“Why should I suffer alone? And you wanted to come,” he said, chuckling. He dropped the magazine and followed me. The next room was more of a connecting hallway without a ceiling than a room. To the right was a kitchen and to the left were bedrooms, two of them, and two other rooms. Straight ahead led further back into the cavern. The flooring stopped about twelve feet back but a single string of lights continued back a ways. Peter sat crouched on a rock between two lamps, listening for something. “You don’t suppose the three of them together would sit in there watching pornos and—”
“Enough, First!” I snarled at him quietly, keeping my eyes on Peter. There was no one in the apartment area of the cave except us, so I crept softly back to where Peter crouched, peering out into the darkness. The string of lights branched once then disappeared after twenty feet, only helpful if we followed it apparently. The right branch led back behind the kitchen area and the left further back into the cavern. Straight ahead seemed to go back into the cavern as well, but the passage was blocked and too uneven and irregular for storage.
“Kieran and Ethan are back there somewhere,” Peter said softly as I crept up beside him. “Chasing something, I think it’s the va-du-seet, but I haven’t seen Dieter either yet.”
“How are they seeing back there?” I asked, then looked back as Jimmy crossed the hall and kept looking through the rooms.
“I think they’ve mapped it out somehow,” he said. “Traveling like blind men. I saw brief low-level pulses of heat where I got a sense of them on the edge.” He sighed tensely, shaking his head. “I don’t know, man, this whole cavern gives me the creeps. Can’t see worth a damn down here. Everything’s so close.”
“I’m not seeing any better than you are,” I assured him, putting hand on his shoulder as I sat down on the rock beside him. I’d forgotten about the armor, making sure my hand touched him instead of a gauntlet. “There are some serious freaks in my backyard.”
Peter snickered. “You haven’t gone into the back rooms yet, have you?”
“No, just glanced at the doors and came to you. Jimmy’s looking through them now, though. Why?” I really didn’t want to know and I knew that to the core of my being.
As if on cue, Jimmy calls out, “Aw, you sick fuckers!” A loud crash of something hitting the floor and Jimmy scuffling to pick it up. He griped the entire time so I didn’t rush back.
“How could you have seen anything? You had maybe a minute longer?” I asked Peter as I stood up.
“I figured out what it was at a glance,” Peter said laughing. “Jimmy probably had to go all the way in. He’s right, though; they were some sick fuckers.”
Jimmy was carefully closing the last door on the left when I got to the hall.
“Jimmy,” I said softly. “Whacha doo-in?”
He panicked at my voice, turning and plastering himself in the doorway of the room he just left. “Seth, um,” he said, breathing rapidly through his mouth. “You scared me there for a second. Um. You really don’t want to go in there, Seth. Really. It’s worse than that magazine out there.”
Oh, crap. “Is that all that’s in there? Sex toys?” I asked.
“Um. That’s all I saw,” he said.
“But now you’re not sure,” I said. “Well, unfortunately, you were right earlier. I need to see it anyway. I need to be aware of the evil that men do.”
It took me a few minutes of cajoling but I managed to get him out of the doorway and me into the room. I could have just moved him, but if I started that now, that would pretty much flavor our relationship for the rest of our lives and I already had enough to feel guilty about with him. Jimmy was right and there wasn’t anything else in there but “toys” and, no, I really didn’t want to go in there. Well, there was some video equipment… Yeah, these were some sick, sick people… yeah, sick, sick individuals.
Jimmy stayed by the door. “Let’s not steal anything from their DVD collection,” I said as I shut the door behind me. He gave me a wry smile.
“There’s a fairly sophisticated computer system in that room,” Jimmy said, obviously trying to move away from the “play room.” “The other two are bedrooms and a bathroom, straight back.”
“Okay, so the Yaegers built them a nice underground apartment,” I said, walking down the short hall and glancing into the rooms as I went. Someone would have to go through these rooms, but we were on the clock right now. “There’s obviously a lot of reasons why.”
I wanted a better idea of how this part of the cave was structured to see why they’d built their bolthole this way. It seemed like there should have been another room behind the last bedroom. Standing in the hall, I asked the Stone to raise me through the ceiling and saw that the Yaegers had fit their vacation home rather tightly into its spot. It also showed more light around the right-hand bend of the light strand near Peter than you could see from his vantage.
I walked past Peter, turning right with, “You could have warned me.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” he asked quietly, snickering but still staring into the void.
I followed the string of lights back to the right to find the room I’d seen from the hall, turning a few quick turns. It was just enough twisting in the corridor to block the line of light from escaping the dimly lit room. Of course, in the pitch blackness of the cave, even “dimly lit” is bright. There were two clusters of two sixty-watt incandescent bulbs hanging uncovered on either end of the long, thin room, roughly ten feet wide by twenty feet long.
The furnishings and decorations looked new, or rather, newly placed there. The two dead men still had a core temperature above ambient, so at least they were fairly new. Certainly not my choice for decorations, but Dieter already showed poor tastes. One man was hanging over the side of a metal claw-footed bathtub on the right-side of the room, his arms spread over the sides and his head under the surface of the dark brown liquid. The other guy was face down on a square of concrete near the center of the room, blood all over the concrete, but no obvious wound from this direction. I could guess at the killing blows from here.
I still had to go in, though. At the far end of the room was an altar to something, probably something really disgusting, too. There were several books on that altar and they may have something in them about blood magic that we can use against it. Something that our side of magic didn’t know, or even want to know but needed to know to fight against it. Like the Loa, it reared its ugly head at us and we had to answer it.
I crept along the cave wall to avoid contact with tub and the concrete slab, but as I got closer, I could see the man in the tub wasn’t holding his head under the fluid. I didn’t want to guess where his head was, or about how many men and women died to get the metal basin that full. The next option for somewhere to look at wasn’t much better, though.
The naked man was faced down and away from me as I approached the slab. His blood pooled over the slab and ran over the side and already soaked into the loose dirt around it. A single indention showed in the concrete through the drying liquid, a circle of almost the diameter of the slab. As I skirted around the sides, I could see I had guessed correctly about the cause of death.
I sighed, shaking my head in morbid despair, and said to myself, “You’d think I’d be used to this by now.”
“Really? Seen a lot of this?” Jimmy asked from the entrance, his voice a choked whisper.
“I’ve seen a lot of dead men lately,” I said somberly, continuing on to the altar. “Been the cause of it far too often to be happy about it.” It was set up on an old computer desk made of pressed wood and glue. It was covered in bits and pieces of things I didn’t have a clue of how or why they’d be important to anybody. Nothing held any power that I could see, but several things appeared to have a ceremonial importance, or could have. Since I didn’t know anything about ceremonial magics of any kind, I was definitely not qualified to make any judgments about this.
I decided to put this away for the time being. Searching through the Pa
lace briefly, I found another room in the vault, a room with no entrance, and shifted the entire altar there, cheap computer desk and all. Turning back to the concrete slab, I looked deeper into that as well. The outer ring wasn’t an indentation, but rather inlayed copper, a ring of brass. At the center sat an ingot of iron, an anathema to Fae magic, though my magic didn’t flinch over it at all. The concrete itself contained an unhealthy mixture of ground human bones and the remnants of dried blood. Charcoal markings covered the surface in some places, but the blood marred it too much to make out the symbols.
“Seth,” Peter called, not loudly but enough. “Something’s happening out there.”
We both sprinted down the narrow corridor back to Peter, my examination of this room forgotten. I brushed the anchor in my head lightly as I ran and got the most peculiar impression of Kieran in mid-leap from a falling eighty-five ton stalactite. It wasn’t an image exactly, but more like looking at a sonogram without someone to explain what you were seeing. At least now, I knew how they were moving around back there.
The sound of the stalactite falling made it to us with a rush of air and a distant, echoing rumble. They were coming closer. I felt Ethan bounding on the cavern walls like a sonar image in the echoes. And a faint blur of something shooting between two columns. Clamping my hand down on Peter’s shoulder, I fed him that image directly. It mapped the cavern about a half-mile back, but there were several possible turns that led to dark, unknown pits and crevasses.
“Explains how they’re getting around,” Peter said, standing up slowly. “What are they chasing? Can you see it?”
“No,” I mumbled, peering into the dark. Jimmy fidgeted nervously with his truncheon in his hands, staring with us. I wasn’t watching anymore, so much as listening now. I got a flash of aura.
“They’re close,” I muttered, tensing. I could feel them now, Kieran and Ethan. Feel their presence coming at me from the cavern, rushing, chasing. It was preternaturally fast, what they ran to capture. I moved forward into the mouth of the next chamber, the next twist in the line. Another flash of aura and small rocks clattering down, hitting pools of water providing a snippet of sound for another partial view. They were closer still.
A blur shot through the path ahead of me and I thought I heard breathing nearby. A bulb in the string blew out, suddenly darkening the cross-connection they’d gone down, then another closer to me. The enemy was coming at me. I crouched as low as I could, motioning for Peter and Jimmy to do the same. With another pale flash of aura among the stalactites, the string of lights was pulled from its anchors along the ceiling, falling and breaking almost completely to me. Then the thing seemed to flip down and fly at me. Fast.
I could not tell what it was. At first I thought it was the missing bat-thing, but its aura was very masculine and human-like and there was a definite intelligence that the va-du-seet lacked. It was half-way down the corridor before I realized I didn’t have a clue as to what this thing was and three-quarters of the way when I realized I wasn’t armored anymore. I called for the Night in mid-thrust of my left-hand, armoring at the same time, but I knew I’d barely nick the thing as it passed. I saw the leathery wing phasing out of reality just as the Night hit the plane it existed in and passing through the rapier before it could grab onto the beast astrally. This was a va-du-seet, then.
“Incoming!” I yelled, turning to follow it. Seeing Peter and Jimmy take on defensive poses and track the blur as I tried to regain my target on it, I started flooding the energy plane behind them with energy. It was harder to maintain down here as the energy siphoned back into the calcite and other mineral rich rocks much faster. Ethan entered the next chamber over, running in this direction. Kieran wasn’t far behind him, bounding off the cave walls.
The bat-thing shot through the air, bounding off stalagmites and columns like a monkey in a tree, and tried to exit through the apartment. It met Jimmy’s staff soundly once on the side of its head, causing it to wheel wildly in the air. It grabbed and clutched at everything, finally catching a stalactite tip and shoving. It flew toward the altar room.
The howling of it dying as it hit the wall of energy at the entrance was eardrum piercing. The flash of energy that followed the bat-thing’s death was very nearly blinding. I almost missed seeing Dieter thrown out of its body to the cave floor, adding his own scream of pain to the bat-thing’s. His lasted longer and, unfortunately, he didn’t die with it.
I ran down the corridor, Peter and Jimmy falling in with me. Dieter heard us coming. We saw him turn and look over his shoulder. Snarling as he rose, drunkenly, he ran forward, toward the altar. We followed, skidding to a halt as the room opened up.
Dieter stood, huffing and heaving, shocked. He whirled around at us, his face a savage mask of anger and hatred. “What have you done with it!” he yelled, pointing at the empty spot that once held his ugly library.
“What’s with you and nudity?” I asked calmly, choosing to not address his question and advancing slowly with the Night ahead of me. He was naked now. I suppose fusing with the bat-thing required that.
“You’ve got no idea what you’ve taken!” Dieter cried. “Give it back! Now!”
“No,” I said, as Kieran and Ethan entered the cave behind us, stopping very briefly to look at the dead va-du-seet on the ground. We had it cornered now. Whatever Dieter was, it wasn’t getting out of this cave. “You’re all done here now, Dieter. Time to say good-bye.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I haven’t lived this long to be killed by a boy. No.” He looked around desperately for something to defend himself as I kept coming at him. “I will find a way, boy, and I will kill you.”
He leapt at me, leaning right, and shoved his hand into the tub of body fluids. I stepped forward, leaning into a lunge with the Night. He tried to block the blade with a bloody bone pulled from the putrid liquid, but the Night sheared the bone off. I missed him by a half-inch anyway. I changed position for another strike hurriedly. He jumped on the concrete slab and shoved the bone shard into his gut, yelling something in what sounded like Portuguese. As I lunged again with the Night, his aura flared hot with an unnatural yellow, blinding me for a full second as the Night passed through the space he occupied. I didn’t feel any resistance, though. I knew before I could see that something was wrong.
He was gone.
I stood over a concrete square in a ridiculous pose in a cave in the middle of the night holding a very unique Sword and achieving absolutely nothing.
“What just happened?” I asked weakly.
Kieran and Ethan walked in and stood beside me, looking at the slab.
“I have no idea,” Kieran said. “What happened to the altar?”
“I put it away. For safe keeping,” I said and sent a sense of the vault in the Palace to him. “It… seemed too dangerous to leave lying around.” I thanked the tools as I returned them to my cavern around the base of my Pact sigil.
“Good idea,” he agreed, nodding. “I don’t see anything special about this. Bone and blood mixed with part of the mortar but nothing that can’t be duplicated.”
“How did you kill this thing?” Ethan asked, kicking the bat-thing.
“He juiced the energy plane,” Peter answered for me. “It feeds off of the potential energy difference between the physical and the astral planes as it shifts between them. He figured out that if you flood it with energy that they can’t make the shifts.”
“It fries them in place instead?” he asked me, grinning at the thought of it.
I nodded. “Sort of.”
“We’re still missing four of the brown robes,” Peter said.
Ethan shook his head. “No. They toss the bodies into a crevasse a couple of hundred yards back into the cavern. It took us a few minutes to figure out who was who before the bat came into the picture. They ran through these caverns like rats in a maze. We didn’t have quite so easy a time at it at first. He… used two of them to merge with that and the other two were cannon fodder, m
ore or less.”
“Let’s get out of this hellhole,” Kieran said, then pulled one of my tricks. Wrapping the five of us in portals, he moved us to the clearing, to the road just in front of the house. We all breathed a sigh of relief. This wasn’t a perfect site, but better than where we were.
Peter pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “I’ve got a signal,” he said, surprised.
The rest of us checked ours. Kieran and Ethan’s phones were broken. The dimness of the cave covered the filth, scuffs, and scrapes of scrambling through the cavern. Their clothes were ripped and torn in many places. Frankly, I was surprised they weren’t worse off, running around in the dark like they were. Actually, that was true for all of us. ‘Cept I was armored most of the time so I was clean.
“Y’all wanna talk to Mike and Richard and get cleaned up while we deal with the Feds?” I asked Kieran, watching the line of soldiers walk past the command tent. I had no idea what they were doing, but I believed it was disarming. They couldn’t have broken my compulsion spell.
“That’ll work,” Kieran said, twisting his arm around and stretching. “You three stay together and call if you need help. Go nowhere alone.”
They shifted together to Mike’s living room.
“Who do we call?” I asked, wandering toward the house, Jimmy and Peter following behind me. “Harris or Messner or somebody all together new?”
“Well, the Marshals will probably be involved in some fashion anyway,” Peter said, “and this definitely crosses state lines, so Messner makes sense, too. But, he still needs some taming. You feeling up to that tonight?”
We stopped fifty yards out from the house and in clear sight of the command tent. None of the soldiers in line looked our way directly, always down and around us. Didn’t bother me in the least.
“Why not? I’m a bit ornery after losing Dieter,” I said, picking Messner’s name on my phone list. “You got Harris?” Peter nodded, so I hit dial and waited.
“Messner,” he answered on the second ring.
Sons (Book 2) Page 24