Bethany’s eyes grew big, and she turned to me with a wide grin. “Trent, there might be hope for you yet. I think you just gave us our answer. If solving this puzzle depends on us choosing one of the Guardians over the others, it makes sense it would be the one who’s not there anymore.”
She pointed at the eighth figure, all the way at the end. I’d thought the rune on that figure looked like a simple circle, but now, as I looked closer, my heart lurched in my chest. It was an eye inside a circle—the same symbol on the brick wall in my earliest memory. The rune for magic? How could that be? What did it mean?
Thornton moved his hand to the figure Bethany had indicated. He cast a quick, uncertain glance at her. “You’re sure? I told you what happens if we’re wrong.”
“Do it,” she said, nodding gravely.
He smirked. “That’s so you, Bethany. Possibly your last words before dying and they’re a direct order.” He pressed his palm against the figure, and it sank an inch into the surrounding rock. A loud grinding noise echoed through the tunnel, followed by the sharp, metallic clank of a lock giving way on the other side of the wall. The slab rolled aside on a hidden track, disappearing into the wall and leaving a huge, round doorway before us.
Bethany let out the breath she’d been nervously holding, and went through first. Thornton and I went after her, and once we were through, the slab rolled back into place behind us. Before us sprawled an enormous, vaulted tunnel, much wider and longer than the last one.
It was like walking into a museum of New York City history—that is, if museums were filled with mountains of garbage. Lit by more torches along the walls, the tunnel was so cluttered with junk that there was only a narrow path down the middle for us to walk on. The junk had been sorted into piles: broken TVs of every make and model, from early 1950’s tubes to high-definition flat screens; discarded dressers and chests of drawers; mounds of old mattresses; a towering pyramid of aged air-conditioning units; a teetering, almost sculptural heap of garbage cans, both old-time aluminum receptacles and modern polyethylene bins. Bethany was right about Gregor being a hoarder, only I hadn’t expected his treasure chamber to be filled with the things most New Yorkers left out on the curb for garbage pickup. It was a far cry from the piles of gold and jewels I’d imagined.
Something glittered by the side of the path, catching my eye. It was a tall pile of subway tokens. The Transit Authority didn’t use tokens anymore, I knew. They’d been replaced years ago by prepaid swipe cards that were a lot cheaper to manufacture. I’d never seen a token before. Curious, I reached for one, but Thornton shot me a warning glance.
“Don’t touch anything, don’t take anything,” he said.
I pulled my hand back. “I was just—”
“Trust me, he’ll know,” Thornton interrupted. He didn’t mention what the consequences of touching Gregor’s “treasure” were, but after learning what would happen if we chose the wrong answer to the puzzle, it was a fair guess that the punishment would be gruesome and permanent.
Thornton turned to continue walking, but his legs suddenly gave out from under him and he fell. I heard the distinctive snap of bone, but I couldn’t tell what had fractured. His limbs looked all right, even the mangled arm he’d reset. A rib, maybe? Dead and decaying at an accelerated rate, he’d become as fragile as porcelain.
Thornton squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, pushing himself up onto his hands and knees. He punched the floor angrily. “Damn it, come on!”
I took him by the shoulders to help him up.
“Don’t,” he said. He didn’t look at me, just shrugged my hands off. With a groan, he sat back on his haunches, wrapping his arms around his stomach as if he were in pain. In the guttering torchlight I saw his hands were marbled with black necrotic tissue. The lights from the amulet on his chest pulsed even more weakly than before. “I was supposed to have twenty-four hours,” he said. “You told me I had twenty-four hours.”
Bethany moved toward him. “Thornton, what’s happening? Talk to me.”
He turned his face away from her. When he spoke his voice sounded hollow. “I can see myself rotting. I can feel it from the inside. It’s horrible. You should have left me dead, Bethany. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask you to bring me back.”
“I didn’t know what else to do,” she said. She knelt down in front of him. “I’m sorry, Thornton. I know you’re worried, and I know you’re scared, but I won’t let anything happen before we get you back to Gabrielle. I promise.”
He turned to her, finally. His eyes were dry, but I thought he would have been crying if he could have. “You can’t promise that, Bethany. No one can.”
Silently, she stood, offered him her hands, and helped him back to his feet.
We continued down the tunnel. Ahead of us was another titanic doorway, this time filled with bright light pouring through from the other side. The air grew colder as we approached it. I closed my trench coat around me, my breath steaming in front of my face, and followed Bethany and Thornton through it into the light.
On the other side, I paused and blinked, certain what I was seeing couldn’t be real. I’d expected another chamber or tunnel, but what spread out before us now as far as the eye could see was a vista more suited to the Himalayas than a cavern beneath the streets of New York City. We were standing on a stone bridge, long and wide and rimmed with ice. In the distance a range of snow-capped mountains rose out of a shroud of white mist. I walked to the edge of the bridge and looked over, past the enormous icicles that dangled beneath us, but the mist hid the ground below. It was impossible to tell how far down it went. There was no visible light source in this place, and yet light permeated the landscape from all directions. It looked like sunlight, but it couldn’t be. We were still underground. How could there be sunlight beneath the city? How could any of this be here?
“Where are we?” I asked, my breath forming a cloud.
“Tsotha Zin, also known as the Nethercity,” Thornton said. “It’s a safe haven, a place where many of those who believe it’s become too dangerous on the surface choose to live, under Gregor’s protection. They don’t trust anyone who’s still on the surface—topsiders, they call them—but Gregor and I have an understanding.”
I stared out at the mountain peaks in awe, and noticed tiny shapes along the slopes that resembled houses. “You’re telling me someone built a city under New York?”
“No,” he said. “I’m telling you someone built New York over a city.” He cupped his hands by his mouth and shouted, “Gregor!” His voice echoed across the mountaintops. He called it again. I thought, skeptically, that Gregor was an odd name for a dragon.
As the echoes died away, the mist below the bridge roiled and broke. A massive shape reared up before us like a mountain in its own right, only it was alive and moving, an enormous, reptilian head at the end of a long, sinuous neck.
I gasped and took a nervous step back. Gregor bore only a passing resemblance to the dragon on the cover of The Ragana’s Revenge. His hide was shingled with thick, stone-gray scales, not green ones. Where his eyes should have been there burned two cold, white fires. His head was encircled with yellowing ivory horns that swept back like a crown from his serpentine face. There was something that seemed almost prehistoric about him, an air of such immense age that suddenly I had no trouble believing he was as old as Bethany claimed.
The nostrils at the end of his long snout flared as big as windows as he inhaled a deep breath. The massive suction nearly pulled me off my feet. Bethany held onto my arm to keep from falling over. Then the dragon opened his titanic jaws and let loose an angry, deafening roar. The heat of his breath blasted me like a furnace. I couldn’t help noticing that his teeth were bigger than I was. He could swallow me with a single bite.
“It’s okay, Gregor, they’re with me!” Thornton shouted.
The dragon closed his jaws, the echo of his roar bouncing across the mountains and dying away. He lifted his head high, exhaling plum
es of steam from his nostrils, then lowered himself to the bridge again. Once more, the dragon inhaled mightily. I braced my legs to keep from being vacuumed into Gregor’s nostrils. Bethany clung to me again until it was over.
“The tiny female is unknown to me. You know strangers are not welcome here,” Gregor said. The long spiky bristles that dangled like a beard from his chin quivered as he spoke. His voice boomed across the mountain range like thunder.
If my jaw could have dropped any farther than it already had, it would have landed at my feet. Not only was the dragon talking, he could speak English. I turned to Bethany, but she put a finger to her lips before I could say anything. I turned back to the dragon. He was studying me with his burning eyes. Somewhere in that white fire I sensed a vast intelligence.
“This one, the male,” Gregor continued. “The stench of death clings to him. He is not what he seems.”
I stiffened. Just how much could Gregor tell about me with a sniff?
“Yeah, he’s all kinds of wrong,” Thornton agreed. “But even so, I can vouch for him. I can vouch for them both.”
“Very well.” Gregor swiveled on his long neck to face Thornton. “I see you have returned with the Breath of Itzamna upon your chest, old friend, and the scent of the dead. I regret that your fate has found you so soon. I will miss your companionship.”
Clearly uncomfortable, Thornton changed the subject quickly. “Please tell me you still have the box I left with you.”
“Of course,” the dragon said. A gigantic hand rose from beneath the bridge, its scaly claws balled in a fist. All three of us backed up to give the hand room as it came to rest before us. “I promised you I would keep it safe, and I have done no less. I would give it to none but you.”
Thornton nodded. “I know. Believe me, just this once I wish that weren’t the case.” He looked at the dragon’s massive fist. “Thank you, I’ll take it now.”
“However,” the dragon said, “it is such a pretty box.”
Thornton rolled his eyes. “Gregor…”
“I would hate to lose such a beautiful item from my collection,” the dragon continued. “It brings me such pleasure to look at.”
I glanced at Bethany. Once again she gestured for me not to say or do anything to interfere.
“Gregor, I’m running out of time,” Thornton said. “The Breath of Itzamna won’t last much longer. Please, I need the box.”
“I propose a barter, then. A fair trade,” Gregor said.
Thornton frowned and shook his head. “What do we have that you could possibly want?”
“Something of equal beauty that I may keep,” Gregor said. He swiveled his massive head until he loomed over Bethany, and my blood went cold. The dragon wanted her? For what, a snack? I moved to get between them, but she warned me to stay back with a quick shake of her head. Gregor continued, “The bauble that hangs around the female’s neck has caught my eye. I would have it in exchange for the box.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, but Bethany didn’t. “Now just a minute,” she said, putting her hands on her hips.
The dragon lowered his head to regard her more closely. His burning eyes narrowed with contempt. “Thornton, inform this tiny topsider that she is not to address me unless I require it.”
Thornton put his head in his hands. “Oh God, that’s not going to go over well.”
“I’ll address you as I see fit!” Bethany shouted back at Gregor. The sight of a five-foot-tall woman bellowing indignantly at a titanic, eons-old dragon would have been funny if I weren’t so worried that Gregor would respond by squashing us all with one gigantic hand. “And furthermore,” she continued, lifting the charm on the string around her neck, the blue veins in the little pearl-like sphere sparkling like glitter, “do you have any idea how hard it is to engineer a personal energy-barrier charm? This bauble, as you call it, isn’t for sale!”
“A shame. Its colors please me,” Gregor said. “I am afraid we have no deal, old friend.”
Thornton looked up at the dragon sharply. “Gregor, please.”
“I have given you my terms,” the dragon said.
Thornton looked at Bethany. Bethany looked at me—the real reason she was reluctant to part with it. “I told you, you’re safe now. It’s over,” I said. She looked skeptical. “Bethany, I know I kept something from you, something bad, but sooner or later you’re going to have to start trusting me again.”
She took a deep breath, lifted the charm from around her neck, and held it up by the string. “Don’t make me regret this,” she said to me.
A second enormous hand appeared from below the bridge, one long talon extended. Bethany hooked the charm’s string over the tip of the nail. The hand receded back into the mist with her charm.
Gregor’s other hand opened, and something tumbled out of his enormous, scaled palm to land at Thornton’s feet. My breath caught in my throat.
The box.
It was just as Underwood had described it, a foot wide by two feet long, and fashioned from a dark, weathered wood. The corners were cased in brass. A brass handle was hinged on one side so it could be carried. A trunk lock, also brass, was bolted to the wood and kept it securely closed. On the lid was the crest Underwood had said would be there, an iron-stamped coat of arms featuring two lions standing on their hind legs, their mouths open in pantomime roars. Between them, their forelegs supported a shield topped with a bejeweled crown. Unfurled across the face of the shield was a banner with words written in a language I didn’t know: IN DE EENHEID, STERKTE.
After everything we’d been through, the creatures we’d fought, and the lives that had been lost, the box looked crushingly ordinary. But then, boxes didn’t have to be special. It was what they contained that mattered, and what was inside this one had left a trail of blood, death, and betrayal behind it.
I’d known this moment would come eventually. I’d been anticipating it, even dreading it. But I already knew what had to be done.
Thornton took the box by its handle, but he was too weak to lift it.
“Let me,” I said, moving toward him.
Bethany got there first. She lifted the heavy box with a grunt and held it like a suitcase at her side. “No offense, Trent, but I’m not letting this box out of my sight again.”
Damn. I nodded and smiled like it was no big deal. I would have another chance.
Gregor began to descend back into the mist. “Guard that box well, old friend, and beware. What sleeps inside it must not be allowed to awaken. There are whispers. The oracles warn of an immortal storm, a gathering force so powerful it threatens all existence.”
“I don’t understand,” Thornton said. “An immortal storm? What does that mean? What does it have to do with what’s in the box?”
“Warn the others who dwell topside. The immortal storm must not come, or it will seal the doom of all—mortals, Ancients, and Guardians alike.”
Gregor disappeared into the mist and was gone. Thornton ran to the edge of the bridge and looked over. “Wait!” But there was no sign of the dragon.
As we walked back toward the tunnels, I kept my eyes on the box. I’d looked at the situation from every angle. There was only one way to throw off Underwood’s yoke from around my neck and send the message that he couldn’t manipulate me anymore. Only one way to keep Bethany and Thornton safe from the dangerous forces that wanted the box for themselves. Only one way to bring to an end all the suffering and death the box brought with it.
I had to destroy it.
Twenty-one
By the time we climbed out of the sewers and emerged from the field behind the brick ruins by the West Side Highway, storm clouds had rolled in to give the sky a gray, swollen overcast. Rain was coming. I could feel it in the soupy humidity that drew sweat from my pores. Was this the immortal storm Gregor had warned us about? Nothing about the dark clouds overhead seemed different from any I’d seen before. Whatever an immortal storm was, and whatever dangers it brought with it, I was pretty sure this
wasn’t what the dragon had meant.
A dragon. I’d seen a living, breathing dragon under New York City. Yesterday I would have scoffed at the idea of dragons—had scoffed at it while reading The Ragana’s Revenge—yet everything that happened since then had been a crash course in just what was and wasn’t possible. It was as if I’d fallen through the rabbit hole directly into Elena De Voe’s head. Even the name of the Nethercity, Tsotha Zin, was like something out of her book, though I supposed even in the real world an ancient, magical city underneath New York wasn’t going to be named Boise. I promised myself that if I ever met Elena De Voe, I’d ask how much of her novel was fictional and how much was true.
We traveled east, trying to hail passing cabs, but with the sky threatening rain all the cabs were already taken. Bethany cursed and kept walking, keeping a tight grip on the box. Thornton limped stiffly beside her. The pedestrians on the sidewalk, instinctively sensing a wrongness about him, gave him a wide berth, even if they didn’t understand why. I was starting to envy them their blissful ignorance.
But I had my own situation to worry about. How was I going to convince Bethany and Thornton to give me the box? After everything they’d been through to keep it safe, would they give it up without a fight if they knew what I planned to do with it? However it happened, I was going to have to do it soon. Much sooner than I’d thought.
Because a sleek black sedan had been following us for blocks now, ever since we left the ruins. It hung back in traffic, trying to stay inconspicuous as it shadowed us around corners and down side streets, but my instincts knew when I was being followed. Worse, I recognized the car. I’d seen it before, just this morning, with a dark-eyed woman at the wheel.
How the hell did Underwood keep finding me? One time I could chalk up to bad luck, but this? This was the universe laughing at me, telling me that no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did, I’d never be out from under the man’s heel. I’d made a deal with the devil, and if there was one thing I knew from watching old horror movies, it was that no one ever walked away from a deal with the devil.
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