“If you don’t mind my asking, was your mother a user?”
“Dust?” The woman asks. “Of course. Who isn’t? It’s not so bad, really. In moderation. Look what it did for my father’s boy.”
“It brought him back. But I need to know something. Is it permanent?”
The woman puts her hand on the closed bedroom door. “Papa doesn’t believe in a life after this one. I told him they’d be together soon, but he’s not a believer. So we saved and saved for this.” She looks at me. “To buy your nixiedust. The man I spoke to—a dwarf with a terrible face—he promised it would last. He said it was fairy magic.”
“He said that?”
She nods. “He promised Papa would have his boy back for as long as he wanted.”
The woman’s brow furrows. There’s a soft knock on the door. It’s coming from inside the room. She pulls the door open and there’s the boy.
“Something’s wrong with Papa,” he says.
The woman rushes to the bed, kneeling beside her father—who lies dead and still beneath the blankets.
Meanwhile, the little boy is frozen in the doorway, staring up at me in fearful wonder. The darkness of his eyes appears to be seeping into the rest of his face. Gray circles begin to pool in his cheeks. Then, slowly, a deep red bruise spreads across his throat.
“My neck hurts,” he whispers.
The woman looks up from the bed, coming to comfort the child, but already I can see what’s happening. Skinner lied to her. The effects of the dust are wearing off. He’s beginning to decay, beginning to return to the dead.
“It hurts,” he says, louder this time, tears in his eyes.
The woman kneels in front of him, hugging and squeezing, hoping her embrace can keep him alive. But the boy screams in pain, which makes her hold him even tighter. Too tightly, in fact, because the body is coming apart, the solidness of the boy’s pale skin is beginning to shred. The pressure of the woman’s embrace is all too much and the boy screams—“Papa!”—as his head is once more wrenched from his shoulders. It thumps on the bedroom floor, and yet still the boy’s mouth is open wide, wailing in pain.
The woman turns her despair at me now. “Get out!” she shrieks, clutching the tiny, dissolving body. “You beast! Look what you’ve done! This isn’t fairy magic! It’s rotten! It’s evil!”
So I run. I run out to where Tom is waiting, racing past him without any answer to his questions, galloping down the alleyway, leading him back into the echoing safety of the tunnels.
26
SUNLIGHT AND FILTH
DAWN IS ON ITS WAY. SPORADIC SHAFTS OF EARLY MORNING LIGHT CUT through the grates above us. We’re going as fast as possible—at least without tripping over the loose stones or killing ourselves by falling over an edge. The passages, the gratings, the pockmarked walls, the unforgiving ceilings, the vicious inclines, the slim bridges over rancid waters—they all flash past like half-asleep dreams.
But none of it fazes me. All I can see in my mind is that resurrected boy. Is that what my father meant about bringing Mom back? It can’t be, because that woman back there was right. It’s an evil kind of magic—dark, fleeting, morbid. Maybe that woman was right about something else, too. At the heart this city, something’s rotten.
Suddenly, Tom stops and I nearly slam flat into his haunches. “Wait,” he says. He flicks his flashlight on, blinding me. “Hold this.” He hands the flashlight to me as he flips the map open.
“What are you doing?”
“I figured out a shortcut.” He points to the map, where the reservoir is marked off as a cloud of black. His claw traces the border with Dockside. “If we go left up here and cut under the cemetery, we can bypass all of this.”
It makes sense for about a second, until I see it’s one of the red tunnels. “We’re not supposed to go down there,” I tell him. “Besides, it’s a dead end.”
Tom squints. “Prob’ly a typo.”
“It’s a secret map. Who makes a typo on a—”
He snaps it closed. “I listened to you back there, and you made us late. So now we’re gonna do things my way. C’mon!” He takes off and I’ve got no choice but to bound after him. This tunnel is larger than the others, which allows us to really get our speed up. The padding of our feet and the raggedness of our breath echo everywhere. Then, suddenly, the echoes get louder. We slow down.
“I told you,” I say, but without satisfaction. A vast black wall looms up ahead of us. It’s a dead end.
“Goddamnit!” Tom slaps the rock face. He turns to me, his dark hair melding with the blackness of the wall. All I can see is the dim glow of his eyes and his bared teeth. “You did this.” He takes a step forward. “All you wanna do is give folks a helping hand. But that’s not our job.”
“Don’t you get it? That’s why she asked for someone big, like me. She needed someone who could—”
“Shut up.” He says it quietly, twisting the words into something sinister. “It oughta be my cousin standing where you are right now. He’s fast, even faster than me.” He takes another step. “But Zeb didn’t make it, did he? Instead I’m stuck with you. And because of that we’re late.” Another step. “Bet you don’t even know what Skinner does to latecomers.” Another step. “Which means now I gotta come up with a story, see?”
I’m bracing myself for a fight. But I can hardly see him.
“How’s this? Newbie trips and falls off a ledge. I try to save him, but I can’t and that’s why I’m late. All I could do was watch him get swept off, slapping and howling on a river of shit.” He smiles broadly, a white slash hovering in the air like a crescent moon. I can sense him about to lunge when he stops. The grin vanishes, and I know why.
I can smell it.
A mixed-up scent fills the chamber, something like sunlight and filth, burning hair and melted rubber, still water and rotting flesh.
“You smell that?”
“I think I’ve smelled this once before.”
“What is it?”
“I didn’t stick around to find out.”
Tom points at me. “This ain’t over,” he says quietly. “But, uh . . . maybe we oughta head back to the other tunnels.”
So we do, loping warily back the way we came. But the mixed-up scent whirls and spins all around us.
“It’s moving,” he whispers.
“I know.”
“Keep going,” he says. “We passed an alcove back there with a slope to it. It’ll head back to the surface. I don’t care who sees us.”
One more step and something huge and dark comes out of the very alcove we’re trying to get to.
Tom leaps backward, tripping over his legs. “Run!”
We both backpedal toward the rock face. Tom pants with fear. “What is that thing?”
It roars, the sound echoing off the walls. It’s enough to flatten us against the stone.
“Gotta get around it,” says Tom.
“It’s too big.”
Could it really be a giant? Surely, it’d never come down here, and the shape of it—it doesn’t seem right. I can’t tell where it starts and where it ends. How do you get around a thing like that?
The roaring stops. It’s sniffing the air. It’s coming for us.
Tom sets out to run, but I grab him. “Wait,” I say. “Not yet. Wait’til it lunges.”
“Are you insane?”
“That’s how we’ll get around it,” I whisper.
The creature swings its shadowy head at us and rushes forward. Tom and I dart away from each other, sprinting along the wall. The creature’s body slams into the rock. It howls a shriek of frustration. The whole chamber quakes as though it’s made of nothing but pressboard.
Then it gets worse. The whole cave starts crumbling. Chunks of rubble fall from the ceiling. It’s even harder to see than before. But my plan worked. We got around the thing. We’re on the far side, running blind through a shower of falling rocks. But it’s still back there, still wailing, still coming for us.
<
br /> “Gotta get outta here!” Tom barks at me.
We meet up again in the middle of the chamber, galloping back the way we came. I glance over my shoulder. It’s still following us, booming forward in a kind of grotesque hobble, moaning and roaring.
“There,” says Tom. He veers left and the chamber narrows, sloping upward. Ahead of us there’re a few stripes of dim light coming through a drain. “As soon as we get—” He yelps when a large stone thumps down on his back. I, on the other hand, keep going.
But then I stop. I don’t know why, but I do. Maybe it’s because of what I did to Roy. I can’t let that happen again, so I turn back for a wolf who was just trying to kill me—for the second time. He’s lying dazed on the ground. A line of light from the grating above cuts him squarely in two.
“Henry,” he whimpers.
“I’m coming.”
Then, out of the darkness beyond, comes a hand—a black, cloven claw, like the forehoof of an enormous mule. But even as I watch it come out of the darkness, I think, That’s impossible. It’s too big.
It rakes into the back of Tom’s hide and hoists him up, drawing him into the shadows.
“Tom!”
I slip the empty pack off my shoulders. A large chunk of stone thumps down at my feet.
“Here,” I say, speaking to the darkness and waving my forearms. “You want some dust, don’t you? Everybody wants dust. I’ve got some.” I hold up my empty pack. “It’s in here. Put Tom down and I’ll give it to you.”
The creature grunts at me but doesn’t move. “Okay,” I say. I pad farther into the shadows. I can see the outline of both of them. Tom, dangling in the air above me, clutched in the grip of a great black beast.
“Put down my friend,” I tell it, “and I’ll give you some.”
The creature roars.
“Okay, okay—” I start unzipping the pack. I have an idea. I toss it at the thing’s feet. “There you go,” I say. “Take it, it’s yours.” I take out my flashlight.
As the creature bends to reach for the bag, I flick the light on. Suddenly, I can see the creature’s not a mule. Not a giant either. It’s not a goat. Not a wolf. Not a raven or a pig or an elf. It’s not even a hedgehog. It’s all of them. I beam the light dead into its enormous eyes. Blinded, the creature screams and drops Tom, recoiling into the dark.
Tom rushes past me and up the slope.
“You’re welcome!” I yell, chasing after him.
There’s a ladder at the end of the tunnel. Tom’s already climbing up.
“Where’s this lead?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer me. He keeps scrambling toward the light. I grab hold of the ladder and it trembles in my fist. I can feel it slipping away from the wall. The whole tunnel is collapsing.
Tom throws the hatch open and the blue light of morning floods in, shooting through the rain of rubble. When I reach the top, the ladder drops off the wall entirely, but I manage to grasp the edge of the cement just as the cavern buckles completely. I clamber out and narrowly avoid being crushed alive. I roll onto my back, staring up at Eden.
My heart’s pounding. Tom’s on his back beside me, his breath ragged and his eyes wide. I look around and see we’re lying right in the middle of the street. We’ve come up through a manhole. There’s a traffic jam freezing cars in both directions. Families on the sidewalk stare and point at us. I tune in the sound of sirens, but I’m too dazed to tell if they’re coming this way.
“C’mon,” I say, helping Tom to rise. “We gotta get out of the street.”
Tom nods, and I usher him to the side of the road. I see now that the families are dressed in black. We’ve come up on a street right beside Earthwood Cemetery, not far from the place where we put Doc in the ground. The trees are thick beyond the fence. I point my snout in that direction and take a deep breath, trying to clear out the scents of the underground. I’m grateful for the cemetery’s trees, but my snout picks up something else, too. It’s a strong whiff of cigarette smoke.
Tom stumbles over and shoves the map at me. “You take it! I don’t want it anymore!”
Begrudgingly, I crumple the map into my pocket.
A few mourners on the sidewalk hug their children close, drawing them away from us. Tom lays his paw on my shoulder catching his breath. “What was that thing?”
I can only shake my head.
“When you flashed the light . . .” He trails off. “It looked like—like . . .”
“I know. What did it look like?”
There’s no time for Tom to answer, because the ground starts shaking. The mourners scream and all at once, the collapsed hole we just climbed out of erupts in a geyser of asphalt and cement. The creature itself bursts through the ground, coughing and roaring and pulling itself into the light of day.
27
TITANS
THE CREATURE ROARS, LOUDER THAN EVER, SHATTERING THE GLASS OF A SHOP window across the street. Even though we can see it clearly now, it is still impossible to say what this thing is. Though one claw is huge, black, and mulish, the creature’s other hand is long and thin, with the amphibious sheen of a frog. Halfway up the same arm, quills begin punching through the oily skin, bristling thicker to cover its back, which is streaked with the fins of a water nixie. The legs and the head are wolfish—save for the globbish tusks that burst out like sabers. And everything—every mixed-up bit of this thing—is blown up to the scale of a giant. It’s a freakish chimera of everything in the city. Maybe this is what happens when you thrust all of us together. You get something awful.
The creature rears up, its huge eyes trained on us. A massive set of raven wings extend from its back, heaving and dragging its bulk along the ground.
Tom screams and gallops past me, off along the edge of the cemetery. I chase after him as fast as I can, and the iron bars of the fence become a blur. The creature hobbles and flaps, shedding a trail of jet-black feathers, revealing patches of white flesh.
Meanwhile, Tom and I are running in tandem, scampering like a pair of crabs, tossed off-balance by the quaking earth. From behind me, I hear something that sounds like the pulling of a thousand teeth, the cracking of a thousand bones. It’s the cemetery fence, as the creature rips it out of the ground. The fence undulates along its length and crashes down, knocking us to the asphalt. No, not us. It’s just me who’s crushed under the fence.
“Tom!” I call to him. “You gotta help me! You gotta lift it!”
He stops, but he doesn’t make a move. “It should’ve been Zeb,” he whispers. “Not you.”
The creature thunders closer.
“But just now in the tunnels! I saved you!”
“I know,” he says. “Zeb never would’ve done that.” He stoops and grips the fence, straining to lift it while I press up with all four limbs.
“Come on!” Tom screams at me. “Slide out! Hurry!”
“I can’t. I’m still—”
There’s a whoosh of air as the creature’s claw sweeps over us, batting Tom away like an insect. He shoots across the street, tumbling into the shadows of an alley.
The creature roars, baring teeth and tusks. It picks the fence up with ease. I try scampering out, but it’s got me and as I’m raised into the air by the scruff of my neck, I get a good view of the deserted street. Everyone has run for cover. I can see a family of elves cowering in the cemetery trees.
The creature hauls me up to its face. Up close, it’s less wolfish. The hide and hair are a kind of mosaic, patches stitched together and looking loose, puffy, and ready to crumble.
“I know,” I say, speaking as calmly as I can, “that I lied before about having some dust in my bag. I don’t have any, but I could get you some.” But I’m giving this thing too much credit. It doesn’t understand a word of what I’m saying. Its other hand latches onto one of my ankles. I think to myself, This is it. I’m about to be torn in two by a giant, mixed-up abomination from the pit of the city. Then I sniff something on the breeze. Cigarette smoke.
&nbs
p; “YOU ARE HURTING HENRY FRIEND!”
All at once, the throbbing pressure in my limbs vanishes. The creature drops me. It drops me because it’s defending itself—from David, the gravedigger, who has come thundering out of the cemetery in a blind run, toppling trees and kicking over mausoleums. I’ve never been so happy to see a giant in my whole life.
I land on all fours in the cemetery bushes, right in the midst of the startled family of elves. They huddle together, backing away. Instantly, we’re all thrown to the ground by a new earthquake, this one caused by David and the beast tumbling to the ground, wrestling and punching and taking cars and lampposts along for the ride.
“Henry!” someone whispers.
The elves flinch like they’ve all been shot.
“Henry!”
“Fiona?”
“Over here.” She comes crawling through the hedges, down on all fours with her camera swinging low between her forepaws. She tosses it around her back and lunges for me, throwing her forearms around my neck. “I thought that thing was gonna kill you!”
“So did I.”
“Had to convince David to come to your rescue. It wasn’t easy.”
“Guess I owe you my life.” I’m beginning to hug her back when she sees the quivering elves ogling us. She pulls away, embarrassed.
Fiona brings up her camera, snapping a few pictures. “What is that thing?” she asks.
“I have no idea.”
The fight’s moving down the street, wreaking all kinds of havoc. David’s slightly bigger, and well-muscled from a life of digging holes and lifting gravestones. But he’s only got his arms and legs to battle with. The creature has wings. And that mulish claw. And that snout full of goblin tusks. It’s using them, too, cleaving deep into David’s shoulder.
Fiona covers her mouth. “Oh, David!”
Police cars scream past. Instinctively, I hunch down to hide myself.
“I see you’re still a wanted wolf.” Fiona moves to shield me from view.
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