by C. E. Murphy
Jeez. I felt like Tinkerbell. My nose stuffed up and my vision got all bleary and for some reason I snuffled a couple times as I patted Rita’s shoulder. “Okay. Okay, fine, I guess you told me. All you people are just a lot cooler than I am.
So anyway, basically Billy thinks I’m being pulled where I need to go.” The very phrase made fishhooks sink into my belly, insistent tug that felt, somehow, like it came from a long way off. I rubbed my stomach and went on. “If he’s right, then a murder Friday night and Lynn’s death Saturday morning are related, and your missing friends might be, too.”
Hope lit Rita’s lined features. “So you’ll help me look?
Even if it’s not your case or your jurisdiction?”
I smiled feebly. “No reason to get hung up on technicalities at this late stage of the game.” Besides, though I didn’t want to say it aloud, exploring the possibility that I was a nexus of some kind was probably kind of important. It might mean those retirement plans to the top of a remote mountain would get moved to sooner rather than later, but it also seemed like if it was an unpleasant reality I was aware of, I might be able to mitigate the fallout somehow. “Maybe you could take us down below and we could…”
So we could start hunting for someones or somethings we knew nothing about. That didn’t sound like my brightest idea, but Rita clasped her hands together like a kid given a gift, and struck off down the street at a healthy clip. “There are sections of the Underground nobody goes because—”
“They’re haunted?” I guessed when she hesitated, and she nodded with embarrassment. “At this point in my life I can safely say less likely things have happened. All right. I’m game for exploring the haunted Underground if you are. Billy?”
“I’m starting to like the idea that your bad guy is in a high-rise instead of mine about him being down in the—”
“Slums,” Rita supplied when he broke off, and it was his turn to look abashed. Rita, though, shrugged it off. “It’s not like we don’t know we’re on the fringe, Detective. And I’m sorry about your suit. Most of where we live isn’t very clean.”
Billy looked down at himself, dismayed. “Maybe I can write off the drycleaning bill.”
“Maybe I’ll pay for it, in thanks for you trudging around on one of my weird cases.”
“I’d be trudging around on it anyway, if it was in our jurisdiction. I’ll take you up on that anyway.” He followed Rita into an alley where the overwhelming scent of soy sauce and old rice informed us the neighboring building housed a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant. My stomach rumbled despite the hint of decay, but I wasn’t quite desperate enough to go Dumpster-diving. Then I wondered if Rita ever had to, and got caught up in a whirlwind of first-world entitlement and guilt that lasted down the length of the alley all the way into a tiny concrete back lot. Boards and fencing made an unfriendly barricade between it and another brick building, but Rita walked up to the fence, twitched aside a section of chain-link laced with green fencing stuff—I didn’t know what it was called—and revealed a hole almost big enough to let a rabbit through. “This way.”
“Are you serious?” It wasn’t even that I objected to crawling into the backsides of buildings. It just didn’t look big enough for anybody to fit in. Rita, however, gave me a sour look and crawled into it backward. I exchanged glances with Billy, shrugged, and followed her.
It was bigger than it looked, chain-links willing to flex and let me through. There was maybe four inches’ clearance between the fence and the building I clambered into. An enterprising kid might find the hole from the building side, but anybody short of a contortionist would have to come the long way around, down the alley and into the back lot, to actually gain entrance to the Underground. It wasn’t bad, as far as secret hideaway doors went. I’d have never noticed it, had Rita not shown me the way.
I backed through a couple feet of wall space before my feet hit dead air. Rita reported, “Ladder,” from below me, and I lay on my stomach to kick my feet and find the rungs. The iron gleamed from years of use, reminding me of how many homeless my city held, before I emerged into an unexpectedly well-kept stretch of Underground.
Amber streetlights shone through glass blocks above my head, making streaky shadows on old brick walls. Pipes ran below the blocks, supporting their own miniature ecosystems of moss and rust, and even with amber lights, I could see that stretches of the brick ceiling were greened-over with algae or moss, too. The air was fresh, though, the occasional broken block letting in a breeze.
Someone—not the City of Seattle, I was pretty sure— had filled a ten-foot stretch of floor with an elaborate tile mosaic of Persephone entering the underworld. Billy and I both hopped across it, trying not to put our feet down, and Rita took a stiff-brushed broom from the shadows and gave the mosaic a few brisk, efficient sweeps once we’d all moved away.
“There are things like this all over the place down here,” she said before I asked. She sounded proprietary and proud, which seemed totally appropriate, and tucked the broom back into its shadowy space while she lectured us. “Artists come down and make them off the tour path. The more fragile ones get destroyed fast, but this and some of the others are really sturdy. The floor’s sunk a little, so it’s cracked, but we try to keep it clean.”
“It’s amazing.” I studied the mural in its soft light a few more seconds, then looked both ways down the bricked-off city tunnel. It plummeted to my left, eventually heading north toward Pike Place Market, which I thought of as the most visible part of the Underground. It wasn’t exactly, but its multiple crooked levels certainly reflected how the city had been rebuilt. I edged that direction.
Rita pointed the other. “There’s a lot more Underground this way. Down there is the tourist area, off the Square.”
“Oh. Sure.” I wrote off trying to be clever and followed the expert. She gave Billy and his suit another apologetic look when she led us through a three-foot-high section of tunnel, but said nothing. We crawled through on hands-and-knees tracks visibly worn into the grime, and came out on the other side with stains I didn’t want to think too deeply about.
“Some people are too itchy about tight spaces to go through there,” Rita reported when we’d gotten back on our feet. “Makes this a good place to sleep and camp out.”
“This” was a stretch of tall walls with distant overhead light grottos, and of broken-into rooms which had once upon a time been storefronts and alleyways. It didn’t smell as good here. In fact, it verged on stinking, but it wasn’t nice to go into someone’s home and comment on the stench, so I kept my mouth shut. Water dripped from an ancient wooden water main, and as Rita led us down the narrow old street, I saw one or two places where somebody had hauled wiring down into the Underground. There might be enough electricity to boil water, and it wasn’t cold, which made the stretch of lost city seem pretty habitable.
Most of the people we slipped past were sleeping, though one group was gathered around a small barrel fire set up beneath broken-out glass cubes twenty feet above them. I’d seen steam rising up from grates and manholes dozens of times. It’d never occurred to me that once in a while that steam might be smoke from a fire keeping people warm thirty feet below me. That revelation made the under-city streets seem just a little more lonesome and dangerous.
The suspicious looks we garnered didn’t alleviate that feeling, either. Rita’s presence kept anybody from getting in our faces, but as we approached the barrel fire, a couple of big guys stood up, bristling with caution. Rita reassured them with conciliatory gestures. “They’re friends. They’re going to help me look for Rick and Gonzo and the others. Can we borrow a couple flashlights?”
Exasperation slid across one of the men’s face, though he dug into his bulky coat and came out with one of the requested lights, then snapped his fingers for somebody else to ante up, too. “Better bring these back. What are you, a goddamned den mother, Rita? Nobody’s missing, they just took off…’sides, how’re they gonna find somebody you can
’t? Not like topsiders know the tunnels better than you do.”
Rita gave him a perfectly sunny smile. “Magic.”
The big guy rolled his eyes in an excellent teenage whatever! approximation and went back to the fire. Rita’s comment, though, shook my brain loose enough to hit on the idea of using the Sight, which, aside from making a good lie detector, was also handy for noticing people hidden behind doors and walls.
Just not for noticing people hiding off-property, waiting to do something stupid enough to get shot for.
I dropped my chin to my chest, eyes closed as I worked my way through not berating myself. It didn’t seem to matter, though, that I knew very well I’d shoot Patty Raleigh again, and that I’d made the right real-world choice for saving my partner’s life. But the memories of that bat swinging toward Billy’s head, of my finger squeezing the trigger and of Raleigh collapsing backward in shock, were going to haunt me whether I’d made the right choice or not. I was going to have to live with it, just like I’d had to live with a million other unexpected things over the past fifteen months.
The Sight didn’t seem to care much about my little crisis of conscience. It slammed through me again, whiting out everything in my vision. I closed my eyes and reached for Billy’s arm, needing something solid to hang on to. I felt him give me a curious look—felt it both from the motion of his body and through a fuchsia flare in the whiteness—but he didn’t object. Grateful, I focused on the familiar splash of his aura, waiting for the Sight to calm down.
After about thirty seconds it became clear I was going to be waiting a long, long time. I got sparks of emotional information from the Underground town’s denizens, but nothing like the clear readable auras I was accustomed to. At most I could tell that those who were awake and aware were cagey, trusting us about as far as we could be thrown. Not that I needed the Sight to tell me that, but it reinforced a desire to slip by and leave them to their lives. I let my magic fade, normal vision re-establishing itself as I murmured, “Thanks for the flashlights,” as sincerely as I could before releasing Billy’s arm and heading past the campfire group into the Underground’s semi-darkness.
Rita let me take the lead until we were well beyond them, then stepped up again, offering flashlights and a shrug. “I can lead you into some of the more remote parts, if you want. I’ve been down there already looking for people, but maybe you can see better than I do.”
I clicked the flashlight on to make sure it worked, then turned it off again: there were still long stretches of light from the streets above, and I saw no reason to run the battery down. “I might be able to. How far do these old streets go? I remember the tour saying something like sixty blocks burned, but I don’t know how big the old blocks were….”
“Farther than I’ve gone. I haven’t been in this part of the city that long. Even we have our territory.”
I nodded, though I hadn’t quite thought of it that way. I knew I recognized several of the homeless who hung out along the Way, and that I was never surprised when a new face showed up and then disappeared again within a few days. It was a little like prostitutes who worked a specific corner, though I had the good sense not to say that out loud. “Seems like it takes a certain amount of nerve to go exploring down here. I mean, how stable are these old walls and pipes and things?”
“Most of them haven’t collapsed in a hundred years. I figure they’re not gonna fall on my head today.”
“Irrefutable logic.” Light from above faded into gloom and first Rita, then Billy and I turned our flashlights on. The bright beams made lost city even less friendly, shedding light where none belonged. Rita gestured us onto hands and knees, flashlights thunking awkwardly as we crawled through a low tunnel. The Underground tour I’d been on had said Seattle’s new sidewalks had been built anywhere from three to thirty feet above the old, which I heartily believed as we scrambled up and down steep grades that changed with unexpected rapidity. Rita kept on like she knew where we were going, and after long minutes we came out above a room big enough to be a cave. There was no natural light, but the flashlights picked out a floor a good ten or twelve foot drop from the tunnel mouth. It had seen more than its fair share of subsidence, with water-filled, sandy cracks running along it. Wood and brick pillars supported a ceiling that stretched an easy fifteen feet above us, bent and broken brick suggesting whatever building lay atop it, its weight was too great. Eventually the whole thing would collapse six yards. I wondered if one building falling in would create a cascade effect, reshaping Seattle’s skyline once again.
Billy said, “Walker,” in an oddly strained voice, and pointed his flashlight across the cavern. I waved my light that way, illuminating another tunnel mouth that had been broken through a building wall rather than having been part of the original street system.
A woman with hip-length golden hair crouched just on this side of that tunnel, hands cupped over a largish pool of water. She turned her head our way, showing long, beautifully symmetrical features, and eyes as gold as mine when I was in the throes of magic usage. They had been brown earlier: that was my first, useless thought.
My second was identical to Mr. Kobe Beef’s once he’d determined I wasn’t dead. Tia Carley was stark naked, and my tiny little brain couldn’t get beyond that fact. She stood up, staring across the distance at us. I had never seen a more athletic, attractive female body in my life: slightly broad shoulders, strong slim biceps, round high breasts and enough taper to her waist that her hips looked lush above long rangy legs. All three of us gaped at her, as unabashed in our staring as she was in her nudity. She remained perfectly still, but even so, she reminded me of the troupe dancers in the midst of the shapeshifting dances. There was something challenging about her, as if she’d been caught, caged, and escaped, and had no intention of ever returning to the cage.
Then her lips peeled back from her teeth in a purely feral threat, and she sprang away from the wellspring in a single lithe bound.
A gold brindle wolf hit the earth when she landed, and disappeared into the Underground’s tunnels.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Rita made a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard, incredulous dismay mixed with childish excitement and a certain amount of terror. “Was that—did I—did she—?”
“Yeah.” I did a 180, flopped on my belly and slithered down the damp cavern wall until I dared drop to the floor. It wasn’t that far—maybe three feet, with me all stretched out like that—but I hit with a jolt that knocked my breath loose.
Billy said, “My suit,” in resignation, and did the same, then yelled, “Walker, wait up!” as I bolted across the underground room floor. “Rita, you don’t have to come with us—”
“Are you kidding?” She tossed her flashlight to Billy—I could tell from the way light splashed over the room—and squirmed down after us. I was just smart enough not to go after Tia without backup, but by the time they got to me I was dancing with agitation, and immediately forewent smarts to scramble through the beaten-down brick wall, shouting over my shoulder as I lurched down the tunnel.
“Her name’s Tia Carley! I saw her at the dance concert, goddamn it, I healed her, Billy! She had breast cancer! Shit, I talked to her this afternoon. She was interested in the magic, in shamanism, and damn it, I never even imagined she might be asking because she’d gotten caught up in the same power surge I did last night. Or like Morrison did today. If she got caught like Morrison did, she has no idea what’s going on! God, she could’ve even accidentally killed poor Lynn Schumacher this morning—!”
“If she got caught like Morrison did, how come he hasn’t reverted to human? How come she just turned back into a wolf? I don’t think she’s a victim of anything, Walker. I think she’s your killer.”
I stopped and flashed my light back to eyeball my partner. “Come on, Billy. I can pop back and forth between shapes. In theory, anyway. Probably. I bet I can. With practice.”
“With practice! You just said Morrison was caught. You can’t
have it both ways, Walker. Either somebody knows what they’re doing or they don’t.”
“So maybe she’s—” I couldn’t think of what she might be, since I knew she wasn’t a shaman, but Billy cut across me, getting straight to the point.
“Somebody who ripped someone’s throat out?”
I stared at him, and Rita’s half-visible shadow behind him suggested, “Let’s argue about it somewhere else.”
I crawled forward again, light bouncing wildly off the closed-in walls—they were dirt, not brick; someone had dug this space out—and tried to come up with an explanation I liked with regards to Tia. By the time we got free of the tunnel, we were filthy and I was no closer to an answer.
There were, as some small favor, dirty wolf tracks crossing the small room we’d entered, which told us which of the two doors—I used the word advisedly—to choose. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never been this far out.” Rita looked up anyway, like the ceiling might offer answers. “I think we’re getting out of downtown by now. We’ve come a long ways.”
“Then we must be running out of Underground, right? She couldn’t have gone far.” Determined, I triggered the Sight again, baring my teeth against the now-expected blinding whiteness. It flared without giving me a single hint of the depth of viewpoint I knew it could, like it was unduly impressed with the weight and pressure of earth around us. I wasn’t certain, though, if it was the Sight itself at fault or if it was me, this time, since I was trying hard not to think about just how far underground we were. Knowing that, however, and shaking it loose were two entirely different things.
Rita said something, but I stopped where I was, in the middle of the room, suddenly irritated. I had had, even by my standards, a hell of an evening so far. Unlike my usual hellacious nights, though, this one had lined me up with what felt like an atom bomb’s worth of fresh power just waiting to be used. Just because my standard operating procedure had always been rushing in where angels feared to tread didn’t mean I actually had to do that now. “Billy, I need advice.”