by Gwynn White
So I do the best I can to roll forward onto the balls of my feet and allow my hands to float lightly at my sides, blades at the ready.
The guy sees me when he steps into the darkness left by the broken light bulb. Just my luck, the charm fizzes out at that instant. But suddenly popping into sight works to my advantage, too. My opponent freezes for a heartbeat when he sees me, and that’s all the time I need.
My training takes over, honed almost to instinct. In seconds, I’m in under his defenses and my blades are crossed at his throat. With one swift motion, I could almost take his head off, simply by uncrossing my wrists and returning my arms to my side.
Something stops me, though.
I still have my probe sunk deep into his mind, and the scent of his fear … isn’t right.
My blades are so perfectly placed that when he swallows, the motion of his throat causes a tiny rivulet of blood to run down his neck. I have to hold myself back from leaning forward to catch it.
Every drop counts, every bit can go toward paying Johnny, but there will be more than enough to catch later. For now, I simply watch his eyes, waiting for him to come to the conclusion that there really is no way out.
Instead, he speaks in a hoarse voice. “Irina Petrov?”
That’s when my reading of him finally pushes deep enough to see the whole picture—not like mind-reading, but a snapshot of his intent.
He sees himself as a hunter, yes, but not like I am a hunter. He is not a predator. Not a killer. He was hunting me down to talk to me. To make some sort of proposal. The desperation I felt was very real. The source of it, though, feels familiar.
Too familiar.
“What do you want?” I ask, letting my knives nick him just enough to remind him how precarious his situation actually is.
“I want to help you.” His eyes are a startling green, bright against his brown skin. His face sports about three days’ worth of stubble, and this close up, I can tell that although he might not have any tag-alongs, he’s fairly popping with a variety of other charms.
He is better prepared for the Heights than I expected.
“I don’t need any help.” If I were smart, I would cut his throat, take any un-activated charms, and drain him of all possible power. Then I could pay Johnny and have reserves to spare.
Or pay Johnny more, maybe.
Instead, I flex my fingers and draw the blades back in, simultaneously taking a step backwards.
“I’ll let you live this time,” I say in my harshest voice. “Next time, I won’t.”
Instead of doing the smart thing and hauling ass back down the alleyway and off to wherever in this godforsaken city he spends his days, the man with the pretty eyes follows me, matching me step for step.
“I think you do need my help,” he says. “Because I know where Johnny DeMarco is keeping your sister.”
He pauses, watching for my reaction.
But I’ve been working on schooling my expression to utter blankness for what feels like an eternity. In reality, it’s less than a year since Johnny came to me with his demands and dragged me down into his nightmare city.
Despite my lack of expression, though, my heart leaps in my chest at Pretty Eyes’ next words.
“I can help you save Tatiana.”
8
I woke drenched in sweat and terror.
I wasn’t sure either was my own—no more than the visions that came to me in the dreams.
At least today I could take another shower to wash it away. The physical residue, anyway.
Light still shone in through the windows when we headed down to the basement and into the tunnels.
Once we’d shut the basement door behind us, Rafe’s flashlight illuminated only the next few feet of our path. I shivered in the cool, slightly damp air.
“How has this tunnel never been discovered by anyone else?” I asked Rafe, my voice echoing a little. I more felt than saw his shrug in the darkness beside me.
“Oh, it has. Plenty of people use it to get in and out of Brochan City. But we’re all motivated to limit the number of people who know its location.”
“Motivated?” Coit asked, still rubbing sleep out of his eyes.
“We don’t want the slavers finding it.”
My shiver now came from more than the air, and even Coit’s response was subdued.
Slavers. Pretty much the worst of the Rift scavengers, they made a living out of capturing the poor lost souls who fell through the Rift and landed in Brochan City—or elsewhere, though Brochan was the most likely place for people to end up. Sometimes the slavers put on a good show, pretending to be there to help. The Rift refugees, disoriented and frightened, then went with the slavers willingly.
Those who didn’t come easily were captured and tortured into submission.
Mostly, the men were taken and sold to provide labor.
Those were the lucky ones.
The unlucky ones—those caught by the least scrupulous of the slavers or those who were too recalcitrant or disobedient or ill-prepared for hard labor were sold off for other reasons. Some went to blood cults to become human sacrifices to the Rift.
Some were placed in arenas and expected to battle monsters much stronger than they.
The women and children were auctioned off at a higher price. I shuddered to think what happened to them afterwards.
There were monsters of all kinds on Tehar.
We walked silently for a long time, cutting under land that might have been impassable on the surface—or, at the very least, full of the kinds of monsters who had teeth and claws and would devour you in one sitting.
Glancing over at the barely visible profile of our guide, I was reminded that not all monsters were entirely monstrous, either.
After a while, he said, “This next stretch is straight for a good long while. I’m going to turn off the flashlight for a while to save the batteries. They’re hard to come by around here.”
“No Walmart,” Coit said, and the two men snickered.
Whatever that meant.
When Rafe clicked off the light, the darkness surrounding us was complete in a way I’d never experienced before.
If not for the sounds of my companions’ footsteps and their breathing, I might have been convinced I was the only person in the tunnel.
Maybe the only person in the world.
Rafe turned on the flashlight for a brief time every half-hour or so and I found myself beginning to look forward to those moments, holding on to them like a lifeline.
We stopped briefly several hours in to consume a light meal Rafe had provided—more of the dried, salted meat, and small, hard biscuits. He had also refilled our canteens at some point.
“How much farther is it to the city?” Coit asked, having finally woken up enough to do more than grunt unintelligibly. Coit was not a morning person, even when morning happened at night.
“We’ll camp in the tunnels around dawn. Depending on what kind of time we make, we might hit the entrance after one more night of hiking. Or we might bunk down in here once more.”
“How likely are we to run into any of the other people who use the tunnel?” I asked.
Rafe shrugged. “Really, it depends on how active the Rift has been. It’s been really quiet lately, which might mean nothing—or it might mean there’s about to be a sudden eruption of some sort. Hard to tell with the Rift.”
Hard to tell with the Rift.
That ought to be a motto of some sort.
About two hours after our meal, we began passing detours—places in the tunnel that branched away from the main path.
“Most of those lead off to other entrances,” Rafe said when he observed me peering down into the blackness of one.
“Have you explored them all?” I asked.
“Most of them. Some are locked the other end with locks that I can’t pick. Others lead out into completely decimated towns or villages. And some of them are blocked in by tunnel collapses and cave-ins.”
&
nbsp; It was in one of the latter of these that we camped. Rafe led us down one of the side tunnels until we came to the point where it had been blocked in by fallen rocks.
“How do you know the rest of it won’t come down on us?” Coit asked.
“I don’t, not really. But it seems sturdy enough, and I think some of the damage here was done by tools, not nature.” He pointed with a flashlight at some of the rocks, which did, indeed, seem to have tool marks on them.
“You think this tunnel was filled in intentionally?” I asked.
“That’s the story I tell myself to make me feel better about sleeping here, anyway.” Rafe’s lupine smile gleamed out at me from the darkness, and I had to grin back.
“I don’t see what’s so comforting about that,” Coit said, shaking his head and he spread his bedroll out and dropped his pack down on it to use as a pillow. “Somebody scared enough to fill in their escape route? Sounds like trouble to me.”
“And why we’ll rotate a watch.” I glanced at Rafe. “You want to take first shift, or should I?”
“I will.” Even if I hadn’t been looking at him in the reflected light, I would have heard the eye-roll in his voice, presumably at the idea of keeping a watch on the route he’d been following for a long time without incident.
Still, once Coit and I were settled, he went without complaints, his footsteps fading away down toward the main tunnel.
Once he was out of earshot, Coit’s voice came to me out of the darkness. “Hey Larkin? How many of them terrible beers did you have at the werewolf bar the other night?”
“Just enough to keep the locals talking while I tried to find a guide. Less than one. Why?”
“Because I’m just laying here trying to figure out which one of us was drunk when we agreed to follow this guy. Usually, I’d assume it was me. But not this time. We ain’t never so much as walked a mile with anybody without you grilling them about who they are and where they came from and what they’re doing and why they’re talking to us. But this guy? You just take his hand and off we go.”
I sat in the dark, staring into the blackness before me, trying to figure out how to answer Coit’s question. He wasn’t wrong. I had accepted Rafe’s offer without much thought.
“Well, we didn’t have the werewolves after us before,” I offered lamely.
“I don’t buy it. We’ve been in tight spots before without accepting help from strangers. What’s different about this guy?”
I considered trying to explain to Coit the attraction—not just physical, either—that I’ve felt toward Rafe since the beginning, almost since the moment I set eyes on him. It would come out sounding crazed, and it was last thing I needed Coit to think about our new guide.
“You were the one who got off your horse first,” I pointed out.
“Maybe so, but as we just established, I was also the one who’d had too much to drink. You could have stopped me.”
“It’s a little late now to be bringing up objections.”
“I’m not objecting. Not exactly. Just wondering why this one?”
There was another long silence while I tried to come up with an explanation that might satisfy him.
In the end, though, he spoke again before I did. “Come to think of it, now I’m wondering why we were in a werewolf bar in the first place. You’ve been doing everything you can to avoid any of the monsters that might be snooping around, anything that might hurt us, and then all of a sudden there you are, all ready to go out to the monsters’ night club.”
My lips twisted. “That was my idea, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am, it sure was.”
I thought back to that moment, less than thirty-six hours ago, when I had suddenly decided that we had to have someone to show us the way into the city. At the time, it hadn’t seemed like anything other than instinct, intuition, a moment of inspiration. We had heard of the werewolf bar several towns back and had initially planned to avoid it. But then, as we rode up to the town, it popped into my mind that the werewolf bar might be a good place to find someone who went in and out of the city without repercussions.
In retrospect, that intuition felt like it might have been connected to the power I had felt running through me when I saw and touched Rafe.
“I don’t have any answers for that yet,” I said to Coit. “I think I’ll need to consider it a bit longer. Maybe re-create, or at least reconsider, what I was thinking at that point.”
But, having posed his questions and voiced his potential concerns, Coit was already asleep, gently snoring.
I tried to do the same, but the unrelenting darkness outside my eyes seemed more compelling than anything I might see with my eyes closed.
Eventually I must have fallen asleep, though, because Coit shook me awake six hours later to take my turn at the watch. “Try to avoid turning the light on very often,” he said before dropping back on his bedroll.
I envied his ability to sleep anywhere, anytime.
Those three hours spent trying to stay awake in the pitch black night of the otherwise empty tunnels might have been the longest of my life. By the end of the stretch, I wasn’t sure if the noises I thought I was hearing were people coming toward us, normal sounds from the surface magnified by the echoing length of the tunnel, or entirely my imagination.
By the time I heard Rafe and Coit stirring, I’d convinced myself that either I was going crazy, or we were about to face a ravening horde of the Thoughtless—those whose minds didn’t survive their fall through the Rift. Those who survived long enough were usually picked up and controlled by a black-magic sorcerer, who used them to raid villages, towns, and cities, looking for anything valuable and killing anyone who got in their way.
I had to clamp down on myself hard to avoid screaming when I heard two sets of footsteps coming up behind me, even though I knew they belonged to Rafe and Coit.
I pointed the beam of the flashlight down at the floor to give their eyes time to adjust.
“Packed up your bag,” Coit said, tossing it to me. “You ready to head out?”
I nodded, hefting the bag onto my shoulders. “This place is unnerving.”
I managed to keep my voice steady, but I saw the corner of Rafe’s mouth twitch up in a grin.
“How many times have you done this run?” I asked him.
“Twenty, maybe twenty-five?”
“If I’m still twitchy after that many trips down here, then you can make fun of me. Not yet.” I stepped out into the main tunnel and turned toward Brochan City. “In the meantime, let’s get moving. I want to get the hell out of here.”
9
I lost track of time as we hiked that day for hours, stopping only occasionally to eat or drink or relieve ourselves in some deep crevasse. The latter made my skin crawl in the dark, and I hurried through it as fast as I could.
The tunnel finally came to an abrupt end, a solid rock wall that loomed out of the darkness at us, a ladder leading up to some kind of trapdoor.
When Rafe led us up to the surface, we crawled out into the ruins of what once might have been some kind of church. I glanced around looking for religious icons of any sort, but if they had been there before, they were long gone now.
I frowned, glancing around again and then studying Rafe. "So you're telling me that you managed to get out of the city, stumble upon a couple of boats, end up here, and just happened to find another tunnel?"
The werewolf had the grace to blush, at least. "I might’ve had a little help."
"Slavers?” I asked suspiciously.
"Hell, no." Rafe's denial was emphatic. "Just the opposite. When I came out that first tunnel—the one I’m taking you to now to get you into the city—I literally stumbled into the middle of a group of children being pulled out of the city. Some of them had been rescued from slavers already, others picked up before the slavers could get to them. And the couple who’d saved them saved my ass, too.”
“Showed you where the next tunnel was?” I asked.
&nb
sp; “And carried me when I got too weak to walk, and pulled me into one of the houses to care for me until I healed.”
“Did they know you were a werewolf?” Coit sounded mildly curious, a counterpoint to my own indignant, half-accusatory tone.
Rafe’s shoulders slumped. “By the time it was all over, they did.”
“Did you take any of the kids out when you changed?” I asked tersely, weaving another truth spell and casting it toward Rafe.
“God, no. I couldn’t live with myself if I had. No. Charissa and Xavier figured out what was going on with me and chained me down with silver for my first transformation, my first full moon.”
“Any reason you didn’t tell us this back when you were telling us your whole story?” Coit asked.
“Just hedging my bets,” Rafe said. “I didn’t think you were slavers—or even wanna-be slavers—but it didn’t seem necessary to tell you that we were going to be using one of the underground railroad’s main escape routes.”
I started to ask what an underground railroad was, but I had spent enough time around Rifters to know that it probably would make any sense to me. Anyway, the implication was clear: people used these tunnels to help others escape from the slavers in the city.
And my magic spell showed that he was telling the truth. I didn’t know what had convinced him to reveal the information now, but I was glad to know it.
I had my own person to save from Brochan City and I was going to need an escape plan.
“You said there’s a boat?” I stepped toward the open doorway of the church building, ready to feel the sun on my face again.
Rafe nodded once and stepped in front of me to peer out the doorway, checking for potential danger. Coit shrugged and followed us.
Green grass grew up all around the church, a clear sign that there was water nearby. Once upon a time, much of the land immediately outside the city had been irrigated. Now the land had fallen back into its usual patterns—green and lush near rivers and streams, more arid farther away.