There was Tomes, the occult bookstore and rites venue that Orlaton ran, as well as the Gallery of Veritatis, run by a goblin. It featured cursed artwork and shapeshifter portraits, among other services it provided.
In the nearby vicinity there was yet another business: the exotic animals breeder.
For obvious reasons I'd steered clear of the place. We're talking magickal beings here. Breeding all sorts of monstrosities. I could easily picture the sorts of creatures that came out of that place and they'd fill the cast of the world's scariest horror movie.
Admittedly, I'd never seen any weird creepy crawly leave the place. Come to think of it, I'd never seen an ordinary-looking person enter or leave it either. Did it have a secret passageway? Was entrance through a portal in time? It may have sounded ridiculous, but I was willing to entertain any option when it came to magick. Anything you could imagine—or wouldn't dare—had probably already come true.
Though it grossed me out, I scooped up some of the puddle of shifter using a spatula and one of Celestina's Tupperware containers.
"I will never, ever want those things back," she assured me with a shudder.
I also scraped a few chunks of Raker into a sandwich bag. With one container in each hand, held as far from my body as possible, I led the way to the animal breeder's shop down the street.
"I don't know anything about this place," Vale warned me quietly as we walked.
Earlier, a single police cruiser had driven slowly down the street, its passenger aiming the spotlight this way and that, and seen nothing. The Black Die Pack had skedaddled, and my friends and I had hidden inside Celestina's shop with the curtains down.
But I was conscious of someone in the houses we now passed having called the cops. That meant they'd been concerned either about the wolf howls or the wolves fighting a glowing golden dragon in the middle of the street. Or maybe they'd had a problem with my dragon flashbang. Lots to choose from, come to think of it. It was amazing a SWAT team hadn't shown up and kicked the door in.
Nor had the Oddsmakers made their presence known. Were they aware that I was involved in these shenanigans and giving me leeway to clean it up? Or were they monitoring me even now, building up evidence for a case against me?
Ha ha. Evidence. A case. Yeah, right. The day the Oddsmakers held a trial for anyone was the day I decided to stop eating doughnuts.
"I know zilch about this place, too," I told Vale, referring to the animal breeder. "And this place has been here for as long as Uncle James has run Moonlight. What bugs me is that I've never seen anyone or anything go in or come out. Do you think it's out of business?"
But the moment I asked that I realized it was a dumb question. I'd seen lights in the windows a couple of times. Someone was inside. Someone collected the mail. Someone was probably peering out at us as we approached the front lawn.
Like the majority of houses on the street, it was a conversion. Business in the front, party in the back, as I liked to put it. So the front wasn't all that interesting. A typical, sagging, battered one-story house that you'd expect a retiree to be living in. The yard was mostly dirt and bits of concrete, with a few cheery weeds sprouting here and there. A walkway that was cracked from age and heat led to the front door. The driveway was empty and cobwebs clogged the edges of the garage door.
A wooden sign that reminded me of a piece of driftwood or maybe a chunk of a pirate ship had been hammered into the wall beside the front door. Burned into the wood was the name of the place: Darwin's Exotics.
"It's like they're playing with us," I muttered.
Melanie, who'd chosen to come along with us while Christian stayed behind to help defend Celestina against any random, angry wolf shifters, let out a squeak. "Is that supposed to mean that only the strongest and scariest breeds survive?"
"I have a hunch we're going to find out," I told her while the first ember of dread began to glow in my belly.
Vale pushed the doorbell since my hands were full of dead guys, and we waited.
And waited. After about two minutes I leaned closer to the door and studied the doorknob. Spider webs were wrapped around it and filled with dozens of tiny flies. I found a few more webs in the top and bottom corners of the door frame.
"I'm guessing this isn't the entrance," I said with a sigh. "If we're going to have to climb down a chimney, Santa-style, I may have to camp out front here and wait for one of you to come get me."
"Let's try the backyard," Vale suggested. He slid a hand onto my shoulder and squeezed. "I promise I won't make you crawl down a chimney."
"When you make promises like that, you're not supposed to have a smirk on your face."
The backyard was protected by an old wooden fence which Vale easily unlatched. The yard hadn't seen a lawnmower since 1968 or thereabouts. A machete would have been useful in hacking away the tall weeds that had managed to grow in the hard ground, but Vale courageously forged us a path without one.
By far the strangest part of the yard wasn't the lack of landscaping, but the concrete fountain that sat incongruously in the middle of it. Fountains in Vegas were a waste of time. Drought restrictions meant you weren't supposed to keep water running for any reason and the air temperatures and lack of humidity meant everything evaporated anyway. As expected, this thing was as dry as my wit and filled with bits of dried weeds, a few leaves, and a whole lot of dust.
The design was strange, big surprise. The base where the water was supposed to be held was circular with a curved lip. Normal enough. But then you got a good look at the centerpiece of the thing and wondered whether its designer had been a cultist of Cthulhu. I think it was supposed to be a sort of cherub with its arms raised to the sky and its curly-haired head tipped back as if in supplication to the stars or some otherworldly deity, but somewhere along the production things had gone off the rails in a big way.
"That thing scares me," I stated as I peered up at it.
"Why are there so many tentacles?" Melanie asked.
"Why are there tentacles at all?" I countered.
Vale ran a finger along one curling tendril. "I think it's supposed to represent transformation."
I held up the bag and box in my hands. "I think I've had just about enough of transformation, thank you very much. A cute, fat cherub would have gone a long way toward restoring my equilibrium."
He chuckled and then jumped up onto the ledge of the fountain.
"You don't seriously want a closer look at that thing?" I asked, cringing. I turned my head and noticed that the shadows cast by the fountain looked like the Kraken bursting out of the skull of an upright baby hippo. "This is the sort of thing Liberace's demonic twin would commission."
"This isn't simply a statue from your wildest nightmares,"
Vale murmured as he turned his head this way and that, studying the thing. "There isn't any dirt on it up here. Around the head it's clean."
"It's a secret entrance," I guessed. "Just like the Keyhole. We need to push a button or perform a sequence of steps to make it open for us."
"Ooh, this might be fun! I was so jealous when you opened the secret door at the Keyhole!" Melanie immediately leaned over the edge of the fountain and began molesting the Hydra-cherub.
I grinned as I watched my boyfriend and best friend rub all over the fountain, digging their fingers into nooks and crannies, rubbing it here and there in ways that would have gotten them thrown out of a legitimate art gallery and possibly arrested for public indecency. Actually, they were doing a pretty good job of cleaning it.
The longer I watched them crawling over the creepy fountain, the more I began to suspect that tugging on an earlobe or pressing down on the thirty-eighth tentacle sucker wasn't the key to opening or activating this fountain. In fact, I had the growing suspicion that "activating" was the key word here.
I carefully set down my precious, if gross, cargo and walked a slow circle around the fountain. On the backside, the side farthest from the house, I discovered the metal tracks in the ground. Brushing aside the dirt covering them revealed them to be two rails embedded in concrete which had been texturized with dirt and rocks to look like natural dirt. The two rails ran perpendicular to the fountain's base, leading me to believe the whole thing slid away from the house, revealing an opening beneath.
But how to get it to open? And why the hell was it so difficult to get into this place? A secret handshake was one thing but this extreme secrecy suggested that some majorly illegal things were happening inside.
Regardless, whoever ran this place would know the most about shifter biology and what dead bodies were and weren't supposed to do, so I needed to talk to them. Now that I knew which way the fountain moved, I assumed that activating it wouldn't happen from this side otherwise you'd get your toes crushed. I circled around to the opposite side, scanning the statue and the ground beneath.
When I saw the droplets, I hissed between my teeth, hoping I was wrong.
They were dark but not completely black and I would have bet money that in the sunlight they would be faintly crimson. Three drops had slid down the side of a tall weed and dried there, which I might have missed had I not seen the fourth dried droplet on the ledge of the fountain, right where the flat pieces joined together.
I dragged my eyes up the cherub's chubby feet and up the plump leg nearest to me, searching for a trail. Nothing, nothing—
"Bingo."
A tentacle that was smaller than the rest, about the length and thickness of my middle finger, reached out from within the indentation of the cherub's belly button. I'd seen Melanie tug and push on it in case it was a lever, but I knew now that it wasn't. I peered closer and sure enough, there was a narrow channel carved within the tentacle, visible only if you came at it from above and were looking for it. With a grimace, I stuck the tip of my pinky finger inside and rubbed it along the channel.
"Hey, guys, I found the 'Open Sesame'." I held up my red-stained pinky finger. "Looks like they're Old School occultists here. No shirt, no shoes, no blood, no entry."
"Gross!" Melanie jumped off the fountain and dusted herself off like she worried she'd become contaminated.
Vale stepped off with less fanfare, his attention on the mini tentacle I'd found. "We could try our blood, but I'm sorry to say, Melanie, that I think this might require animal or shifter blood."
"No," I protested, but Melanie waved me off and rolled her eyes.
"It's no big deal, Anne. Weirdly enough, when I get cut as my monkey it doesn't hurt as much. I don't know why. So hang on a sec!"
In a blink her little blue-haired monkey stood within her puddled steampunk outfit. She stuck a tiny finger in her mouth and bit it with her sharp monkey teeth. Once Vale turned his back on her respectfully, she shifted back to her human form. I helped her do up all the buckles and laces on her clothes so she could keep her bleeding finger extended and out of the way.
"Okay, Vale, I'm decent!" she said as she hopped up onto the fountain ledge again. She waited until Vale and I were ready and then held her bleeding finger over the channel in the tentacle. Only a few drops were needed before the fountain jerked into movement.
"Ack!"
Vale caught Melanie as she fell off. "Careful," he murmured.
The base of the fountain slid far enough to reveal a crescent-shaped opening in the ground from which a pale yellow glow emanated. A metal ladder painted red extended down to what looked to be a tunnel.
"I don't want any tunnels," I complained.
"I'll go first." Without waiting for a discussion on the matter, Vale cautiously climbed down. Melanie and I leaned down to watch him investigate the area. He disappeared for a few seconds as he checked out the tunnel.
"Don't go through it!" I hissed.
He reappeared, a knowing smirk on his face. "I wouldn't go without you, Moody. Shame on you for thinking that."
He took the bag and Tupperware container from me and I climbed down next. Once Melanie was in, we all looked back up at the sickle slice of the starry sky.
"Are we supposed to close it again?" Melanie whispered.
"No idea. I guess it'll close on its own. Or maybe it's supposed to stay open and we close it once we're out." I was making the big assumption, of course, that we were going to get out of here.
But what in the world was here?
The tunnel's ceiling was low enough that we all had to duck walk it. It led back beneath the house about forty feet. The golden glow came from a ball of light that hovered at the end of the tunnel beside a second ladder, this one a black one.
We did our best not to touch the hovering ball of light because it was obviously a work of sorcery. At least that answered one of my questions about what sort of magick was involved here. But it didn't answer my question about whether that magick was used for good or super creepy and very bad reasons.
The black ladder led up to a trap door.
"I'm sending Lucky through first," I said, giving Vale and Melanie a look that brooked no opposition. "No way am I letting us walk head first into a potential ambush."
Wisely, they didn't argue with me, so I called up my dragon and gave him a little oomph so he had enough physical presence to lift the trapdoor with his head. It opened without a sound and fell back soundlessly, as if the floor were carpeted or covered with rugs. Lucky curled up into the air of the room and took a look around.
I couldn't see through my dragon's eyes. Not unless I gave in to my ancient blood and became the dragon. When I'd performed the ruse with Xaran, I'd learned, much to my joy, that I was capable of becoming the dragon without fully losing myself to it. The prospect of losing my humanity had haunted me since I was a child, and now that worry was gone. But just because I could pull out of my dragon didn't mean it was pleasant or that I wanted to do it willy nilly whenever I felt like being a badass or wanted to fly around and burn things. It hurt and it was stressful, so I had no intention of doing it unless I absolutely had no other choice.
I had other choices here. So after Lucky had hovered for a good two minutes and nothing attacked him, I made the choice to risk entering the breeder's house myself. I had Lucky come down and take hold of my bag and Tupperware container in his tiger paws and then I quietly climbed the ladder into the house.
As I quickly discovered, though it looked like a house on the outside, the inside was a far different story.
chapter 4
As a huge fan of horror movies, I was familiar with the classic setting of a mad scientist working within a laboratory full of shelves holding specimen jars containing all sorts of unrecognizable unholies that floated in murky or glowing liquid. Or perhaps he worked surrounded by cages holding the next unfortunate subjects of his experiments, those beasts filling the air with their angry or sorrowful barking, squawking, or
squealing. It was never a female scientist, by the way. Why were the crazy ones always male?
When I climbed up out of the hole and peered around, I was genuinely surprised by what I saw because it wasn't what I'd been shown in the movies. It wasn't even what I'd seen in movies featuring veterinarians.
First off, I'd emerged into what looked like a warehouse. There were no dividing walls and no windows. No sofas or cocktail tables, nor any lamps or decorations. It was one large room as far as I could tell, and it was at least three times the square footage that the house appeared to be from the outside.
That part was magick. I could deal with that. I was pretty sure the same kind of magick was at work in Tomes, since Orlaton had a veritable maze of bookcases in there, holding what seemed like millions of books.
The next thing that struck me as strange about this breeder's lab—since I could no longer call it a house—was that the walls appeared to be made of ice. The reason the trapdoor hadn't made a sound when Lucky dropped it open was because it had fallen onto a fur pelt. Dozens of them of varying colors, patterns, and sizes were spread across the floor, which also appeared to be made of ice.
With my breath puffing in little clouds in front of my face, I warily climbed out of the hole and rose to my feet. The hole was located in the front part of the building in what would have been the living room had this still been a normal house. I looked back across the room and saw three huge metal vats or silos, each fed from the top by large silver pipes. Each was the size of a small, standalone gazebo. On the wall adjacent was a line of stainless steel slabs attached to the ice wall, looking like a line of doors laid out horizontally end-to-end. Each door had an arm mechanism attached to its bottom two corners, which made me think that they weren't doors but work stations that flipped down when needed.
Standing opposite the vats on the other side of the warehouse were about two dozen unpainted stone or resin statues. They were clustered together haphazardly, as if shoved there to get them out of the way. Looking at them made me think of the fountain in the back yard…